people ridicule it because it's so different than the american way, which is to severely restrict housing construction to cause enormous increases in price so that nobody can afford to live anywhere without taking out massive loans, while poor people get kicked out of their homes.
It's hard to point to examples of cities that don't do it because it doesn't make the news when a new building is put up in Nashville. It doesn't make the news when a law to limit building height is never even proposed in Kalamazoo. It doesn't make the news when Akron's population increases 3% year over year.
It does make the news when San Francisco's residents start getting driven out of the city. It does make the news when Madison limits the height of buildings downtown. Can you give me an example of people who didn't get a flat tire today? Of course not, because that's just called normal functioning.
so what you're saying is, the media distorts and amplifies the exceptions in order to create a perception of widespread dysfunction, thereby generating revenues through public outrage?
but this only happens in the US, right? not anywhere else, like... china?
Beijing real estate makes San Francisco look like a bargain.
Also, china doesn't have a property tax, so you can just buy an apartment and sit on it forever, there is no economic pressure (as a property tax is) to put it to productive use.
No one expects that to hold, but even if it does, the US has property taxes most everywhere, and you'd eventually pay for your land again and again just by owning it.
It is speculated that China will drop the land use grant when they institute a real property tax.
There has been massive displacement of Chinese peasants too. By a decree. But indeed - if you look at rates of home ownership in Eastern Europe pre changes - socialist systems indeed seem to prefer affordable housing.
I wonder if sooner rather than later, those ghost cities might actually fill up once they bottom out and become affordable like how bad parts of SF or Oakland or NYC used to be cheap?
Moving to a city doesn't majically get you a job and livelihood. There is already plenty of depopulated country side with plenty of livable space, people go where the actual jobs are.
True, but my point was that in China the government exerts a lot more control on where people can go. Wouldn't surprise me that the Chinese gov't could fill an empty city if they wanted to.
I don't think that is true. Sure, there is the hukou system, but migrant workers have been free to move around since the 90s, and they do.
If you handed out hukous in 3rd tier economically depressed new cities, I'm not sure if there would be many takers. And the properties in Kangbashi are all fairly high end anyways, the city hukou-deprived migrant workers probably wouldn't even be welcomed.
China builds a lot of subsidized public housing on the city outskirts of major cities, but no one wants to live there because transportation is bad to where the jobs are.
