01-19-2024
, 08:49 PM
01-19-2024
, 09:58 PM
kangbashi is not a city, it's a district of ordos, cherry picking upon cherry picking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangbashi_District
only 500 units left on the market out of 40,000 newly constructed apartments in 2017
as you can see from satellite images, most of it are still empty lots, the idea they just went nuts is not supported by facts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangbashi_District
Quote:
Apartment and office capacity
Characterized as a ghost town, Kangbashi was made world-famous by a news report in November 2009 from Al Jazeera,[12] later picked up and expanded through an April 2010 article in Time magazine,[13] for having few residents but massive amounts of empty residential housing and high-tech public works projects. Subsequent reports have supported the claims that Kangbashi housed around 20,000 to 30,000 people as of 2010.[14] In 2014, the vacancy rate of new homes was 70%.[15][16]
Writing in Forbes in 2017, Wade Shepard had questioned the justification for the label of "ghost city" and argued that it was being judged too quickly, as it was too soon to be speculating whether a new city will end up being largely uninhabited in the long run. Shepard noted that when Al Jazeera had visited Kangbashi, the city back then was only five years old, and had around 30,000 people, and that it really should had "impressed the world" for having an entirely new city and partially populating it in just five years' time. Shepard also pointed out that by the end of 2015, housing prices have risen by approximately 50% on average and that in 2017, the population has grown to 153,000 people, and there were around 4,750 businesses in operation in the city, as well as having just 500 apartments still left on the market, out of the 40,000 apartments that had been built since 2004.[6]
Characterized as a ghost town, Kangbashi was made world-famous by a news report in November 2009 from Al Jazeera,[12] later picked up and expanded through an April 2010 article in Time magazine,[13] for having few residents but massive amounts of empty residential housing and high-tech public works projects. Subsequent reports have supported the claims that Kangbashi housed around 20,000 to 30,000 people as of 2010.[14] In 2014, the vacancy rate of new homes was 70%.[15][16]
Writing in Forbes in 2017, Wade Shepard had questioned the justification for the label of "ghost city" and argued that it was being judged too quickly, as it was too soon to be speculating whether a new city will end up being largely uninhabited in the long run. Shepard noted that when Al Jazeera had visited Kangbashi, the city back then was only five years old, and had around 30,000 people, and that it really should had "impressed the world" for having an entirely new city and partially populating it in just five years' time. Shepard also pointed out that by the end of 2015, housing prices have risen by approximately 50% on average and that in 2017, the population has grown to 153,000 people, and there were around 4,750 businesses in operation in the city, as well as having just 500 apartments still left on the market, out of the 40,000 apartments that had been built since 2004.[6]
as you can see from satellite images, most of it are still empty lots, the idea they just went nuts is not supported by facts
01-19-2024
, 10:07 PM
01-19-2024
, 10:57 PM
Quote:
i am trying to be polite here
but you absolutely do not know what you're talking about and are repeating a bunch of nonsense
the "ghost cities" are lies
china plans 10-20-30 years in advance
it builts things in anticipation of usage and not for immediate needs
in the late 90s you saw them build out a modern highway system that was empty and there were tons of articles of "ghost highways"
at the time they began to build those massive national highway systems, the city traffic was literally like this
they saw the trends, understood the need and went for it, knowing full well that they would be run at under capacity for a few years as automobile ownership caught up
china is also leading the self driving car push, mostly behind heavy investment towards robo trucking
so when china builds a highspeed rail network, they aren't building it for right now, they are building it for the next 50 years. There are spots where they understand "hey there's nobody here now and not many jobs, but it makes logistical sense to run a bunch of new rail lines through here so if we put in a station here then it's be cheaper to ship supplies for businesses who would open up there, which is turn will bring in people to work there, etc etc
the end result is for a few years you have this absurd gargantuan station which doesn't really serve too many people
all those articles about "ghost cities" etc are written by idiots who didn't understand the long term planning behind it and every single one of those wound up as vibrant populated centers
it's the field of dreams, if you build it, people will come - americans don't understand this so you get a young journalist sent abroad and he's like "wow i can win a pullitzer pointing to this new urban development that is only 10% occupied because it is brand new"
but you absolutely do not know what you're talking about and are repeating a bunch of nonsense
the "ghost cities" are lies
china plans 10-20-30 years in advance
it builts things in anticipation of usage and not for immediate needs
in the late 90s you saw them build out a modern highway system that was empty and there were tons of articles of "ghost highways"
at the time they began to build those massive national highway systems, the city traffic was literally like this
they saw the trends, understood the need and went for it, knowing full well that they would be run at under capacity for a few years as automobile ownership caught up
