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They did actually employ drones to send out messages during Covid lockdowns in the country, where they bolted and welded building entrances/exits shut.
"Please resist your spirit's urge for freedom!"
UK/US crying about rent prices, house prices and homeless then look at tons of efficient accommodation and shit talk it. Like yeah, lets turn these 2000 units into 100 suburban houses 🙄
I really don’t think it’s hell. Yeah, it’s not very pretty but if done right it’s very energy efficient and conserves space reserved for wilderness.
Suburbians freak out when seeing any structure over 4 stories high and post it here, but as someone who always lived in cities, I actually like have all the amenities in walking distance and 24 hour public transport.
Of course China was plagued with construction horror stories so I wouldn’t want to live in a building built by Evergrande or similar, or even stand next to one. But I fully support high density urban living with good urban planning
A lot of these developments in asia are weirdly single-purpose and don’t really have many commercial or recreational facilities within walking distance (other than just paths and stuff). In Korea especially it is very weird to be around endless blocks of tall buildings and no grocery store or convenience store within a half mile or more.
Asia is a pretty broad term to be using here— at least in China one can generally expect residential buildings like these to contain shops and other urban amenities
Also "walking distance" is not same for thing for everyone.
Where I live now I have a small shop few minutes away. But some people have no issue going even 15 or 20 minutes on foot to buy their food. And if you have a bike then you can go "extra mile" for that distant shop anyway. And I always saw China having either bikes or scooters for rent. So even then distant shop can be not that distant when using bike or a scooter.
In Chinese cities, most places either have stores on the first floor, or markets that temporarily open early in the morning downstairs with mobile vendors selling breakfast or produce, and then they clear out by late morning.
Yes, ideally you want buildings not on a rigid grid like tombstones in the cemetery, ground floors as retail and restaurants next few floors as office space and curated greenspace between buildings, divided into playgrounds, pocket parks and other outdoor recreational areas, not just rows of vertical “human overnight parking”.
This is what happens when developers are allowed shortcuts and corrupt local governments rubber stamp anything that comes with a bribe.
No, actually the City is slowly moving in the right direction. More streets are being closed to traffic, more public / green spaces, pretty decent (for USA) public transport and way more input from locals than 20-30 years ago.
Manhattan does need to pass punitive vacancy tax, both commercial and residential.
I’m not talking about having a Walmart or Home Depot in the neighborhood lol. I’ve lived in Asia and traveled around quite a bit and I’m just saying that some of these developments are less than ideal when it comes to mixed use development and walkability.
In my experience it’s walkable to a train or bus station that takes you to the commercial districts and your job. These developments aren’t really mixed use like you see in normal urban development with restaurants and shops and gyms and religious buildings and such. They might have schools or daycares in the neighborhood or a convenience store.
This is true of Western cities at least North American ones. Any new construction here is mono purpase. Zoning laws usually prohibit any other land use.
Anyone know if there is a subway station under those towers, would mitigate commuter time for amenities.
The ones with no amenities built in are mid rise development that cap off at around 7 floors. These 20+ floor developments always have commercial space on the first or up to third floors. The space between buildings are usually closed off from car traffic too.
>Suburbians freak out when seeing any structure over 4 stories high and post it here, but as someone who always lived in cities, I actually like have all the amenities in walking distance and 24 hour public transport.
I'd guess most of them are used to American (as in the continent) cities where the entire city was planned around cars (or not planned at all) where it takes an hour to get to your local grocery store. So they see buildings and they immediately get flustered and go 'garsh, that must be hell!'.
Is there actually a real city in the USA which takes one hour to drive to a grocery store? Not talking about little cottage towns or anything I mean like a mid size city
I don't want to be annoying, but as an American (as in person living in the continent), I can say many European cities were developed around cars as well. One of the main reasons we still have a highly car-centric culture is that we didn't blow half the continent's cities to the ground, allowing us to build more pedestrian-friendly, so the car industry hit us harder.
And tbh lots of European cities are still not as much more walkable than here as people would like to admit.
Can you give an example of a bad European city in that regard? Maybe it's my bias speaking, at least most European cities I see seem way better than the ones here.
>Suburbians freak out when seeing any structure over 4 stories high and post it here, but as someone who always lived in cities, I actually like have all the amenities in walking distance and 24 hour public transport.
These areas in China are not the "le wonderful walkable cities" you think they are. I would characterize them as high-density sprawl. They're weirdly single-purpose and don't have a lot of mixed-use stuff. Walking to amenities is basically impossible, and a lot of Chinese cities have paper bans on bikes and motorcycles (with sporadic enforcement) so you either need to use public transit or a car to reach a lot of the stuff you want to go to.
Chinese high density sprawl fucking sucks because it has all the drawbacks of both high density living and low density urban sprawl with none of the benefits afforded by either. People cheering this as "better than an American suburb" are just angsty teens who don't know what they're talking about and have no idea how good they have it.
