China's Ghost Cities: The Truth Behind The Empty Megacities
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- Опубликовано: 31 янв 2023
- China's Ghost Cities House 64 Million Empty Apartments
The skyscrapers are empty, the streets are without traffic, and a chilling silence emanates throughout the area. These are the scenes of China’s ghost cities.
These streets resemble abandoned or evacuated cities from a zombie or nuclear apocalypse movie. But nobody even lived here in the first place.
China’s economic plan to build into oblivion has transformed it into the world’s second biggest economy in a short space of time. But do these empty cities show the ugly side of this economic boom? Let’s take a look.
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I am surprised post-apocalypse movies are not filmed in these cities
I was gonna say I’m surprised they aren’t used as movie sets.
Because china has complex rules
Well they aren’t going to let foreigners in because that’s let’s the outside world see failure. And I guess the Chinese filmmakers do it because that’s admitting failure to their own people.
@@markfaraday9204
Commie China has a complex?
My god, they have an abandoned Paris, Manhattan, London….it’s screaming for movies.
Buildings require maintenance whether occupied or not, the longer the building remains empty will result in decay.
Yes that's exactly right. The earth will begin to reclaim what is not maintained
Serves them Right for always striving for World Domination 😂😂
I can’t imagine how much trillions worth of maintenance of these ghost cities to function ...
Exactly what I was thinking!!!🙏🤔
Those developers do not even have money to pay the banks.
"and who wants to live in a ghost town?"
*dislocates shoulder after raising hand too fast*
WHY the hell would you? You might say you like the peace and quite but I am sure the novelty wouyld wear off fairly quick. No stores, no gas stations, no restaurants, no friends or neighbors to chill or at least talk too. Sure, you can talk or video on the phone, but its a lousy substitute.
More likely than not, you will end up like that dude from the movie "The Shining"
Brave of you to assume people who want to live alone have friends.
@@zolombox1779 Facts
Even if you have no friends, you still need to have access to basic amenities to survive. There are those that can survive with some land for a personal garden and some farm animals, but that would be pretty tough in a concrete jungle ghost town.
where you gonna get groceries? Would you even be able to get internet? would cellphone work? Depends on how far away you are from the next populated town, or at least some kind of store. with no subway or public transportation, if you don't have a personal vehicle, riding a bike or as a last resort, walking could take days.
@@tluzanov All of those activities involve interacting with people. I stand strong with my original comment. I'll cave-man it and eat dirt and wipe with my hand.
I lived in Zhongshan for a year 2018-2019. It was amazing to watch how fast skyscraper apartment buildings were built, 24/7. I was also shocked and confused why they kept building when most of the buildings were nearly empty.
tbh i was impressed how fast they build highways, over 8 000km in 1 year.....
Corrupted MF's in my country take years to repair few kilometers, we have build 1200km of highways in 60 years.
@@doposud problem is this is corrupt just in a different way
@@doposud its definitaly terrible working conditions
I know why but nobody will listen to what I have to say.
你应该问问你自己，为何你认为空着的房子，而街上却那么多人
"None of them could afford to live in Thames town"....replicated London a little too well!
Right?! Not many students study in London cos of the high cost of living.
They’d need to import millions of packies and darkeys to do that. But I don’t think they’re stupid enough to want to replicate London THAT much 😅
All these buildings sit empty and decaying but they keep building them and building them. It's mind boggling.
They don't care they are rich because of the united States
all i can think of why they do this is to create the illusion of a booming echonomy whilse scaming foregin investors to invest in these properties. the most likelyhood is that investting in property is a gret way to use as white washing mony.
That's communist China for ya 🤷♂️
That's not gonna decaying, it's still standing strong. It's only occupied in the future
I just have a fear of living in giant buildings...I fear that I may die in a fire, earthquake, or poor construction causing it to collapsed...so I would never buy one
As someone who previously worked in video production, I'm baffled how these places aren't considered for locations more often. These places are awesome.
On second thought, I guess populating a ghost town with vehicles, people and other props is a logistical nightmare.
Looks great for post apocalyptic setting
去那里看看，你会发现为什么
The Chinese government does not allow the filming of anything that makes their totalitarian regime look bad. They know their property sector is a house of cards and are trying to hide this fact.
