The only rest stop town that I've been to that is even remotely interesting is West, Texas.
I had to look that up to see if it was the one with a Czech bakery. Yep it's the one with a Czech bakery. Only good rest stop town.
Imagine people just... Living in homes like some sort of freaking animals.
China bad, updoots to the left.
yeah you just have to work for less than a minimum wage and buy stuff in their internal store and OH FUCK THIS IS SLAVERY AGAIN ISN'T IT?
that cement was made with the ground up ashes of Uyghur bones. tru fact.
empty buildings are bad, but only if they're empty because no one's moved in yet
buildings that are empty because squads of armed men prevent people from using them are good
I hang out on a lot of economics and investing subs. I think the timeline of western reporting on the Chinese real estate is something like this:
2000s: China has a massive real estate bubble that is 100% going to crash their economy
2010s: China is building ghost cities and that is totalitarian and shows how inefficient central planning is. Their economy is 100% going to collapse.
2020s: Ignored completely (many of these ghost cities are now full of upwardly mobile workers paying reasonable housing prices. The bubble deflated, which slowed the economy but didn't cause a massive crash and mass unemployment like in a free market economy)
That said, I'm not convinced housing in China is in great shape. It seems like that is one of the few places ordinary people can invest in private capital and so speculation will continue to be a problem as there is no where else to go? Interested to know more about what is happening now.
Meanwhile here in Chicago we keep tearing down family homes to build luxury studios that nobody is moving in to. Clearly this means we have the better system. Removing families from their homes so that nobody can live there is proof we are truly free
Libs: "Observing trends and planning ahead is Socialism!"
China and other AES: :yes-comm:
Housing speculation is completely out of control in China with the landlords buying up all those properties and driving up prices far too expensive for the common people to afford.
Paging Chairman Mao.
According to the IMF ’s house price-to-wage ratio, China has seven of the world’s top ten most expensive cities for residential property. All through the country's tier-one, tier-two, and even some tier-three cities, housing prices are severely out of proportion with the incomes of the people who live there.
However, the people of China can afford to buy these extremely expensive properties. In fact, 90% of families in the country own their home, giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. On top of this, north of 20% of urban households own more than one home, according to Nomura. So with wages so out of whack with real estate prices, how can so many people afford to buy so many houses?
When we talk about how people afford houses in China today, more often than not we’re not talking about individuals going out and buying property on their own — as is the general modus operandi in the West. No, we’re talking about entire familial and friend networks who financially assist each other in the pursuit of housing.
Why there is so much liquid cash available for these relatively large down payments is straight forward: the Chinese are some of the best savers in the world. In fact, with a savings rate that equates to 50% of its GDP, China has the third highest such rate in the world.
Another way that Chinese home buyers are able to afford their down payments is via the country’s Housing Provident Fund... Part of this fund included a government initiated savings plan where employees are given the option to invest a portion of their monthly earnings and have it matched by their employer to assist them with buying a house.
Although we must remember here that China’s banks are fully owned by the Communist Party, and social stability often takes precedence over the raw pursuit of profit, so their lending practices cannot be compared like-for-like against those of Western banks.
According to a 2017 HSBC survey, 70% of Chinese millennials already own their own homes which is nearly double the global average. 91% of Chinese millennial non-owners also plan to buy a house in the next five years, according to the survey. By comparison, America has only a 35% home ownership rate among millennials and the UK has 31 percent.
Having significantly lower student debt also certainly helps
Have you been to Miami? Thousands of luxury condos starting at $1500/mo being built all the time and almost no one lives in them. The beaches are eerily empty around there too
This by itself isn't even that impressive. I don't know what kind of timeline or budget they're working with, but develop housing -> put people in housing should be a fundamental thing a representative government does. I think it speaks to what a shitty fail-system exists everywhere else that these two headlines in isolation seems cool.
First headline is pretty funny, because the phrase itself is fully correct. Funny part is that they're framing the solution(building houses) as a bad thing.