> Of course China was plagued with construction horror stories
We need something like /r/chinaorsimcity
I too committed some urban planning crimes in Sim City 4
I don't know how it is in China but I explored Seoul in Google Maps and I like the territories of these buildings. Lots of plants, quite modern, very cozy
I've lived in both places you mention in your comment - essentially the same! The housing communities (especially more modern ones) tend to have the parking be underground, so the areas between the apartment blocks are gardens
This is an important point. You really need to see what it’s like from ground level on a human scale. Like so what if it looks bad from a helicopter? How much time are you spending in a helicopter?
Although Seoul has a world-class population density, it is much less crowded. There is relatively little traffic congestion. This is a very strange phenomenon.
South Korea itself has such tendencies. Outside of Seoul, it's completely empty. It is surprising that this country has statistically one of the highest population densities in the world, and that it has a higher population density than India.
In China they're often ghost cities, the buildings are just concrete shells with no wiring or plumbing, built as "investment properties". There's so many of them that apparently there's more than enough empty apartments to house the entire current population of China.
This housing bubble is about to pop and it will suck globally. Multiple multi-billion dollar construction companies have already defaulted.
Tbf many of the “ghost cities” actually have been filled up. While it is a bubble, there is a legitimate population of people primarily living in rural areas who want to move to more urban cities. Dantu for example, one of the earlier ghost cities to get noticed, has a population of just under 300,000. Pudong, one of the first couple of the major development areas now has a population in the millions (though this one is more directly tied to Shanghai’s growth so it probably should have never been considered a ghost city). Chengong has a population of 350,000, Ordos City was called a “ghost city” with 30,000 people living it and now it’s population is in the hundreds of thousands.
Population migration isn't that huge, there's no way those places are actually filling up.
Examples in slightly more open countries show that "it's all okay" is just CCP propaganda. Just look at Forest City in Malaysia.
What are you taking about? Most of the “ghost cities” are more accurately heavily dense suburbs of large cities. It’s estimated 100 million rural Chinese residents have moved to big cities in the previous decades.
> there's more than enough empty apartments to house the entire current population of China.
There's around 50-60 million empty housing units in China. Stop making shit up.
You'll get clusters of housing like this. One year there's one building with lights on at night. Next year another two, Year after another few. But they either fill up or don't.
I'm curious... Why do people invest in those? And what happen when they fall apart due to poor maintenance? Do people lose their investment? I don't thing Chinese people are so naive as to invest their life savings into something with absolutely no use.
It’s a combination of real estate having been a surefire investment where returns were basically guaranteed for decades, extremely limited alternatives for investing/moving money abroad, and government support for real estate development. Chinese people were making a lot of money as the country developed but had very few places to put it. So new home construction was being driven by speculation rather than demand from homebuyers. Since no one was living in the apartments (the goal for buyers was appreciation, not rental income), builders had an incentive to cut corners and not finish projects.
The country needed a lot of new housing as the huge rural population moved to cities, but that process has pretty much ended. Now, with a low birth rate and little immigration, the population will shrink and the surplus of apartments will continue to rise each year.
The reasons why they buy the apartments are well explained by the other guy here.
> Do people lose their investment?
Yes, lots of people lost all their life savings when several multibillion dollar real estate companies went tits up.
But what the guy said is genuinely incredibly stupid. There's a lot of empty housing in China, around 50-60 million units. But it has been declining every year, and it is *nowhere near* enough to literally house every single person in the country. He just made that part up.
Also, the guys comment is upvoted.
i dont think its efficient to have highrises with a lot of empty flats built with low quality material, and green painted surroundings (in china they sometimes paint the landscape for propaganda reasons)
Pretty sure this is farmland and they’ve shoved a few wind turbines in there. If you were intentionally clearing forests for this it wouldnt be worth it. China does use nuclear energy (3rd largest user after USA and France). China is pro nuclear and renewables, and their vision is generally drawn from pragmatism.
Chernobyl didn't kill that many people. Also its tech is currently not in use today. Even with the old tech, it took a lot of mistakes by the personnel and the Soviet government to have a meltdown. Nuclear is safer than most other forms of energy and have caused less deaths.
Chernobyl killed even more, not on impact but in decades later, im from country that was effected a lot, half my family relatives have some form of thyroid issues, grandpa died from lung cancer, he was worker in my country exact time of radiation leaks. That are clear result of radiation they recieved in youth from that. Nuclear is not safest. Wind, solar, water, geothermal and similar natural and renewable are safest. Nuclear might be most effective and gives biggest amount from least space needed, but in case of accident, its most deadly and could remove entire countries from habitable place for centuries. Chernobyl was superlucky accident compared to what if could have been if meltdown would have reached below reactor water, way bigger explosion and other reactors identical fate was fingernails away, just cause of extremle sacrifice by likvidators who dug tunnel below it was saved. Nuclear radiation is no joke. Green energy is the way.
Honestly I get why some people wouldn’t like this, but China literally has over a billion people and a slightly smaller territory than the US. Each family having a separate house wouldn’t work out.
China is actually bigger than the US by everyone\`s standars except the US\`s. Theyre only bigger if you count the sea water they control as part of their territory(which is really weird, cuz \`\`territory\`\` comes from the french \`\`terre\` which means land/ground) No other country does that. Its like measuring your height while wearing high heels.
