Or maybe it's because if you're well-off, there's no reason to buy an expensive villa that looks just like the one next to it. Better to buy a smaller, more tasteful house that's uniquely yours?
IMO neighborhoods with a single house design copy-pasted are really unappealing, no matter the country.
Teleport that whole thing to London or the Bay Area and they'd sell for millions each. Some people are fine with cookie-cutter affluence. And after good landscaping and tree growth, it wouldn't look so weird.
The don't sell for millions because of "cookie-cutter" affluence in London or the Bay Area, they sell because of the location and there are no other options.
Depends on the design/typology. Uniform rowhouses can often look very beautiful--take any number of streets in Brooklyn Heights, or the newer projects by Peter Barber in London. It's not "repetition" as a general principle that's unappealing, it's the particular execution that's so common in cheap sprawl developments.
There are national differences to this, in Europe and Asia affluent people tend to move into city centers whereas in NA often the opposite is often the case (exceptions of course do apply), which makes these developments even more baffling in China.
It's literally a bunch of McMansions thrown at some plot of land. You see this a lot with real estate development in the emerging economies, as if developers looked at Western movies from the 80s and decided that is what high status looks like. A lot of really tacky retro-futuristic skylines that look terrible and out of place have come out of this as well in China or the gulf states.
Oof. I've lived in townhouses for so long that I didn't even stop and think for a second that they all look the same. I kind of thought my previous house was a bit ugly, but I couldn't afford the ones I actually liked the looks of so I guess my expectations are just super low.
They don't care about the home, they care about the land (the buyers that is). Rules in China penalize holding undeveloped land, so if it's approved for a housing development, something has to be built. And if you end up renting it out, what do they care what it's like?
It's not quite the same as farmland being reclaimed literally between houses, but I remember going to Vegas in 2009 (I think, or late 2008). There was an in-progress casino that was dark; no work going on.
I asked the desk at the hotel I was staying at what was going on. When the market crashed, the company went out of business. He said the workers literally laid their tools down in the middle of a shift, walked out and locked the gates.
It was very, very strange, because the depth of the crash hadn't yet sunk in to my tiny pea-brain. That really drove home just how bad this was about to be.
(funny but unrelated story from that same trip. We were there for a technical conference on research in K-12 administrator training and development, in the same hotel was a furry convention. Explaining to 75+ year olds what a furry was, and why that man had a fox tail was one of the best, and most surreal experiences of my life)
How I explained it to the particular elderly gentleman I worked with was - you know how Dr. Bob does model trains in his basement? You know how sometimes he wears the bibs and the hat while he works on them?
Like that, but probably not as much of a sex thing.
The whole initial concept is so bizarre to me. The point of owning a grand mansion is to show it off. If it is identical with all the neighbours then that undercuts the mansion's value.
Honestly it feels like someone thought: "Let's make a neighbourhood for rich people." and didn't quite think it through what those people will need or want.
They have something similar in Vietnam. I was in HCMC and from the place we were staying you can see huge developments of row houses (very nice ones though). At night time, not a single light to be seen. Get closer and they are all finished on the outside, but empty on the inside. And this development was finished years ago.
It's basically an investment. All the homes had been sold, likely for prices approaching $1M USD (it was pretty close to city center), but it was purely an investment. The property taxes in Vietnam are very low, so the carry costs are a rounding error. No need to rent it out (that would take more money to finish the interior!). Plus local laws require houses be built - you can't buy land intended for residential homes without building something.
And it's a great investment! It's probably the only asset the government respects ownership of, it's a tangible asset unlike equity in a stock market ripe with fraud.
This is for people who have the money to forge their own unique identity, but not the personal store of creativity or confidence to do so.
It is literally for the petty bouge class who above all wants to flex that they are living among the "rich people", that they are part of a class that is distinct from everyone else. There are plenty of people like this in America and Europe as well.
I highly doubt that it failed because there wasn't a market for this type of community but because there was a problem with financing or not finding the correct fit on other factors such as distance to transportation or to a similar dollhouse toy community of insta-culture shopping and dining.
> I highly doubt that it failed because there wasn't a market for this type of community
But then surelly we can find somewhere on earth a semi-succesfull “this type of community”. Is there such a thing?
The problem as I can see is that people who want, and can pay for, grand marble staircases, and huge windows with intricate moulding around them don’t want to see their neighbor’s ass a mere meters away from those panorama windows. These type of houses are designed to stand on large grounds and overlook manicured lawn. The kind of people who want to live in a mansion like this also want a private pool, and a tenis court, and stables and a spot on the green to land a helicopter. That is the lifestyle which goes with a mansion like these. But with these ones you don’t even have enough garden to kick a football in.
Sure we can, every single super luxury condominium tower (of which there are thousands all over the planet) offers this same type of community, though even more closely packed in - and inconveniently for those who might make use of them - a little too close to the rest of civilization.