The buildings generally have no running water. And they're made using substandard materials, and the hookups for water in case of fire are never completed. Lookup "tofu dreg construction" and "ghost cities" videos.
@@user-bc3ir7jg5kwhat happend? Can explain?
Anyone else curious what they look like inside? Like are the apartments carpeted/tiled, with kitchenettes, plumbing, etc? You never get to see the inside of these places, so it makes you wonder if they’re just a facade on the outside similar to a movie set.
omg yesss
@@progo8156 Explore those unfinished apartments for a whole week? Doubt it. Although some apartments are almost done, maybe 90%, but most are completed anywhere from 50% down to 10%, meaning just a bare naked concrete structure. If you go to one of those ghost cities, just check out the apartments on a single floor in one building, and boom, you know what the rest of the 50,000 apartment units look like.
Apparently they are bare, because furnishings actually lower the value of the units. A youtuber name scarpenza (i think that's how you spell his name?) did a video on it once.
There is a video by yes theory where they go to the paris one and they give you a current inside of the city and its people
its concrete floors and walls
I rode my bicycle across China
I was shocked to see dozens of cranes building sky scrapers in every city.
All while tons of other skyscrapers sit empty. I was just oh well
How was the bike ride? Sounds amazing
Under China's non-compliance business laws, corruption of officials at all levels and loopholes in bank loans, building a house itself is a business that can make money without capital. Every building under construction is already a money tree If it can be completed and sold, it will be a A bigger and more perfect money tree; developing real estate in China is just a way for a group of people to make big money together, and has little to do with the real concept of developing real estate ;
There are currently 2 billion residential units in China (already existing and under construction), which means that each Chinese can be allocated 1.2 units, or each standard family can have 3.5 units of housing. . . How happy?
@@hannnu5855 Yeah, and the only people who lose are the people getting scammed into buying a worthless property for far above market value (which in many of these buildings is basically 0 or negative). Everyone else, meanwhile, from the developer, to builder to financer, already made off with money.
This reminds me of Japan's corrupt and terrible banking laws that basically tanked their economy for 30 years in which they still haven't recovered from.
Classic example of a Communist government ignoring the natural laws of supply and demand. You can be sure a lot of corrupt bureaucrats and their relatives are making a fortune from these useless projects.
You rode bicycle across China when all Chinese are travelling with high speed train and electric cars. Why are you so poor?
Imagine working hard on skyscrapers and realizing they'll never be used.
Imagine being homeless and seeing 65 million extra homes that aren't used. What a strange country.
In the USA, every financial collapse was preceded by a skyscraper boom. China's will be on a scale never seen before.
Love how US keep projecting their own banking collapse pain onto China 😂 China doesnt have unregulated sub prime mortgage problem like the US. Worse they will experience is only a cycle of real estate slow down. US news and hater political analysts been predicting China bubble collapse for almost 3 decades now but nothing so far 😂 Remeber that Evergreen story that all the western news were ao sure and saying China economy collapsing in few months lol. It's been like 2 years now. Where's the collapse? Even a dead clock is right twice a day. At this point US haters will keep repeating their narrative for years and years till there's finally some recession cycle and they would call it a " prediction" 😂
You will be disappointed 😂
@@trevorsmith2793how?
there are 65 million empty residential units, not counting the commercial ones. I read that in some cities, it will take as long as 6 yrs to fully occupy them.
@@trevorsmith2793 Do your Maths, 1 child, 1 set of parents, 2 sets of grandparents. when the child got married, the couple already inherit 6 houses. Besides, their population is declining.
7:41 "The small town was designed for students and university workers, but none of them could afford to live there, and none of the property owners are willing to lower their price."
This is the part I don't understand. Surely it is better to rent out / sell at a lower price than to not rent out / sell at all and have the place slowly erode away! 🤔
Its because they are owned by investors who bought at a markup from the developer, they need to sell at current price to turn a profit.
Because Chinese people are very wicked and very selfish.
That’s the issue with even semi planned economies. The supply comes before the demand, and that supply just kinda exists on the hope someone will want it eventually. No market research or understanding it’s actually… wanted in the first place before it’s actually constructed
@@exelenxius5832 "they need to sell at current price to turn a profit."
Alright, but how's that going to happen if the value of their property keeps falling due to neglect and decay?