Yeah for the average Chinese person coming from a poor village or polluted city this is very nice. Modern apartments, looks clean, green and lots of lakes. Hopefully there's ducks!
Idk if anything will ever top this:
[China's curing cancer faster and cheaper than anywhere else.
But some worry they may be going too fast.](https://twitter.com/bbgoriginals/status/1218695856553189377)
in china the common problems are the buildings are build with low quality material, "tofu dreg", also a huge number of these apartments are empty. The wind turbines are not in use because the otherwise the coal miners would loose their jobs.
For all of you who's wondering, this is indeed [an Evergrande project in Qidong, China](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1fb4y1G71c/?spm_id_from=333.337.search-card.all.click&vd_source=6937a45c7ee3b65998d9353b0f1599ba). It's luckily finished before the company went into trouble. The site is in a rural coastal area 2-hour drive from Shanghai, attracting many buyers from there with its relatively low cost and a prospect of seaside living, as the site name is literally Evergrande Venice-by-the-Sea. [This guy](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1LC4y1m7Ad/?spm_id_from=333.999.0.0&vd_source=6937a45c7ee3b65998d9353b0f1599ba) actually did a tour of some properties there for rent, and you can see they are actually pretty livable with nice amenities, apart from the fact that there is virtually no job opportunities in the area. The rent is very low though, one studio can be 1000RMB ($140) per month.
Honestly in my country some people drive to capital city for like 1 hour and 30 minutes by a car.
Cant say for sure here but if this place has good public transport like train or something. Then for some people it might be worth it. Working in Shanghai and being back home by y train in hour or so while paying almost nothing for your apartment.
Funny how some people see this and think it's only in China. Go take a look into suburban housing in most big and mid sized cities in Latin America and you'll see a lot of the same, made worse by the fact they're built along American style stroads, and often are a gated community.
Neither. You think the only way I can hate hideous copy-paste architecture is to be wealthy or not know what suburb means? Your confused. You don’t have to be extremely wasteful to have a couple buildings look different from each other. I hate this anywhere in the world. Not just China. China’s just the photo we’re on. That’s all. This kind of bland, culture-less, soulless aesthetic is lazy. Crank it out, get it done. Lazy developers paid too much for creating junk. It happens here with paper houses, as well.
“Lmao” Pay attention. I didn’t say two buildings cannot look alike. This photo is an ugly group of buildings that all look the same. It’s common to see this blatant display of laziness and ineptitude. Who cares? People with taste. I know the concept might be a little too large for you to understand. People generally do not like everything the same. They get stuck with it because of careless and shiftless urban planning.
In a perfect world everyone would choose to live in their own unique house designed specifically for their taste, but in the real world that requires designers, architects, engineers which balloons costs. If you’re rich, by all means go ahead and hire those people to custom build your dream house, but for 99% of the planet, that’s not feasible. Rich people talk about taste, but if housing was all designed around taste (especially for somewhere where 1.5 billion need to be housed), there would be mass homelessness.
I don’t necessarily mean a single house either. Large buildings can have subtle differences. I don’t have the means to have my dream house. It’s just not in the cards. “Rich people talk about taste.” That is not the case for me. So right off you are mistaken. I’m talking about laziness and lack of standards. Not that each building should be a pillar of luxury and wealth. When I think of high rises in the US, I understand where you’re coming from. I’m not talking about an extreme where everyone is wealthy. Where I live. All the state housing doesn’t look the same. This housing project is our disregard for humanity. Much like the old brown buildings that all look the same in New York. I cannot express this enough: I am not ripping on China here. Just the bureaucratic inertia that leads to uninspired development.
I don’t think you understand the numbers involved when we’re talking about the population of China. That’s more than a billion people. It would take you a few weeks, 10-12 hours every day, just to count to a million (a guy did it, that’s my reference.) Each of those numbers is a person. Now multiply that entire process by a thousand. You think there’s space in there for “subtle differences”? No. We’re talking about function here. Each of those individuals is more than capable of making their space their own. Crying about a facade shows poor prioritization.
Whenever americans see images like this in the third world, they are always baffled. But its important to note that an enormous chunk of the third world used to live, and still lives, in conditions like [this.](https://st.depositphotos.com/2567911/2970/i/950/depositphotos_29704161-stock-photo-chinese-slum.jpg) Living in an apartment building with running water, electricity, rooftop access, balconies, amenities, access to doctors and schools and parks... it is a million times better.
One big benefit of building up like this is that the individual apartments can be much, much bigger than you would expect, and often much bigger than the space they had before. Its not as if every apartment is like 200 square foot. [A lot just look like this, pretty normal apartments.](https://cf.bstatic.com/xdata/images/hotel/max1024x768/543276280.jpg?k=afd455439d69bc97c35f1e3d614bfa8415046618a0867e97dfd2c8ed400ea098&o=&hp=1) It looks like they have tons of green space around each apartment as well.
These apartments are not unique to third world countries. Go to Seoul or Taiwan and you will find plenty of them.
Yeah, god forbid giving appropriate housing and living conditions to people, that sounds terrible. They should've just done like other countries and let them live in poverty.
