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China's 1.4 billion population isn't enough to fill the country's empty homes, former official says
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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... isn't that the point?
Right?! Love how the article frames it as a bad thing because it doesn't make sense from a capitalist standpoint.
It certainly isn’t capitalist to have such an insane gap between offer and supply. If lack of offer is a problem, the issues with such enormous oversupply are even greater. Just wasteful. Damaging to the environment. And introduces a lot of economic woes.
Oversupply of life saving goods is a good thing. Only under capitalism is it bad, which is why we have so many preventable deaths and deaths of poverty. Overbuilding housing and making it available to everyone in anticipation of localized population booms or migrations is exactly what the government should be doing.
I mean, maybe a bit of a buffer, but China was pretty much just building them endlessly. A lot of people were evicted and wetlands filled for these (bad, cut-corner) apartment buildings to go up and then sit totally empty.
Ah yes, because housing as a right rather than an investment is a bad thing.
Who do you think built all of those houses? Capitalists who were speculating on real estate.
Just no. It's something libs seemingly can't understand : you need surplus to face problems and adapt to a changing situation or a crisis without people dying. Problem is that libs care more about money than people, so they seek an equilibrium where supply is right below demand so the capitalists can exploit the people.
Sure it is! Capitalists just do it in the opposite direction; keep supply low so prices stay high.
No, that's an effect of collusion and cartelization of the economy. It's because you have very few actors supplying the product and the barriers of creating a similar product are too high, so new competitors cannot access the market. Then the current suppliers can sit on the product and wait for it to be at the right price, as long as it doesn't go to waste.
As you can see, all of this screens about real estate:
This is the time when governments should intervene and come up with a proposal to solve the cartelization.
That's just capitalism honey
Yes and no. Capitalism without regulations may bring this kind of issues. But capitalism with regulations shouldn't. The issue is that the required regulations are not being applied or do not exist.
We should not blame or put the weight of the issue in capitalism, when we clearly know we don't live in a perfect capitalistic world, and very few markets are like that. The issue is with politicians.
Capitalism destroys its own regulations because politicians are for sale! You're acting like politics and markets are different, but they're interconnected at their very core.
Don't blame capitalism for something that's at the core of any political system: Greed destroys it. Greed and humans are intertwined. It's not capitalism's fault. The same happened across history even when and where capitalism didn't exist: the Egyptian empire, the Roman Empire, the Soviet block and even in China now. Greedy people that can be bought will exist everywhere. The wish for power is not inherent of capitalism, is inherent of human nature. Failing to see that will lead to the same issue over and over again, in democratic or autocratic regimes.
Misanthropy.
The problem with capitalism and feudalism and the ancient empires before them is they are unequal and undemocratuc. The common thread through all of them is a large amount of power concentrated into very few hands, leading to class conflict between haves and havenots. Capitalism isn't unique in that respect, it's just the most advanced form.
I don't hate the human race. But I cannot stop pointing to our flaws. Not understanding our flaws, will lead to keep having them and the problems they carry.
On the other hand, what you are saying will be valid in any system. How do you propose to have a completely egalitarian society? It's nearly impossible, there will always be people wanting more than they have and won't care about the consequences of it.
As long as there are haves and havenots then there will be class conflict.
Abolish private property so no one can be a 'have' and redistribute the wealth so there are no longer people who are 'havenots.' WIthout the accumulation of wealth and power the class distinctions evaporate into air and we could abolish the State itself, because the State only exists as a tool for one class to oppress the other.
Imagine if everyone was finally working together.
See? That's where I get confused and I end up with the "that can't happen" attitude in my head.
If you abolish private property, then who has that property? Someone will always have some of that, at least. Let's imagine that it's seized, by whom? How? And why wouldn't that be thievery in the eyes of those who don't want it? Because if I want it to happen, then it would be relinquishing, but if I don't it would be coercive, because I cannot pay anything to that person, otherwise it would become a "haver" against all of those "havenotters" that gave their property for nothing but good will.
And then there's the redistribution fact, of how to do that? Equitable? By some principle? Depending on who you are and are not, you get X o Y amount of "property"? And then it's the issue of how do you measure that "property"? Because two cups of sugar can be of similar value, but not two houses. It's not the same to live in downtown Manhattan than in the middle of Saskatchewan.
Finally, who does that? We? And who is "we"? Who organises "we"? How is "we" not anarchist? And if it's anarchist, how do we ensure it's just?
Whoooookay, that's a lot of questions! So:
Everyone has it, referred to as "the commons"
The State, which will still be necessary during this transitional period. It will use the power invested in it by the democratic process (because havenots vastly outnumber the haves) to take and redistribute the wealth. This will likely not be a peaceful process, but the creation of private property was not peaceful either!
Property is theft.
The very existence of private land is based solely on violent theft from the commons. All land was stolen by armies and gifted to nobles and aristocrats and settlers and companies. The history of land acquisition is bloody all across the world.