They don't think like humans
As a person who lives in a “ghost” city its eerie. The city itself has over half a million people but, when the recession hit all of the money left Baltimore. They closed the Louis Vuitton Stores and Tiffany’s and every designer store in Baltimore. It never recovered so when you still walk down certain streets you can see what once used to be a wealthy shopping district. Baltimore is filled with empty decaying buildings and crime is quite high, with all of the money gone it has become uneducated making their offices abandoned. Its eerie to look at a map and see the massive size of the city and see what it once was compared to modern day, where there’s no high end boutiques, no fancy restaurants, no super car stores. Baltimore is slowly getting better but its weird entering my once favorite mall with half of the stores being closed and the only “fancy” store left in Baltimore in a Chanel store in the wealthiest district.
1
it's not getting better
i'm from toledo, ohio - smack in the middle of the rust belt. visited baltimore last year after a few years living on the east coast. seeing the empty streets downtown made me feel like i was visiting home.
Also from Baltimore. Live in the county now, but it is very eerie seeing what’s left of the city
you dont live in a ghost city you live in a hood,all the fancy white shit is now moving out and its all cause you capped for a fent addict and threw a innocent cop in jail for it.
yall wouldnt stop robbin and now cause anyone with more than 2 cents has moved out so have the nice companies who are also sick of being robbed too.
Why don’t they build in phases? Creating a whole city at once and hoping for the best? Seems so ridiculous and risky
capitalism, that's why. the corporate developer collects money from people and builds. they don't really care if anyone lives there or not. they got their money, that's all the care about.
@@CoolGobyFish They literally have a socialist country. The government makes the rules, so why do they allow it in this case?
@@trashyraccoon2615 nothing socialist abut them despite their name. their corporations ran amok as well. Cuba and Korea are the only ones with the real socialist economy
@@CoolGobyFish Gotcha. Good call
@@CoolGobyFish So you know literally nothing about China and socialism, good on you for making it so obvious
I saw somewhere that the people who bought apartments never intended to live there and were instead going to sell as the propriety price went up. It really seemed like a big scam and balloon waiting to pop.
It's speculation. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
They are just empty shells as well, since the owners modify to their tastes, and it is better to move into a place no one has lived in for some reason. So, to maintain the value of the investment they stay as empty concrete boxes. No one will want to move in because who wants to live in an appartment surrounded by empty concrete boxes? And since the critical mass for the buildings to become livable is never reached, they stay empty.
Jobs, affordability and convenience are lacking. So no population migration.
The chinese people idea of investments is buying apartments or real state. that is hwy you have buildings still under construction and every unit is already sold.
@@rap3208 It's not an investment if you can never sell it!
This is mind-blowing!
What a super cool video! Love the images and VO
This reminds me of how I often play Cities:Skylines. Hit pause, build all the streets an highways, rail, subway, all stations, police, fire dept., parks, etc. Zone the free spots and then unpause. You'd think that the city would immedietely flourish, but that's not the case. It takes time.
I think this is the perfect example/explanation to the issues going on in china. They keep building these huge sprawling buildings with all this stuff...and assume people would've just come running cash in hand. Sadly it takes years to fill city's of that size and it's crazy to assume a million people in your country have enough disposable income to justify moving down the road.
@@minxironwood People have come running, cash in hand.
These are now filled with people.
@@kristoffer3000 being that I was recently in china doing some urban exploration and traveling through some of these city's...gonna have to say that's total bs lol
@@kristoffer3000 unless your trying to saying about half a million people decided to suddenly move, two weeks after I leave the country lol
@@minxironwood lmao, sure you did, buddy.
Actually, I was there as well, think I saw you walking around hahahaha
Absurd waste of resources.
... But they are shown in series of splendid double digits of G.D.P.
Yeah, this is a great video! Thank you
It's shameless propaganda
@2:25 Homeless population of 300 million??? I think that is an error. From what I can tell, their homeless population is around 3 million. 300m would be a full 25% of their total population.
i yelled "HOLY SHIT!" when he said that
It’s the truth just the 300 million live mostly in rural areas they build illegal makeshift mud houses on land that’s not theirs with no plumbing and running water, no gas it’s the same as homeless
It's not even as high as 3 mill
The homeless population of the United States is around 500,000, with a total population of around of 330 million. If China's homeless population was as bad as the United States', it might be around 10 million, based on a population of 1 billion.