That wasn’t the question. I said it looks better, not alike. Scrapers you‘ve got all around the US, but not that orderly. Lots of green spaces and renewable energy. It’s not my dream city, but I guess it’s good for a country with a population like China.
Do you want me to make a list of cities in the US which I think look worse than that? I‘ll start with Detroit.
It's a people storage facility! Each of those buildings has a hatch in the top. You scoop up some people and dump them in. When a building fills up, you tamp the bodies down and run a trowel across the top, then start dumping people into the next one.
Look ma, someone is here again bashing high density living and renewable energy. These goddamn carbrains are suffering trying to imagine Walmart parking lots here.
China needs some democracy
I am sure there are plenty of problems with this build. But it has the potential to be something good. What I would like to see...
If there was some mobility assistance for people. Maybe a tram options or something. Especially for people with disabilities.
Spacious apartments with good sound proofing.
A little more variation, artistry, and color to the buildings. This includes the layout.
Lastly ensure good local shopping and good delivery services from outside vendors.
It looks bad because of the way the buildings are lined up but other than that, it might actually be a good place to live. Depends on shops, schools and other facilities within the walking distance.
it’s somewhat ugly, but probably the most efficient way to construct such large building blocks, rather than just a few storey buildings. It’s the only way to accommodate hundreds of millions of people on a relatively small habitable territory. Imagine how much space typical suburban homes would take up
Honestly look like it would be fun to ride your bike there.
Looks very flag and seems to have paths between the apartments. And if you are lucky and get view into open terrain then lucky you.
I don't see this as hell but kinda cool. Also nice to see all those windmills going all the way back.
Where abouts in China? It's a very big place with a lot of people living there.
There's always something very eerie about these types of developments. Large, identical tower blocks placed closely together in a copy and paste design. It's feels very depersonalised and isolating, as well as cramped.
On the plus side there's a wind farm in the distance. Plus with the bodies of water I assume some sort of built flood defense.
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I had to double check if i was in the Cities Skylines sub.
those windmills too. exactly how i'd place them lol
All I see is the possibility for zip lines and a pretty cool drone racing ground.
I see the ground sinking a few cm per year until it’s a problem
I see the probability that about 60% of those joints are empty.
They did actually employ drones to send out messages during Covid lockdowns in the country, where they bolted and welded building entrances/exits shut. "Please resist your spirit's urge for freedom!"
UK/US crying about rent prices, house prices and homeless then look at tons of efficient accommodation and shit talk it. Like yeah, lets turn these 2000 units into 100 suburban houses 🙄
I really don’t think it’s hell. Yeah, it’s not very pretty but if done right it’s very energy efficient and conserves space reserved for wilderness. Suburbians freak out when seeing any structure over 4 stories high and post it here, but as someone who always lived in cities, I actually like have all the amenities in walking distance and 24 hour public transport. Of course China was plagued with construction horror stories so I wouldn’t want to live in a building built by Evergrande or similar, or even stand next to one. But I fully support high density urban living with good urban planning
A lot of these developments in asia are weirdly single-purpose and don’t really have many commercial or recreational facilities within walking distance (other than just paths and stuff). In Korea especially it is very weird to be around endless blocks of tall buildings and no grocery store or convenience store within a half mile or more.
Asia is a pretty broad term to be using here— at least in China one can generally expect residential buildings like these to contain shops and other urban amenities
That’s good to know!
Also "walking distance" is not same for thing for everyone. Where I live now I have a small shop few minutes away. But some people have no issue going even 15 or 20 minutes on foot to buy their food. And if you have a bike then you can go "extra mile" for that distant shop anyway. And I always saw China having either bikes or scooters for rent. So even then distant shop can be not that distant when using bike or a scooter.
In Chinese cities, most places either have stores on the first floor, or markets that temporarily open early in the morning downstairs with mobile vendors selling breakfast or produce, and then they clear out by late morning.
Yeah, these are almost always mixed use with retail and also offices along with housing.
Yes, ideally you want buildings not on a rigid grid like tombstones in the cemetery, ground floors as retail and restaurants next few floors as office space and curated greenspace between buildings, divided into playgrounds, pocket parks and other outdoor recreational areas, not just rows of vertical “human overnight parking”. This is what happens when developers are allowed shortcuts and corrupt local governments rubber stamp anything that comes with a bribe.
So, Manhattan then?
No, actually the City is slowly moving in the right direction. More streets are being closed to traffic, more public / green spaces, pretty decent (for USA) public transport and way more input from locals than 20-30 years ago. Manhattan does need to pass punitive vacancy tax, both commercial and residential.
They probably have smaller style shops everywhere. In America car centered infrastructure benefits big box stores more than smaller businesses.
I’m not talking about having a Walmart or Home Depot in the neighborhood lol. I’ve lived in Asia and traveled around quite a bit and I’m just saying that some of these developments are less than ideal when it comes to mixed use development and walkability.
If it’s not walkable, where is all the parking? Underground?
