Bubblecar said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

dv said:

Describe it.
Home ownership rates in China are around 93%. What is the nature of the crisis?

Tens and tens of millions of empty homes built by private developers that are now insolvent in cahoots with local governments who sold land for development in the expectation that property prices would keep rising. That bubble has burst.

As always China under Xi will muddle through and some bright spark will propose a solution by prioritising industrial development in areas with excess housing to restore public finances and provide willing buyers for vacant housing in regional areas away from the largest cities.

Now it’s certainly objectively true that at least in Australia governments used to be a lot better at building public and affordable housing and if Canberra had used the revenue forgone in negative gearing and CGT discounts since 1998 to actually just build housing we’d be in a very different situation with regards affordability to what we are in now but that horse has bolted.

But it’s not just Australia with a housing affordability crisis which is shared by most Anglophone countries caused by a myriad of factors like nimbyism, the rising cost of materials and planning laws that restrict new developments with a growing population fuelled by immigration. Even Singapore is becoming increasingly unaffordable even with massive public investment in affordable housing because of the simple fact that rising incomes and real wages are more often than not funneled into their homes because people like to have nice things.

Now it world be wonderful if Australians in housing stress could buy excess Chinese housing and commute by teleportation but until that happens the housing affordability crisis in Australia at least wouldn’t be solved by the situation in China where as Reuters suggests there are approximately 60 to 80 million empty homes.

It would have been a lot easier if the Chinese had just dug holes and buried their Yuan and skipped the step where they build temporarily useless housing which no one wants to buy for years ahead.

I wouldn’t want to live in China for all the tea in…well.

exactly, other countries are horrible places populated by horrible people