Another issue that the video didn't address is the poor level of construction in many cases. I saw a video by Serpentza and his friend touring one of these ghost towns when they still lived in China, and the building were not in very good condition. Some of the balconies had collapsed and the concrete used on some of the support columns was defective.
Tofu Dreg
Defective concrete... How?
@@Vordigon1 to much water, not enough water, to much agg, not enough agg, theres a mulitude of things that could go wrong just from the concret truck driver taken to long to get there, or the guy driven the truck put to much water in the barrel of the truck, i mean it could be a lot of things.
People quoting Serpentza like he is some expert haha. You losers in the west only hear what you want to hear.
@@Vordigon1 It is naked, not coated with paint, the moisture gonna erodes concrete day by day. Ivy, fungus, and some plants enjoy clinging with abandoned buildings.
... They usually collect or gather water in the air, vapor or moisture, that are unfriendly for concrete. .......
Buildings without maintenance?? Not good!
... Some people seem to not know this, so naive. ........
I work for an American manufacturer who has pressed the importance of "buying American". About making sure we were building with American products from American companies. Eventually we had the meeting about all of these "American" companies had become companies who bought from China, and sold to us, and that there's no reason to pay a middle man, so we would be visiting China to find a direct supplier. When the people we sent over there got back to the States, all they talked about was skyscrapers being built everywhere. And this was over a decade ago.
I can hardly believe the massive investment in faux world cities. Did they really think people would be comfortable
living in a copy of other people's creation? I myself don't think I could do that.
Yeah, it's so weird isn't it? It feels so out of place.
Tbh i’d rather live in fake chinese paris than negger-infested French Paris. Diversity has destroyed that nation
@@jordanxfileThe same way fake chinatown in western country feels out of place, so not to an extent that no one will want to live in it
Is all greedy..
these are Tofu dreg buildings made with cheap material that should not be used with construction to save costs, it's very dangerous to live in these buildings because for example, rain could happen and the buildings with suddenly collapse
Chinese ghost cities were the original NFT. The dirty secret is that many were never built to be lived in. Many don't even have sewers or plumbing. They were built to be traded on the market and sold to gullible investors on the other side of the country, Again, not for them to move in to, but as investment that would grow in value and could then be sold to someone else.
Stop lying!
@@glenwjohnson80950 cents have been deposited into your account
good point
thank you
@@glenwjohnson809 well he ain't lying pal.
@@zachhanson6575 bro, the whole world knows that China has the largest population so, it needs adequate infrastructures for that, I very surprised u guys don't understand that.
image roaming these vacant cities at night. it would be so surreal.
The craziest part is that the world bought chinas bullcrap about them having 1.4 billion people. They lied about it, just like they do with their GDP and everything else in their country. China imports most of its food since most of the country is hard to farm on and some is even not possible to farm. So they import tons of their food yet around the mid 2000s before the great recession they slowed their imports of food down while at the same time claiming their population had actually grown? So what? They all started to learn to not eat? How is that even possible if your population growns so should your food imports but they decreased while at the same time their in house faming was replaced by imports why? Because they've been lying about their population size for a long time and soon it will come to bite them in the ass when suddenly there are most old people who need money to eat and not enough young people to tax to feed them.
Yeah fascinating and scary at the same time.
I bet it'd be fun if it wasn't china where the government would probably institutionalize you if they catch you roaming somewhere you shouldn't be with their billion + cameras.
They probably don't have many lights on at night, so there wouldn't be much to see. They don't even have windows and doors.
@@Roonasaur ... Poor quality of life for being number 2 of the world.
Nice video..
Thank you..
Only government can force the misallocation of resources on this scale. Imagine what all that money and resources could have done...
Imagine what all that money REALLY went towards. These are just covers.
Having lived in apartments in China for a few years, I know that no maitenance is ever done. The workmanship of construction is so shoddy even buildings a few years old start to fall apart. I once leaned against a wall that I thought was concrete, my hand went through it as it was painted polystyrene sheet !
I don't know about China, but in Japan, this is just the culture. Buildings aren't meant to last super long times and Japanese accept this so they don't really care on maintaining something that they will demolish for something newer down the line.