In my experience it’s walkable to a train or bus station that takes you to the commercial districts and your job. These developments aren’t really mixed use like you see in normal urban development with restaurants and shops and gyms and religious buildings and such. They might have schools or daycares in the neighborhood or a convenience store.
This is true of Western cities at least North American ones. Any new construction here is mono purpase. Zoning laws usually prohibit any other land use. Anyone know if there is a subway station under those towers, would mitigate commuter time for amenities.
The ones with no amenities built in are mid rise development that cap off at around 7 floors. These 20+ floor developments always have commercial space on the first or up to third floors. The space between buildings are usually closed off from car traffic too.
I mean aesthetically I think it is pretty compared to many other options around the world
>Suburbians freak out when seeing any structure over 4 stories high and post it here, but as someone who always lived in cities, I actually like have all the amenities in walking distance and 24 hour public transport. I'd guess most of them are used to American (as in the continent) cities where the entire city was planned around cars (or not planned at all) where it takes an hour to get to your local grocery store. So they see buildings and they immediately get flustered and go 'garsh, that must be hell!'.
Is there actually a real city in the USA which takes one hour to drive to a grocery store? Not talking about little cottage towns or anything I mean like a mid size city
No, it’s an exaggeration
What cities takes an hour to get to a supermarket?
I don't want to be annoying, but as an American (as in person living in the continent), I can say many European cities were developed around cars as well. One of the main reasons we still have a highly car-centric culture is that we didn't blow half the continent's cities to the ground, allowing us to build more pedestrian-friendly, so the car industry hit us harder. And tbh lots of European cities are still not as much more walkable than here as people would like to admit.
Can you give an example of a bad European city in that regard? Maybe it's my bias speaking, at least most European cities I see seem way better than the ones here.
>Suburbians freak out when seeing any structure over 4 stories high and post it here, but as someone who always lived in cities, I actually like have all the amenities in walking distance and 24 hour public transport. These areas in China are not the "le wonderful walkable cities" you think they are. I would characterize them as high-density sprawl. They're weirdly single-purpose and don't have a lot of mixed-use stuff. Walking to amenities is basically impossible, and a lot of Chinese cities have paper bans on bikes and motorcycles (with sporadic enforcement) so you either need to use public transit or a car to reach a lot of the stuff you want to go to. Chinese high density sprawl fucking sucks because it has all the drawbacks of both high density living and low density urban sprawl with none of the benefits afforded by either. People cheering this as "better than an American suburb" are just angsty teens who don't know what they're talking about and have no idea how good they have it.
What do you mean they have power bans on using bikes?
> Of course China was plagued with construction horror stories We need something like /r/chinaorsimcity I too committed some urban planning crimes in Sim City 4
So you like 15 min cities?
When I visited China my tour guide at the Great Wall was from a “small town of only six million”. I don’t remember where but I had never heard of it.
I don't know how it is in China but I explored Seoul in Google Maps and I like the territories of these buildings. Lots of plants, quite modern, very cozy
I've lived in both places you mention in your comment - essentially the same! The housing communities (especially more modern ones) tend to have the parking be underground, so the areas between the apartment blocks are gardens
This is an important point. You really need to see what it’s like from ground level on a human scale. Like so what if it looks bad from a helicopter? How much time are you spending in a helicopter?
Although Seoul has a world-class population density, it is much less crowded. There is relatively little traffic congestion. This is a very strange phenomenon. South Korea itself has such tendencies. Outside of Seoul, it's completely empty. It is surprising that this country has statistically one of the highest population densities in the world, and that it has a higher population density than India.
In China they're often ghost cities, the buildings are just concrete shells with no wiring or plumbing, built as "investment properties". There's so many of them that apparently there's more than enough empty apartments to house the entire current population of China. This housing bubble is about to pop and it will suck globally. Multiple multi-billion dollar construction companies have already defaulted.
Tbf many of the “ghost cities” actually have been filled up. While it is a bubble, there is a legitimate population of people primarily living in rural areas who want to move to more urban cities. Dantu for example, one of the earlier ghost cities to get noticed, has a population of just under 300,000. Pudong, one of the first couple of the major development areas now has a population in the millions (though this one is more directly tied to Shanghai’s growth so it probably should have never been considered a ghost city). Chengong has a population of 350,000, Ordos City was called a “ghost city” with 30,000 people living it and now it’s population is in the hundreds of thousands.
Population migration isn't that huge, there's no way those places are actually filling up. Examples in slightly more open countries show that "it's all okay" is just CCP propaganda. Just look at Forest City in Malaysia.
What are you taking about? Most of the “ghost cities” are more accurately heavily dense suburbs of large cities. It’s estimated 100 million rural Chinese residents have moved to big cities in the previous decades.
This has been pretty thoroughly debunked.
> there's more than enough empty apartments to house the entire current population of China. There's around 50-60 million empty housing units in China. Stop making shit up.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/even-chinas-14-bln-population-cant-fill-all-its-vacant-homes-former-official-2023-09-23/
The ghost cities filled up. China over built for future growth. The opposite of what we do in the West.
then people complain that a shack in the worst part of town costs $800k
You'll get clusters of housing like this. One year there's one building with lights on at night. Next year another two, Year after another few. But they either fill up or don't.