Profit, too, is theft. Profit is the surplus value created by labor and unequal exchange through unfair trade and State-backed violence i.e. the market. Then those profits are used to buy politicians to steal even more, leading to endless wealth accumulation and evergrowing inequality.
Democratic decision making works here; we all own it together and we decide how it is used/distributed.
Is it so unthinkable that we could democratically determine the value of a house based on location, quality, size, popularity, etc.? Why must this be done by a market? And before you say that the market is democratic, remember that democracy is "1 person, 1 vote" but the market gives the haves more votes than the havenots.
These are strategic questions. I don't think anarchism can achieve this because the State is necessary for the havenots to seize wealth and property and power from the haves. I worry that the State will need to be dealt with and won't just 'whither away' on its own, as posited by Marxists. Some kind of synthesis between the two? I don't know!
Ultimately, this is all just theory crafting divorced from real world struggle. Nothing you or I say on the internet really matters. We have to go out into the real world and test ideas against material reality, where things are ugly and messy
The world is already ugly and messy, though, so I think it's worth it.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.
We have a solution, it is called anti trust legislation. We need to break up all of these too large to fail organizations. It’s ridiculous that we have only a handful of major players in soo many markets.
Yes, of course we do. We just need politicians willing to do that. I thinks that's the most difficult part.
Oops, the businesses bought the politicians and now they won't pass anti-trust legislation. Who could have seen this coming???
_Looks at Anti Trust legislation that was passed over a hundred years ago and scratches head.
Sherman Act 1880 Clayton Act 1914 Federal Trade Commission Act 1914_
We don’t need new laws, we need people appointed to the FTC who will enforce the law more aggressively.
Yeah, and what happened to that legislation? Businesses bought the right politicians and defanged everything that inhibited their profits. Businesses have their thumbs on the scale making sure the FTC doesn't have the right people to be a threat.
Uh, that organisation is generally City Hall.
The anti trust act is a federal law… I’m not sure where you inject city hall with breaking up cartels or large multinational businesses.
That's wrong. In many countries boomers possess a truckload of the estate, but they don't expect to sell it because it's their life insurance.
It's not cartel or collusion, it's how society was planned by the libs over the last 50 years.
"Planned by the libs", as if the "libs" were a single entity that have a homogeneous plan. Let's stop giving entity to stuff that never existed and realise that there is a structural problem that occurred because of bad management of our economy and policies. Because we had mediocre actors and in some cases actors with bad faith.
That's what I call the libs: it's not an entity, it's the politicians with this ideology. Feel free to turn that into a conspiracy.
Are you making up a special magical definition for "libs"? Good luck with that.
It is a bad thing! How are investors holding on to dozens of empty units at ridiculous prices supposed to get a return on investment if the market's oversaturated with living spaces?
Looks like we're gonna have to start tearing them down to reduce supply.
It's a problem for people who indebted themselves to buy those homes with a valuation based on scarcity. Also a problem for the real estate Chinese companies, sector which represents a quarter of Chinese economy.
Sounds to me like China is trying to solve both of those problems by lowering property scarcity - if this stays controlled it will make properties cheaper so people don't need to acquire as much debt and it will shrink the real estate sector. Since this housing is built through centralized control and not a market, it should be totally under control.
Obviously something unexpected could happen that blindsides the Party, but it looks like politics is in command and everything is proceeding as expected.
I take it you didn't read the article.
To me, this seems wasteful. I'm not very familiar with the Chinese real estate market however.
There should always be a reserve supply of vacant properties to give people freedom of movement between regions and cities.
This might be overkill:
65M is what percentage of 1.4Bn? It's about 5%.
5% oversupply is pretty reasonable, especially given that the housing isn't fungible and the populations are more mobile than the houses are.
That doesn't actually mean there are 65 million surplus properties. A vacant house isn't an unnecessary house. Children move out all the time, families sometimes break up, Chinese citizens currently living overseas or in Europe return home, etc.
I bet there's actually math for this - I wonder if anyone has calculated the optimal amount of vacancies?
That is a very good point. I still find it hard to believe that they are making the best use of labor and materials with situations like this:
Sometimes, you misspeculate. Some developers lost a whole fuck ton of money on the project, but that's more than made up for if you can turn a profit on projects near big cities (which demand is still sky high for).
Is anyone? If I have to choose between "housing shortage" and "housing surplus" I know which society I would prefer.
Sure. The point I was trying to make is that society might be better served by allocating resources to building hospitals or schools or something the community needs instead of housing that the community does not necessarily need because there is already a surplus of housing.
China isn't really limited by construction resources. There's a heavier constraint in terms of hospital staff and teachers than there is on construction resources.
Maybe they aren't running out of concrete and steel, but they are taking out loans for these construction projects.
They're also building hospitals and schools so...