It's actually pretty cool (unless you live in one of these buildings) because they can tear down old trash without the pretense of "saving muh culture"
No, you are not. Please don’t make a lie. You are talking about wooden construction with polyurethane sheets which is typically American building. Chinese building never ever uses wood + polyurethane as construction materials. Only concrete, or brick, that’s it
@@user-CNMD-FLG.FanZei.ZhiChu You must be another of winnie the poo's official propagandists. Search for tofu-dreg construction - makes for a good laugh. You'll find regular occurrences of rebar made of 'pot metal' and painted bamboo, concrete made up of mud and sand. *New* apartment buildings constantly falling apart or collapsing and China hides the true numbers of casualties. Some of these tall structures collapse exposing a complete lack of rebar, and where there should be thick concrete beams - there are only piles of sand. Can you imagine what will happen to the three gorges dam when the sub-standard materials degrade a little further? Satellite imagery proved the dam was warping a few years ago. What did China do to fix this problem? They prohibited further satellite imagery. Now get back to enjoying your food cooked in gutter oil...
I lived in China for ten years and was always blown away by ghost developments and shoddy construction.
This is typical of a economy run by Socialist bureaucrats. There are no safety standards or building codes because there is no healthy competition. I would like to see the balance sheets of these projects - cost vs. profits to the bureaucrats.
These Ghost Cities would be the Perfect setting for a Shin Godzilla Movie 😁
all those buildings look like prisons.
Exactly!!!!!!
At 10:51 you have a photo of New Orleans (Specifically the Central Business District looking to the French Quarter, with the Mississippi River on the right). New Orleans is notably NOT abandoned (with a population ~400,000) as well as NOT even remotely close to China.
New Orleans is turning into a ghost town... Too much crime. Bourbon street the only thing keeping it..
I remember going to a ghost city and almost fallling yo my doom. The construction of the building is pretty poor!
Credit @TheProperPeople who captured a lot of the footage here and have fully explored the big city. You can see them on the roof here 0:33
Beautiful video 💙 Happy New Year 🎊🎆 🎉
We saw SO MANY halted buildings in 2015 - And you can only leave concrete open to the elements for a short time...
Therapist: "Bad French isn't real. It can't hurt you."
Buildr: *"shamps-DIS-lisease"*
Imagine if China actually developed its traditional architecture into a modern day cities but nope they instead chose to copy/paste what other nations already did. They have so much history to get inspiration from this is unfortunate
They have enough traditional architecture
same problem with Dubai. Instead of building traditional Arab cities, they chose to put up a bunch of American highrises, totally unsuited to high temp desert living.
Traditional architecture if not done well can be really tacky, and it is really expensive to build.
This video was fascinating to me. I had absolutely no idea about these cities.
What a waste of resources!😢
All of these towns appear to be cheap, Chinese knockoffs of actual world class cities. The mantra for real estate has always ben "location, location, location". None of these towns have anything close to a good location.
I recognize that footage in the opening scenes from a the Proper People!! Would be nice if you gave them credit!!!
Whenever you have a dramatic boom there's always the dramatic bust that comes next. Economics 101
No this is far different
Economics is bullshit
@@bozoclown99 explain...
Print money created project..peoples have the money to spend...no inflation..because spend on real job. This is my personal opinion.
@@CrucialConflict. cus china is bad brooo
We do not have a resource problem as much we do a wastage problem.
Still looks nicer than Chicago and Los Angeles.
Naaaaaaaaaah
Knock off electronics and clothing brands is one thing, but entire cities?
To many Chinese investors watched ‘Field of Dreams’ and took ‘if you build it, he will come’ as some kind of capitalistic gospel.
I'm willing to bet those skyscrapers are fragile. They built them to fast.
Chinese escalators 😂
tldr letting real estate developers do whatever the fuck they want and allowing them to hold property without doing anything with them leads to bullshit like this. We have miniature versions of this issue in the US as well. Specifically in Los Angeles where certain parts of downtown is just owned by these real estate assholes that won't see or do anything with it. And haven't for decades. Which means they are intentionally withholding possible housing units out of greed. In an era where there is a housing crisis and a lot of homeless
SO SORRY & THAT'S HORRIBLE . . . DON'T THEY WANT TO MAKE A PROFIT? THERE IS SOMETHING VERY SHADY ABOUT THIS . . . THEY HAVE TO BE INCENTIVISED IN ORDER TO SPEND THE MONEY TO BUILD OR REMODEL? IT CERTAINLY DOES NOT MAKE ANY SENSE!