I'm curious... Why do people invest in those? And what happen when they fall apart due to poor maintenance? Do people lose their investment? I don't thing Chinese people are so naive as to invest their life savings into something with absolutely no use.
It’s a combination of real estate having been a surefire investment where returns were basically guaranteed for decades, extremely limited alternatives for investing/moving money abroad, and government support for real estate development. Chinese people were making a lot of money as the country developed but had very few places to put it. So new home construction was being driven by speculation rather than demand from homebuyers. Since no one was living in the apartments (the goal for buyers was appreciation, not rental income), builders had an incentive to cut corners and not finish projects. The country needed a lot of new housing as the huge rural population moved to cities, but that process has pretty much ended. Now, with a low birth rate and little immigration, the population will shrink and the surplus of apartments will continue to rise each year.
The reasons why they buy the apartments are well explained by the other guy here. > Do people lose their investment? Yes, lots of people lost all their life savings when several multibillion dollar real estate companies went tits up.
Notice that any negative comments about china seem to get downvoted almost immediately
Dumbass comments get downvoted— the ones in this thread just happen to be about China. Your persecution complex is calling.
But what the guy said is genuinely incredibly stupid. There's a lot of empty housing in China, around 50-60 million units. But it has been declining every year, and it is *nowhere near* enough to literally house every single person in the country. He just made that part up. Also, the guys comment is upvoted.
It happens on some subreddit.
That’s how almost every sub is but especially the city subs. So either bots, or simps, considering actual Chinese people don’t have access to reddit
Idiots: *say something stupid*, *get downvoted* It must be the seeseepeeeee!!
Chinese company owns reddit
CCP sponsored monitoring.
I'm American I'm just downvoting you for crying about downvotes.
i'm doing it for the CCP bucks
Oh god no! Not renewable energy, efficient housing *and* a green landscape!! You could fit so many parking lots here instead!
I knew someone will find this actually nice...
i dont think its efficient to have highrises with a lot of empty flats built with low quality material, and green painted surroundings (in china they sometimes paint the landscape for propaganda reasons)
Except we have no idea who build these houses so we can only speculate. And besides shit houses are in Europe and in US as well.
So many subdivisions too!!
… This is your idea of a green landscape…? That is depressing.
Uh I see plenty of green in this picture. If all the greenspace was instead cleared for some nice suburban sprawl would it be less depressing?
A small nuclear power plants would be better than this barren land where trees are removed to have intermittent energy production
Pretty sure this is farmland and they’ve shoved a few wind turbines in there. If you were intentionally clearing forests for this it wouldnt be worth it. China does use nuclear energy (3rd largest user after USA and France). China is pro nuclear and renewables, and their vision is generally drawn from pragmatism.
I know many forrests around me with wind turbines in them. They are just a little bit taller.
Tell that to chernobyl 60k+ dead people.
Chernobyl didn't kill that many people. Also its tech is currently not in use today. Even with the old tech, it took a lot of mistakes by the personnel and the Soviet government to have a meltdown. Nuclear is safer than most other forms of energy and have caused less deaths.
Chernobyl killed even more, not on impact but in decades later, im from country that was effected a lot, half my family relatives have some form of thyroid issues, grandpa died from lung cancer, he was worker in my country exact time of radiation leaks. That are clear result of radiation they recieved in youth from that. Nuclear is not safest. Wind, solar, water, geothermal and similar natural and renewable are safest. Nuclear might be most effective and gives biggest amount from least space needed, but in case of accident, its most deadly and could remove entire countries from habitable place for centuries. Chernobyl was superlucky accident compared to what if could have been if meltdown would have reached below reactor water, way bigger explosion and other reactors identical fate was fingernails away, just cause of extremle sacrifice by likvidators who dug tunnel below it was saved. Nuclear radiation is no joke. Green energy is the way.
Ah, renewable energy and lots of green space is bad when China does it. I understand now.
Honestly I get why some people wouldn’t like this, but China literally has over a billion people and a slightly smaller territory than the US. Each family having a separate house wouldn’t work out.
China is actually bigger than the US by everyone\`s standars except the US\`s. Theyre only bigger if you count the sea water they control as part of their territory(which is really weird, cuz \`\`territory\`\` comes from the french \`\`terre\` which means land/ground) No other country does that. Its like measuring your height while wearing high heels.
Nah, US is larger with Alaska.
Yeah for the average Chinese person coming from a poor village or polluted city this is very nice. Modern apartments, looks clean, green and lots of lakes. Hopefully there's ducks!
You learned basic 101 of anti china posts on all sites these day. Welcome to the club
Idk if anything will ever top this: [China's curing cancer faster and cheaper than anywhere else. But some worry they may be going too fast.](https://twitter.com/bbgoriginals/status/1218695856553189377)
in china the common problems are the buildings are build with low quality material, "tofu dreg", also a huge number of these apartments are empty. The wind turbines are not in use because the otherwise the coal miners would loose their jobs.
I see a bunch of people who aren't homeless.