china is also leading the self driving car push, mostly behind heavy investment towards robo trucking
so when china builds a highspeed rail network, they aren't building it for right now, they are building it for the next 50 years. There are spots where they understand "hey there's nobody here now and not many jobs, but it makes logistical sense to run a bunch of new rail lines through here so if we put in a station here then it's be cheaper to ship supplies for businesses who would open up there, which is turn will bring in people to work there, etc etc
the end result is for a few years you have this absurd gargantuan station which doesn't really serve too many people
all those articles about "ghost cities" etc are written by idiots who didn't understand the long term planning behind it and every single one of those wound up as vibrant populated centers
it's the field of dreams, if you build it, people will come - americans don't understand this so you get a young journalist sent abroad and he's like "wow i can win a pullitzer pointing to this new urban development that is only 10% occupied because it is brand new"
Quote:
fair enough, i just want to say that most coverage on china is written by an idiot who can't even speak the language and is looking to make a name with a big story
and the key to getting good coverage is to play into tropes
freedom loving people who are oppressed, terrible pollution, ghost cities, etc
it's even been absolutely proven that a lot of media puts grey filters on their photos and videos of china
here are is the same video from the bbc side by side, one for a Chinese audience and one where they added the grey filter for coverage abroad - it's stranger than fiction
most media coverage of china makes me spit up my milk with how incredibly wrong they are in their interpretation and coverage
mindflayer, i actually like and respect you and follow your thread - but you've been sold a bunch of bs - when dealing with china it's best to cut out generalities and try to deal with specifics - that helps underline whether or not it's actually happening, for example, try to find an actual ghost city, a specific one rather than discuss the vague idea of it happening
like all that covid coverage of people being welded into buildings was all nonsense, what they were doing was trying to get people to do contact tracing which meant scanning a qr code whenever the entered a building - to make this easier to manage, they would close the many entrances and exits to each building so there was only one - since many of those doors were never intended to be locked, they didn't have any locks on them and since people are all selfish they would continue using those doors - i personally ignored those and always used the closest and most convenient entrance until my building management also found a way to install some locks - in some case they decided it was just easier to weld it shut and replace it with a new door later
absolutely nobody was being welded into a building, that made zero sense - yet that's the narrative media ran with
same thing with instead of calling them markets they used the term "wet market" because it sounds less sanitary - wet market is not a chinese thing, it's an english word not found in chinese, an industry term meant to distinguish between something like a whole foods which sold perishable goods and something more like a grain elevator which was used to store corn for over a decade
a whole foods is a wet market - but it sounds ickier and gross so that's what they went with
and the key to getting good coverage is to play into tropes
freedom loving people who are oppressed, terrible pollution, ghost cities, etc
it's even been absolutely proven that a lot of media puts grey filters on their photos and videos of china
here are is the same video from the bbc side by side, one for a Chinese audience and one where they added the grey filter for coverage abroad - it's stranger than fiction
most media coverage of china makes me spit up my milk with how incredibly wrong they are in their interpretation and coverage
mindflayer, i actually like and respect you and follow your thread - but you've been sold a bunch of bs - when dealing with china it's best to cut out generalities and try to deal with specifics - that helps underline whether or not it's actually happening, for example, try to find an actual ghost city, a specific one rather than discuss the vague idea of it happening
like all that covid coverage of people being welded into buildings was all nonsense, what they were doing was trying to get people to do contact tracing which meant scanning a qr code whenever the entered a building - to make this easier to manage, they would close the many entrances and exits to each building so there was only one - since many of those doors were never intended to be locked, they didn't have any locks on them and since people are all selfish they would continue using those doors - i personally ignored those and always used the closest and most convenient entrance until my building management also found a way to install some locks - in some case they decided it was just easier to weld it shut and replace it with a new door later
absolutely nobody was being welded into a building, that made zero sense - yet that's the narrative media ran with
same thing with instead of calling them markets they used the term "wet market" because it sounds less sanitary - wet market is not a chinese thing, it's an english word not found in chinese, an industry term meant to distinguish between something like a whole foods which sold perishable goods and something more like a grain elevator which was used to store corn for over a decade
a whole foods is a wet market - but it sounds ickier and gross so that's what they went with
Quote:
there are zero "ghost cities" even ten years old