@@SandraAnnEvans
Like the video explained. The only reason they do it is because the government doesn't allow them to invest in proper investment options. So they tie up their excess capital in fruitless projects like this to protect their monet. Same thing in America, to many regulations and quotas to meet to be allowed to work in fruitful projects on the side.
FL has this happening in spades. We have empty, move in ready houses, condo complexes, ect, that investors are just... sitting on. It's called buy-and-leave (dunno if California calls it something else). They do it to create artificial scarcity in the housing market while at the same time increasing their portfolio worth, because they can get loans against the estimated value of their assets. It's why they'll never sell these places, and renting them out just means they're competing against *themselves* in a tight housing market which will halt the astronomical (40% year over year average, 300% since 2018) price hikes.
It's not that they can't sell these houses/condos even at astronomical prices (the northerners will still eat that shit up and call it a good deal), but that doing so would be actively detrimental to their ability to get loans and price set rents, so they won't.
Me watching from NYC.
Gets casually blitzed about the condition of the city lol.
Problem is lack of jobs. And you can't start a business there as you won't get any customers
Very insightful
100% propaganda but okay lol
@kristoffer3000 didn't say it wasn't bruh, It's just cool to see an empty ass town made by a government that can easily offer cheap housing and not blink twice but they don't
@@from9126 Housing in China is very affordable actually
@@kristoffer3000
Please tell us the truth chinese bot
@@from9126 Look up Chinese home ownership rates, they do offer cheap housing...
Property should not be allowed as an investment. Houses and apartments should only ever be a place to live. The property investment boom is killing the lower classes. A home that was $250k ten years ago should not be worth double that or more. It's absurd. Rent is also wildly out of control; people paying a literal mortgage payment while not owning.
Great location for movie sets
Here in Ontario, Canada, our governments tried to centrally plan a city of 250,000 called Townsend. It didnt work. Only 2000 people live there. At least they didn't build like crazy as they did in China.
I'M I Ontario, what area or region are you talking about?
@@ianstuart5660 Townsend is just outside Jarvis, ON in Haldimand County, south of Hamilton.
@@richardhorlings3774 Got it, thanks very much!
They're trying to do the same thing with Grimsby now, converting a bunch of farmers' fields into a city. The Greater Hamilton Area is a strange place, man...
Hi from Switzerland 🇨🇭. We swiss don't like to build like in China. Thanks God. This is all greedy chains..
nice bro
I dont understand how they can have hundreds of towers beside each other, and they are all exactly the same... Depressing.
Cash in one place, housing in the other. Odd, really, that you can't often get the two together.
As some old coot once said: "Used to eat a steak dinner for 55 cents; a pack of smokes was a nickel: that was a lot of money in those days".... Yup.
Real estate represents the lionshare of investment for the Chinese population. But it's mostly mal-investment, purchasing apartments in places like this with no intention to ever live there, or even rent them out. Instead, much akin to the Dutch Tulip Mania, they expected to buy 4 or 5 places and just wait for an investor to come along and pay more. Most are still waiting.
This they have done, along with other foreigners or newly seeded generations in San Francisco.
In China, you cannot buy more than two property for one family.
The same thing is happening with Vancouver with its housing. Soon it'll be the entire city.
Why don’t they just send homeless to these buildings
It empty but maybe it was sold so this empty building has owners
Check back in 10 years
Milton Friedman called Pudong the biggest Potemkin village as late as 2001. You wish you had bought something there back then now.
Binhai, Yujiapu, Zhengdou, etc. All "ghost cities" with now 2-10 million people.
The only reason why Pudong escaped the fate of a ghost city is its proximity to Shanghai. Otherwise trophy cities like most centrally planned projects, were built to satisfy some leader's ego and as a testament to their narcissism with little regards to the average man's needs.
Praying every one safe.
It obviously wasn't growth driving these cities, but centralized planning. Everything from the concept of the cities to the architecture was designed by the CCP, and THEN it "allowed" people to invest. If the investment had driven the growth, they wouldn't have this problem.
