Page 7 - IAV Digital Magazine #579

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China's 1.4 billion Population
Isn't Enough To Fill The
Country's Empty Homes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37uE2ieVC-g
By Marta Biino
A former Chinese government official said the country's entire population of 1.4 billion wouldn't be enough to fill all of its empty
houses, Reuters repo rted, citing a video from the state news agency China News Service.
China's real-estate struggles rose to prominence in 2021, when industry
giant Evergrande bec ame the most indebt- ed company in the world and defaulted.
At the time, there were at least 65 mil- lion vacant properties in the country, which would have been enough to house the
entire population of France, Insider previ- ously reported.
"How many vacant homes are there now? Each expert gives a very different number, with the most extreme believing the current number of vacant homes are enough for 3 billion people," He Keng, a former deputy head of
the statistics bureau, said, per Reuters. "That estimate might be a bit much, but 1.4 billion people proba- bly can't fill them."
China has long relied on real-estate devel- opment as a safe investment to bolster economic growth. But that's created
an excess
supply, with endless rows of high-rise buildings left empty.
"They built an over- supply, and then they sold it. And that's why you see the vacan- cies," Li Gan, an eco- nomics professor at Texas A&M University, told Insider in 2021.
Many buildings sites have also become so- called "rotten-tail" projects after they stalled or were aban- doned halfway through.
City's like Shenyang, in the country's north- east, were envisaged as new hot spots for China's ultra-rich, with flashy European-style villas.
But the development project headed by property giant Greenland Group, which began in 2010, was abandoned just two years later.
Today, farmers have taken over the ghost town, plowing the land and letting cattle roam free around the empty mansions.
Ordos, near the bor- der with Mongolia, was meant to hold over 1 million people and become a cultur- al and economic hub. But by 2016, its popu- lation was only around 100,000, and it has been described as "the largest ghost town in the world."
The government has since enacted efforts to move some of the country's top schools to the region, which has led to an influx of families and high- achieving students, bringing the popula- tion and real-estate prices up, Japanese publication Nikkei Asia reported in 2021.
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