what happens is for whatever reason, a region will be targeted for development - 100% of units are sold right away because everyone believes it'll be a good investment and can sell later even if they have no intention of relocating
it could take 5-6 years just to finish the construction of all the residential and commercial sections and schools and police stations - it'll then take another 2-3 years before parents want to send their kids to the schools there because they want the schools to hit their stride and have qualified teachers, not be living there in the first year where they may have had to cut some corners to ensure they had enough staff
likewise, people are slow to move in when it's new and there's not much going on yet, why move to your new home when there's not many dining options in walking distance yet, why not just wait another year before you make the official move and be more comfortable in the meantime
in the west we don't do this kind of holistic planning - it's unheard of, so some journalists see something in year 4 of an 8 year construction plan and have no fundamental understanding of what is really happening but see block after block of mostly empty buildings and then believe it's all fake and society is on collapse
i know a bunch of chinese people who owned dozens of homes and would just let them sit empty because if they were previously lived in by renters the value drops dramatically - nobody wants to buy a home someone else outside their family lived in, it's a cultural thing
they will sit on those homes knowing that a new school has already been approved to be built in 6 years or that a new subway line will be built with a nearby station in 4 years etc and then sell
chinese have incredibly patience
but.. the idea of long standing "ghost cities" is just a lie
hence why he won't be able to name any specific ones, only talk about it in the abstract
the population itself may not be growing recently, but they just eliminated the one child policy and a lot of pent up baby desire is happening with tons of kids, even old couples who's first child is now in their 20s are going to fertility clinics
also a massive amount of the population lives among many others in cramped/dorm style housing
the vast majority of the country is still living subsistence farming lifestyles working plots of land so small it can barely provide enough to subside and live in wretched conditions - that's why they'll happily go to the city, live in a factory dorm and work 14 hour shifts every single day because it's better than staying in their hometown
millions of chinese literally live in caves - the demand for these developments is real and only someone who leaned too heavily on some dumbass journalists would believe otherwise
why i first returned to Beijing from North Africa, I was living in a brand new development about 2 hours northeast of Beijing
i was living there because it was incredibly cheap to live there at that time, the roads were empty, most store fronts were empty - it was a literal ghost town - within a year all those had filled up and it was a vibrant place and you'd never know that just a year prior it looked post apocalyptic
what happens is for whatever reason, a region will be targeted for development - 100% of units are sold right away because everyone believes it'll be a good investment and can sell later even if they have no intention of relocating
it could take 5-6 years just to finish the construction of all the residential and commercial sections and schools and police stations - it'll then take another 2-3 years before parents want to send their kids to the schools there because they want the schools to hit their stride and have qualified teachers, not be living there in the first year where they may have had to cut some corners to ensure they had enough staff
likewise, people are slow to move in when it's new and there's not much going on yet, why move to your new home when there's not many dining options in walking distance yet, why not just wait another year before you make the official move and be more comfortable in the meantime
in the west we don't do this kind of holistic planning - it's unheard of, so some journalists see something in year 4 of an 8 year construction plan and have no fundamental understanding of what is really happening but see block after block of mostly empty buildings and then believe it's all fake and society is on collapse
i know a bunch of chinese people who owned dozens of homes and would just let them sit empty because if they were previously lived in by renters the value drops dramatically - nobody wants to buy a home someone else outside their family lived in, it's a cultural thing
they will sit on those homes knowing that a new school has already been approved to be built in 6 years or that a new subway line will be built with a nearby station in 4 years etc and then sell
chinese have incredibly patience
but.. the idea of long standing "ghost cities" is just a lie
hence why he won't be able to name any specific ones, only talk about it in the abstract
the population itself may not be growing recently, but they just eliminated the one child policy and a lot of pent up baby desire is happening with tons of kids, even old couples who's first child is now in their 20s are going to fertility clinics
also a massive amount of the population lives among many others in cramped/dorm style housing
the vast majority of the country is still living subsistence farming lifestyles working plots of land so small it can barely provide enough to subside and live in wretched conditions - that's why they'll happily go to the city, live in a factory dorm and work 14 hour shifts every single day because it's better than staying in their hometown
millions of chinese literally live in caves - the demand for these developments is real and only someone who leaned too heavily on some dumbass journalists would believe otherwise