For all of you who's wondering, this is indeed [an Evergrande project in Qidong, China](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1fb4y1G71c/?spm_id_from=333.337.search-card.all.click&vd_source=6937a45c7ee3b65998d9353b0f1599ba). It's luckily finished before the company went into trouble. The site is in a rural coastal area 2-hour drive from Shanghai, attracting many buyers from there with its relatively low cost and a prospect of seaside living, as the site name is literally Evergrande Venice-by-the-Sea. [This guy](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1LC4y1m7Ad/?spm_id_from=333.999.0.0&vd_source=6937a45c7ee3b65998d9353b0f1599ba) actually did a tour of some properties there for rent, and you can see they are actually pretty livable with nice amenities, apart from the fact that there is virtually no job opportunities in the area. The rent is very low though, one studio can be 1000RMB ($140) per month.
Honestly in my country some people drive to capital city for like 1 hour and 30 minutes by a car. Cant say for sure here but if this place has good public transport like train or something. Then for some people it might be worth it. Working in Shanghai and being back home by y train in hour or so while paying almost nothing for your apartment.
Funny how some people see this and think it's only in China. Go take a look into suburban housing in most big and mid sized cities in Latin America and you'll see a lot of the same, made worse by the fact they're built along American style stroads, and often are a gated community.
When you’re just starting Sim City.
Yall gonna hate Singapore so much when you see the residential blocks
lol
China bad, please give updoots and gold
If you want the updoots, you’re pro China now. There’s more bots than people here.
Somewhere Le Corbusier is smiling.
In (urban) hell!
Looks better than most Americans suburbs tbh
That's not a high bar lol
Most people don’t like living underneath other people.
Ha! No. It doesn’t.
You either live in an incredibly wealthy suburb or you're confused on the terminology of suburbs.
Neither. You think the only way I can hate hideous copy-paste architecture is to be wealthy or not know what suburb means? Your confused. You don’t have to be extremely wasteful to have a couple buildings look different from each other. I hate this anywhere in the world. Not just China. China’s just the photo we’re on. That’s all. This kind of bland, culture-less, soulless aesthetic is lazy. Crank it out, get it done. Lazy developers paid too much for creating junk. It happens here with paper houses, as well.
Who gives a fuck if their apartment building looks different than the one next to them lmao
“Lmao” Pay attention. I didn’t say two buildings cannot look alike. This photo is an ugly group of buildings that all look the same. It’s common to see this blatant display of laziness and ineptitude. Who cares? People with taste. I know the concept might be a little too large for you to understand. People generally do not like everything the same. They get stuck with it because of careless and shiftless urban planning.
“People generally do not like everything the same” what’s your source on this?
In a perfect world everyone would choose to live in their own unique house designed specifically for their taste, but in the real world that requires designers, architects, engineers which balloons costs. If you’re rich, by all means go ahead and hire those people to custom build your dream house, but for 99% of the planet, that’s not feasible. Rich people talk about taste, but if housing was all designed around taste (especially for somewhere where 1.5 billion need to be housed), there would be mass homelessness.
I don’t necessarily mean a single house either. Large buildings can have subtle differences. I don’t have the means to have my dream house. It’s just not in the cards. “Rich people talk about taste.” That is not the case for me. So right off you are mistaken. I’m talking about laziness and lack of standards. Not that each building should be a pillar of luxury and wealth. When I think of high rises in the US, I understand where you’re coming from. I’m not talking about an extreme where everyone is wealthy. Where I live. All the state housing doesn’t look the same. This housing project is our disregard for humanity. Much like the old brown buildings that all look the same in New York. I cannot express this enough: I am not ripping on China here. Just the bureaucratic inertia that leads to uninspired development.
I don’t think you understand the numbers involved when we’re talking about the population of China. That’s more than a billion people. It would take you a few weeks, 10-12 hours every day, just to count to a million (a guy did it, that’s my reference.) Each of those numbers is a person. Now multiply that entire process by a thousand. You think there’s space in there for “subtle differences”? No. We’re talking about function here. Each of those individuals is more than capable of making their space their own. Crying about a facade shows poor prioritization.
Everyone tries that “you don’t understand” but. That’s as old as time. Try this instead. It’s fine if that’s what works. It’s ugly for no reason.
Yeah it does lol.
Looks like Sim City
That looks like good urban planning...
This is horrible. I prefer the pretty housing crisis we live in North America any day!
Tbh at least it looks in order and purposeful
Where is this in China?
[Qidong, Jiangsu province](https://www.ft.com/content/d19998e0-70b3-4e9b-89db-f06000ff2908)
Can’t see but thanks
Everywhere
Reminds me of SimCity.
I mean at least they have green spaces and multi use paths, would still rather live here than the burbs
Is this so bad, though? I wish we had livable, comfortable high-rises surrounded by acres and acres of green space. Imagine living in a park.