If anything, as a newly minted robber baron or junior member of a minor royal family or undersecretary of an ossified military dictatorship, this kind of development is a major step up when you're looking for a place quiet and out of the way to tuck your third or fourth mistress our of sight. where she is perfectly happy to idly sit around sticking on different kinds of eyelashes all day, getting foot rubs (and more) from the stable of live-in domestic staff who can't travel around town gossiping (because there is no town), and and taking Insta selfies to humblebrag about how wealthy and "blessed" she and her family are. Family whom you have gladly moved in at her request because like her are now walled in the same garden.
Then there's the enormous market for Airbnb McMillionaire people who want to live like this but can only afford it for two or three weeks, or those who travel with an enormous entourage and need to house them all in one place for the same, ahem, privacy reasons as above. Throw in a sprinkling of other mixed uses like day rate rent-a-mansions for tv and music video shoots and aspiring wealth influencers and you have a tidy little business here.
This definitely could have made money assuming it wasn't compromised by some showstopping flaw like the highway (or sewer or water or electricity) your inside contact in the regional government could never get approved.
Local governments built these things because people were buying them. It was a way to raise money. Now they’re not selling so the developers are deep in the red and unable to sell what they have or finish what they started, and the local governments have budgeted income that they will never receive.
So, they claim that "a supply-demand imbalance" is to blame, but I find it unlikely that there is really no one in China (of all places) who would like a home of this size. More likely, either:
1) there is some fundamental problem structurally (e.g. no plumbing or no electricity) that makes these otherwise palatial homes unusable (by humans), or...
2) the financing was such that they cannot admit that they will sell for half what was expected, so the whole thing ended up in legal bankruptcy limbo
I don't know which it is, but I am reminded of how, in my home town of Austin, Texas, we have something like 10,000 homeless people but plenty of empty commercial real estate (some of it listed for rent but not actually plumbed up or otherwise available). It's a rather egregious misallocation of resources.
It is similar to when the roman empire collapsed here in the UK - why didn't the local people just live in the houses the roman left?
Well they couldn't afford to run them for a start, and the businesses and trade that had made the areas profitable, disappeared too.
I imagine for these houses that the double edge of location and risk will keep most people away. Would you move in if you didn't know if your neighbours were about to be all cows or a new factory? And what about if the nearest road ended 3 miles away?
"It is similar to when the roman empire collapsed here in the UK - why didn't the local people just live in the houses the roman left?
Well they couldn't afford to run them for a start, "
What kind of running cost has a stone house compared to a mud house?
I rather think if roman houses were left untouched, it was rather because of a fear that the former owners would come back, because they likely did not put a sign on front, free to take. And the romans were not famous for soft punishment.
Large stone houses needed numbers of servants to collect and prepare firewood to keep them warm, and required materials (and workers) no long available to maintain. Even the 'rich' kings and queens after the romans were no where near as cash rich as many of the romans that managed parts of the UK, as the population dropped significantly and slavery (while it still existed) wasn't as common as roman times.
Plus we know building were used, for example as farm buildings - but it was more common for the building materials to be reused, rather than people moving into houses. I don't think they would have been too scared of the romans, as largely the lands were taken over by new groups - which the romans could not afford to keep defending against.
There is a similar reason that amazing old houses lie for ages untouched in France - the cost to run and keep the is huge (and always has been) - but they no longer own the land/farms required to fund the buildings (and lives of the owners), so they sit rotting away.
"There is a similar reason that amazing old houses lie for ages untouched in France"
Yeah, but here it is property laws preventing use. Otherwise there are potentially enough people in seqrch of a home. (See squatter/occupy movement)
And in general I see the same pattern today: abandoned houses would get used, but cannot easily, so step by step materials of that house gets used somewhere else as that is quite safe (if a owner comes back).
And warming a big stone house is a problem, but I think most people rather have one warm room and have lots of dry but cold space, rather than one warm mud hut.
So it was probably lots of factors preventing a use of the old roman houses.
> why didn't the local people just live in the houses the roman left?
There are many things suspicious with this question. Why do you think people en-mass left? Why do you think nobody lived in their houses after they left?
> Ghosts towns are not unusual in China, where an estimated 65 million homes are left empty. For decades, the country’s economy was driven by real estate, so much so that the government often encouraged large-scale developments. But an aging population and affordability concerns, among other factors, resulted in a supply-demand imbalance, at times creating entirely vacant cities. Thames Town, a suburb outside of Shanghai designed to emulate London, is now virtually empty. Kangbashi, or “the empty city,” in Ordos, however, is perhaps the most recognized of this phenomenon
Feels kinda like what's happening with the affordability of housing at least here in California. San Francisco starting being one example of this for similar and different reasons.
> where an estimated 65 million homes are left empty
Wow this number sounded absolutely crazy although I guess it makes sense with 1.4 billion people. I looked up USA stats - 140 million total homes, 16 million of which are vacant. I wonder how dispersed they are.. 16 million vacant homes in this housing market.
This article is interesting but it doesn't line up at all with the one above with the map. Completely different list of which cities have the most vacancies.
> There are more than 16 million vacant housing units in the U.S. (16,078,532).
5.8% of rental units are vacant, while 1.4% of homeowner units are vacant — a 314% difference.
