An estimated 65 Million apartments sit empty in Chinese cities while millions of China’s urban residents live in overcrowded, rented apartments. The scale of China’s housing overstock is like nothing ever seen before.
Many stories and reports have emerged in the past few weeks about China’s scary housing bubble after Moody’s downgraded China’s property sector from ‘stable’ to ‘negative.’ Although it is difficult to understand the scale of how empty parts of urban China really are without traveling there, I found this Australian documentary by Dateline to be particularly illuminating. It provides an accurate idea of the scale of this massive development overstock by walking through a few ghost cities, malls and highrises. Boing Boing describes it below:
It’s symptomatic of the growing divide between China’s rich and poor, which has left many Chinese without adequate housing. Unlike the US bubble, the Chinese property bubble isn’t founded on cheap credit…
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