Even China’s population of 1.4 billion would not be enough to fill all the empty apartments littered across the country, a former official said on Saturday, in a rare public critique of the country’s crisis-hit property market.
China’s property sector, once the pillar of the economy, has slumped since 2021 when real estate giant China Evergrande Group (3333.HK) defaulted on its debt obligations following a clampdown on new borrowing.
Big-name developers such as Country Garden Holdings (2007.HK) continue to teeter close to default even to this day, keeping home-buyer sentiment depressed.
As of the end of August, the combined floor area of unsold homes stood at 648 million square metres (7 billion square feet), the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) show.
That would be equal to 7.2 million homes, according to Reuters calculations, based on the average home size of 90 square metres.
I’m guessing most of those dwellings are in places that don’t have any employment options.
presumably someone is doing upkeep on these buildings, and presumably those someones have needs for other folks to fill
presumably once more folks move there, they will have even more needs for folks to fill
not to mention remote work and all that
deleted by creator
perhaps not, but hey, if a job around here won’t make it possible for you to afford four walls and a roof, then the difference it purely academic.
People like to create things, to do something productive. it’s why NEETs are notoriously miserable people who hate themselves. humans crave to DO something or it torments us to the brink of suicide - and sometimes past it. If only these folks had a place to live and weren’t brutalized by the authorities for daring to attempt to do so, they’ll create productive activities.
Part of the problem of poverty here, also, is that it’s sometimes literally fucking illegal to carry out productive labor activities unless you’re on land that you own or land that is owned by a designated employer. Try growing produce in a vacant lot and you’ll get arrested for trespassing and “vandalism”, and possibly sued by whatever ghoulish real estate holdings firm is hoarding the land.
With an apartment and nothing else, you’ll have a place to go back to while seeking employment OR a place to stage activities with other people. just because I personally don’t have 100% of the answers or the clairvoyant foreknowledge of what someone might be able to do with the resource of just having a space to call their own doesn’t mean that someone else won’t come up with something i’d have never dreamed of. I think it’s not unreasonable to have a little faith in human creativity.