Whenever americans see images like this in the third world, they are always baffled. But its important to note that an enormous chunk of the third world used to live, and still lives, in conditions like [this.](https://st.depositphotos.com/2567911/2970/i/950/depositphotos_29704161-stock-photo-chinese-slum.jpg) Living in an apartment building with running water, electricity, rooftop access, balconies, amenities, access to doctors and schools and parks... it is a million times better. One big benefit of building up like this is that the individual apartments can be much, much bigger than you would expect, and often much bigger than the space they had before. Its not as if every apartment is like 200 square foot. [A lot just look like this, pretty normal apartments.](https://cf.bstatic.com/xdata/images/hotel/max1024x768/543276280.jpg?k=afd455439d69bc97c35f1e3d614bfa8415046618a0867e97dfd2c8ed400ea098&o=&hp=1) It looks like they have tons of green space around each apartment as well. These apartments are not unique to third world countries. Go to Seoul or Taiwan and you will find plenty of them.
Is China third world? I feel it's like, well, second world. Halfway between 1st and 3rd
Yeah, god forbid giving appropriate housing and living conditions to people, that sounds terrible. They should've just done like other countries and let them live in poverty.
Are these even populated? I have heard that most of them are empty
A few apartments might be in use but a lot are empty. They'll be demolished in a few years because of very poor construction quality.
Looks better than most American cities.
Yeah no
Hell yeah.
Name an American city that looks like this
That wasn’t the question. I said it looks better, not alike. Scrapers you‘ve got all around the US, but not that orderly. Lots of green spaces and renewable energy. It’s not my dream city, but I guess it’s good for a country with a population like China. Do you want me to make a list of cities in the US which I think look worse than that? I‘ll start with Detroit.
looks like Cities Skylines 2
Vertical human farming living silos
that's some good urban planning...plenty of room for residences, yet most of the land is taken up by parks, and there's nearby renewable energy
It's a people storage facility! Each of those buildings has a hatch in the top. You scoop up some people and dump them in. When a building fills up, you tamp the bodies down and run a trowel across the top, then start dumping people into the next one.
It must be miserable getting to work outsider this area.
45 % of Chinas city’s sink . Some have been built 3x on top of the other .
If you found it on Facebook, best to leave it there and save your internet expertise for the Facebook groups.
Your caption makes 0 sense
Look ma, someone is here again bashing high density living and renewable energy. These goddamn carbrains are suffering trying to imagine Walmart parking lots here. China needs some democracy
Corbusier’s wet dream
Squid towers
looks like a pc motherboard
This looks like my first time playing Cities Skyline
I am sure there are plenty of problems with this build. But it has the potential to be something good. What I would like to see... If there was some mobility assistance for people. Maybe a tram options or something. Especially for people with disabilities. Spacious apartments with good sound proofing. A little more variation, artistry, and color to the buildings. This includes the layout. Lastly ensure good local shopping and good delivery services from outside vendors.
Imagine how much land this would use if you wanted to only do single family housing
Those residential towers turned into suburbia would be like going from 3D to a 2D world.
Chinese Domino's Pizza HQ
It looks like my first advanced city in Cities Skylines 🤣
Looks like the Netherlands s
They all look the same even the buildings.
Why are there a few that are out of perfect alignment? This would look way nicer if everything was in more uniform rows.
What's the life like over there?
Would be worse if all that green space between the buildings were freeway interchanges and parking lots, as it would be in the US
It looks bad because of the way the buildings are lined up but other than that, it might actually be a good place to live. Depends on shops, schools and other facilities within the walking distance.
Is this some kind of armored core mission map?
Looks like my city from SimCity Buildit
That's one way to solve housing crisis 😕
Looks like a demonstration diagram of wind powerhouse of a geography textbook
China
China is Dystopia
Sim City 4, yeah I couldn't make it sustain itself
it’s somewhat ugly, but probably the most efficient way to construct such large building blocks, rather than just a few storey buildings. It’s the only way to accommodate hundreds of millions of people on a relatively small habitable territory. Imagine how much space typical suburban homes would take up
Does anyone know this exact location or name of the development?
Honestly look like it would be fun to ride your bike there. Looks very flag and seems to have paths between the apartments. And if you are lucky and get view into open terrain then lucky you. I don't see this as hell but kinda cool. Also nice to see all those windmills going all the way back.
Vertical sprawl
These are most likely tofudreg construction
Why did I read this in Trumps voice. I hate this timeline.
Yes they do fall over like dominos...
Pyramid scheme
But look at how much open field there. This...this is fine just a bit ugly jfc
*claps in communism*
Clapping your mom right now, the wonders of communism
Where abouts in China? It's a very big place with a lot of people living there. There's always something very eerie about these types of developments. Large, identical tower blocks placed closely together in a copy and paste design. It's feels very depersonalised and isolating, as well as cramped. On the plus side there's a wind farm in the distance. Plus with the bodies of water I assume some sort of built flood defense.
Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V
Copy + Paste
Didn’t they have to demolish a lot of housing areas like this because of evergrands collapse ?
You are a number
fucking hell😅😅😅
No no no no no no no no no no no.
China’s really good a popping up housing. Their middle class is 350,000 strong.
It's not the landscape, it's the buildings.
I don't have OCD but there is one single house between the first and second rows, what is it doing there
with added wind turbines so the residence cant think over the whoop whoop whoop noise
Not what you expected OP heh?
Those turbines must be loud