The truth about these cities is that they're a REAL copy of the USSR's ghost towns and railroads to nowhere. The old CCCP Soviets figured that if they built particular industries and residences in areas that needed development, people, manufacturing, and retail would just go there for the "free" real-estate. But they didn't. The factories were too far from their suppliers, or the logistics were otherwise difficult. People wouldn't move because they liked their current area, or they wanted to be close to family, or they didn't want to leave their jobs, or one of a zillion other factors that no bureaucracy in the world, however competent, can or has ever anticipated across even a few thousand people.
If the Soviet Union hadn't gone broke, offered more subsidy, and had allowed more foreign investment, they MIGHT have been able to populate a few of these cities, but even then results can be deceiving. Government spending is also part of GDP, and in China, investors and political class members are rewarded for increasing GDP, not Purchasing Power Parity or Real Wealth or any of that. Thus, you can spend 10 billion Yen and that shows up as an increase of 10 billion Yen, even if the final product costs you 40 billion Yen and you go bankrupt.
In that vein, China is currently facing a demographic crisis, not a population boom, so who is going to move into these places as more housing becomes available in developed cities? They have the people to move in, and who would want to, but they live outside the Special Economic Zones where you're allowed to do things like "buy" property (It's actually renting from the government). They'll have to change that, and they are not likely to because three quarters of a billion people exposed to even limited capitalism would likely overthrow the government. Worse, most of those people are peasants, so it's not like they have many marketable skills, or even the ability to take care of an apartment building without a lot of training and education.
It's quite the quandary for China as it ventures into economic trouble, but the problem all along was that they believed "If you build it, they will come." Not how the world works. Instead, it's "If people want to build it, and you allow them, they will."
I always wonder they say its a ghost town, is it completely abandoned? or are there super small groups of people living there because they moved in and can't leave beacuse of financial reasons? There has to be people like that right?
I believe some area are like that. I remember seeing documentary where highrise with 100+ units only have 2% occupation
Usually there a small handful of people living in some buildings. It’s like those almost dead towns that happened more organically elsewhere in the world after and economic boom usually gold/oil etc passed. And unlike them the property value doesn’t go down. Everyone has to get their services and goods from somewhere else. Well it’s the perfect place for a hermit.
Occupancy rate will say it is a ghost town or not? ....
There are people living there. It is just that they are distant from their jobs so the rate of occupancy is not that fast. But still, what they don't tell you is that it is hard for a city to grow a million people bigger. new York took about 20 years to grow to the peak population in 2019 and then the population promptly went down again at the onset of the covid pandemic. Houston took about 14-15 years to grow a million bigger but it was a boomtown.
In China, their biggest cities at the peak of their growth, some became a half million to more than a million bigger in a year. These cities, they showed in the video are from years back. today, they have a few hundred thousands living in them. It just won't show because the cities were built for a million or two. but if you would calculate, they have a faster rate of growth compared to american cities.
Most so called ghost cities aren't ghost cities for long. Some are illegal projects that are demolished by the city officials. And a small fraction of them are just bad investments.
Geez it has been over 10 years and it seems many still don’t quite get that none of these “ghost cities” are ghost cities. Slow to adapt indeed.
Some propaganda never dies.
@3:14 you can see the video author mispronounce the city name "Kunming" as "junming".
It looks like they have built this to put people from the original cities that they live in wow
Oh my, that French pronunciation of Arc de Triomphe and Champs-Elysées was a mess. LOL Despite that I was totally intrigued by the info on this duplicate ghost city! I kinda wanna see that in person!
German, Italian spelling is also atrocious in many contexts. Engrish is always present, as usual.
Yeah, that was funny and gauges everything else portrayed.
The guy did a video on China and couldn’t pronounce Kunming. The K isn’t silent 😂
This free movie theme park
Wow, when I visited Shanghai and Pudong, I never knew Pudong had been considered a ghost city. The place was quite vibrant. Actually, it felt more vibrant than Tokyo.