The overall vacancy rate in the U.S. is 11.6%.
The most vacant city is Orlando, Florida, with an overall vacancy rate of 15.3% and 160,952 vacant housing units.
Seven metros have an overall vacancy rate that exceeds the national rate of 11.6%:
Orlando, Florida (15.27%)
Miami (14.75%)
Tampa, Florida (13.71%)
Birmingham, Alabama (13.23%)
New Orleans (13.1%)
Riverside, California (12.13%)
Jacksonville, Florida (11.87%)
The least vacant city is Minneapolis, with an overall vacancy rate of 4.6%.
That vacancy rate is a bit deceptive unless you're clear what you're looking at, and why. Even when housing is conceptually "full," meaning that houses are occupied, or will be occupied very soon - there will still need to be some buffer between occupants. A house might be vacant for a few months while being sold, for example, or for a couple of weeks between tenants. But that's a different sort of vacancy than when a home is intentionally left vacant with no short-term intention of occupying it.
This is just like "full employment" is still maybe ~2% or so unemployment, because there are always a few people between jobs, but who will likely become employed very soon.
In the US, our 16M vacant homes are the former, "normal" kind. In China, the 65M are actually left vacant indefinitely with no expectation of anybody moving in soon. Not that you can't find some exceptions in both cases, but this is mostly the case.
Another interesting thing to put Chinese housing in to perspective - it is believed to be the largest asset class in the world (worth more than the entirety of the US equity market) and just the alleged value of the unsold inventory exceeds the value of all residential real estate in Japan.
Of course it is all a bubble, and after it fully pops, it could be worth 10% of what it is now (or deflates if the Chinese central government wants to drag it out across a few decades.) A lot of the real estate will be worth 0 because of the cost of maintenance and what happens when the maintenance isn't performed.
To give some context, the primary reason these kinds of massive housing projects are being built is to help local govts meet their revenue needs (eg. Pensions, Capital Expenses, Local Govt salaries) [0].
The Central Govt in China stopped subsidizing local and provincial govts in the 1990s as a way to force local govts to be more efficient along with incentivizing them to incentivize capitalist developments like a private housing market [1].
This financial mechanism is called a Local Government Financing Vehicle (LGFV) and this is what spurred the growth of ghost cities. [0] [1]
While a large number of local govts in China probably fudging GDP numbers, they're targeting different metrics and this is more of an issue with the less economically dynamic interior provinces like Ningxia, Sichuan, etc. The numbers in economically dynamic provinces like Guangdong, Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing, Zhejiang, etc are generally reliable [2]
CCP has been doing the opposite for the past year, letting the big construction companies go out of business and not bail them out and letting the housing bubble deflate, with housing becoming more affordable.
That is actually the biggest reason for the bad economic numbers (at least available numbers, since the youth unemployment is being "revisited") coming lately from China.
IMO don't think people should be worried if magic numbers (GDP) go down because housing is becoming affordable.
I don’t know about that. Social media in the West has encouraged behaviors (greater outness of LGBT, advocacy for minorities, new subcultures like furries) that the CCP feels, at least in the Chinese context, would pose a risk to social stability and harmony.
China expends huge effort on keeping its citizens’ internet activity tightly censored and surveilled. Its authorities might even have preferred that the Chinese population did not have smartphones with unlimited internet and were instead kept more atomized, but the cat is already out of the bag and the internet is too important to the economy.
My father came back from a visit to China maybe a decade ago with hundreds of pictures of ghost cities full of empty skyscrapers. Turns out there’s a Wikipedia article about the phenomenon, and it says that they are filling up with people over time and getting used as intended. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupied_developments_in...
In the US it seems like most builds don’t get started until after it’s acutely needed. Makes sense given the way development investment works here. I know the situation is much more complicated in China than just where the money comes from, but maybe it’s a little bit of a good thing to build housing supply in advance of the demand? It seems like China’s economy supports doing that in a way that the US’s doesn’t.
What would the logic be? If it’s just government pouring money into the economy it would work just as well to spend it on space or science or education or whatever. Who benefits from building empty houses as a capital sink?
The problem here is that you have provincial level leaders with a 7th grade education who are dictated to up their GDP to a certain number. They know that building something will do the trick and at the same time prop up their personal unofficial finances via bribes and whatnot. So it continues...
Most provincial level leaders in China are likely better educated than their Western counterparts due to strict civil service exam and promotion hierarchy of progressively larger municipal management responsibilities
This study indicates that 2/3 of provincial leaders hold advanced degrees. I don’t have the comparative one for the US but I am pretty certain this is not the case for governors.
No source was requested for the claim that they have 7th grade education, I’ll note.
I don’t know about the mansions in the article, but my (limited) understanding is that the intention is to build cities that do get used, not to leave them empty forever, and that part of the reason is to help relieve population pressures on the larger cities like Beijing and Shanghai. They just sometimes build entire cities before anyone moves in, unlike they way cities develop elsewhere, little by little as people move in.
IMO neighborhoods with a single house design copy-pasted are really unappealing, no matter the country.