鬼城是有但数量并不多，这里很多信息完全不正确，很多建筑还没完工怎么会有人住呢，上海松江的泰晤士小镇现在游客很多的
It never was a ghost city
True about most of these places other than Shanghai
A big problem in China is corruption in the construction industry, where "tofu" buildings are erected with substandard materials that start falling apart after a year.
same in USA with houses we build since covid
How many poor Chinese villages could have been rebuilt, fixed or just overhauled with all these wasted resources.
City living with the ambiance of the country.
Seeing rows and rows of high rise apartment buildings in general makes me sick. Humans are not meant to live in such cramped and crowded conditions that currently exist in many cities today. There is so much space, yet it's used to cram as many apartments in as possible. It's all about the money, not about creating a healthy way of living.
Chinese cities are grey and grim. Row after row of bland, poorly built apartment buildings with no soul or character.
your sniveling
Not so easy when there are billions of people on this planet.
Abstract true. Now the reasons they use are all about environmental protection. It's a bunch of BS. It's about money and control!
There is not much beauty in a communist society
Some of these images look like the back rooms.
I saw a short on RUclips, where it looks like they demolished these buildings. I believe it was something like 8 buildings, all blown up at once.
Wasting so much land and resources building buildings that look the exact same.
the worst part is they are so poorly constructed that they'd probably just collapse if people actually started to live in them.
... It does not matter, China has almost 1.5 billion people. Who will give a dime. .....
@@jebes909090 So why hasn't that happened seeing as these are now all inhabited?
@@kristoffer3000 except they arent
@@jebes909090 Google it and come back to me, liar
It's always best to have confirmed buyers first before building.
It's all bought but not occupied.
I saw hundreds of these half finished high rise housing projects while on a 40 hour train ride from Shandong Province to Kunming. The Chinese have so much money from our consumption that they thought real estate investing was the best place to go. They Effed up big time!
The madness of central planing.
Also, who would think that building a copy of Paris or London? it's tacky as hell and embarrassing, China does have its own culture, doesn't it?
... Western styles are mesmerizing for people all across the world, but Muslim. ........
OMG, OMG, what a waste and here we have people living on the streets and in tent cities.
china is buying everything in USA-all of our houses, apartments, our parks of parked mobile homes
Beautiful 😊
This is all very out of date, most of these ghost cities are full or filling fast. Ordos for example has filled the new city nearly half full and surpassed their 300,000 population goal.
Migrant workers, numbering at 290.77 million, are not 'homeless' - not the way those 3 guys were depicted anyway.
That's why federal city planning will fail. If it's not driven by people, it won't easily be adopted. And the way they buy real estate, which in part they are doing here, is a way to ruin the opportunity for regular people to own a home.
I want to explore these cities I have always been interested in urban exploration so it would be on my bucket list.
they should just offer free units to the street residents of SF & LA
This would be an epic area for paintball
Makes sense. Like sitting on gold bars for as long as it takes. Smart actually. The building ones .
Surprised that Buildr released a video with so many errors in narration.
It’s a government ponzy scheme, Chinese are denied foreign investment, so they invest in apartments which are empty. The government dictates the rise and fall of value of apartments worth. This allows for further investment even though the cities will never be filled
Chinese investors drove up California real estate prices trifold. They offered immediately a hundred thousand dollars more in cash than the asking price was. Californians didn't have $1.5 million for a 3-bedroom house in San Francisco.
Google these cities, they're not ghost cities anymore.
Almost like you're just not very intelligent lol
"The truth" is really that a minor fraction of these projects have failed. But given the scope of China's exponational growth, the failures appear large.
If you visit any Chinese city you can easily see abandoned "ghost" developments. I used to live in Dongguan 东莞市 and they were everywhere.
@@freeman10000 keyword "were". It doesn't take a genius to figure out that it would not be economical to build ghost cities.
This does fit the saying that "Rome wasn't built in a day". .
The city's name is Kunming, as it is spelt, and not "Junming" Where do you get the "J" sound from?
I knew chinese weren't original but this is so sad, how about making traditional chinese houses that chinese would love
1,411,750,000 people live in China. These ghost cities might easily be full of people in a matter of short time. 🖤😎👍
It is always seems like cost of the property is the issue. They need to find ways to encourage businesses to move and lower costs if they want Any life. They waste so much.
"Who would want to live in a ghost town"
*waves hand frantically *
Me
Something tells me that whole city is made of strong cardboard painted gray 😅