why i first returned to Beijing from North Africa, I was living in a brand new development about 2 hours northeast of Beijing
i was living there because it was incredibly cheap to live there at that time, the roads were empty, most store fronts were empty - it was a literal ghost town - within a year all those had filled up and it was a vibrant place and you'd never know that just a year prior it looked post apocalyptic
01-19-2024
, 11:01 PM
Quote:
kangbashi is not a city, it's a district of ordos, cherry picking upon cherry picking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangbashi_District
only 500 units left on the market out of 40,000 newly constructed apartments in 2017
as you can see from satellite images, most of it are still empty lots, the idea they just went nuts is not supported by facts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangbashi_District
only 500 units left on the market out of 40,000 newly constructed apartments in 2017
as you can see from satellite images, most of it are still empty lots, the idea they just went nuts is not supported by facts
01-19-2024
, 11:17 PM
01-19-2024
, 11:53 PM
this means I technically grew up next to a ghost city in massachusetts
pittsfield mass has tons and tons of empty buildings and there's entire districts which are just rundown and decrepit - it's such an issue that each year the town puts money together to demolish abandoned storefronts and homes
there's entire streets there that are empty, most of the downtown businesses collapsed, an entire strip mall is abandoned
that's my point, that once you start ntipicking to "well this district of that city has high vacancy so it's a ghost city" then the word lacks all meaning entirely and everything everywhere becomes a ghost city
there are areas of manhattan where there's more unoccupied commercial real estate than occupied, but would it would be insane to call that a ghost city
look at kangbashi on the map, it's just a handful of city blocks, that "urban sprawl" you're referencing is just empty steppe
you can also clearly see how the majority of it is still undeveloped, they built the roads already but haven't yet begun construction - it wasn't a "build everything all at once"
while still going at lightspeed, everything is still clearly being done in stages and we're still at the very beginning
01-20-2024
, 12:09 AM
01-20-2024
, 12:15 AM
also, lol at the "urban sprawl size of philadelphia" comparison
you're confusing arbitary sizes of land, the thought of comparing one of the highest denisity population areas in the western world to a desert steppe in mongolia is lol, especially with the "urban sprawl" addition
the government of ordos saw a long term influx of people from the countryside to ordos, this was causing housing shortages, they saw that kangbashi was a districut of land that was largely empty & under their jurisdiction so they steered development there
the "infamous ghost city" is just a few city blocks
meanwhile, this is how your typical ordos migrant worker from the countryside is living, there is a demand for these homes, the issue is an "over supply of homes" but rather that "wealthy speculators buy up the new properties and sit on them as investments so adding new units doesn't have the 1:1 housing alleviation they desire"
you see these temporary dorms all over the country because there's no place for people to live
inside those they are packed like sardines
places like ordos which have a lot of empty land around them have tent settlements surrounding them where the migrant workers live and they can easily commute in to their jobs in the city
making temporary shelters out of shipping containers is a real thing
when i lived in Beijing, every apartment complex I lived in had underground attachments which when built were intended to double as parking garages and storage units or even atomic shelters if they were built in the cold war (marshall publicly stating we should nuke china will have that effect)
none of those are used that way, they have all been converted into migrant housing, if you walk down the ramp that was designed to have cars drive down but nobody drives in anymore then you'll see the bunks and see how open and exposed these people are because they have no privacy nor walls, you turn the corner and then boom, you see this
this is what they look like from the outside, this one here was converted into a shop
you're confusing arbitary sizes of land, the thought of comparing one of the highest denisity population areas in the western world to a desert steppe in mongolia is lol, especially with the "urban sprawl" addition
the government of ordos saw a long term influx of people from the countryside to ordos, this was causing housing shortages, they saw that kangbashi was a districut of land that was largely empty & under their jurisdiction so they steered development there
the "infamous ghost city" is just a few city blocks
meanwhile, this is how your typical ordos migrant worker from the countryside is living, there is a demand for these homes, the issue is an "over supply of homes" but rather that "wealthy speculators buy up the new properties and sit on them as investments so adding new units doesn't have the 1:1 housing alleviation they desire"
you see these temporary dorms all over the country because there's no place for people to live
inside those they are packed like sardines
places like ordos which have a lot of empty land around them have tent settlements surrounding them where the migrant workers live and they can easily commute in to their jobs in the city
making temporary shelters out of shipping containers is a real thing
when i lived in Beijing, every apartment complex I lived in had underground attachments which when built were intended to double as parking garages and storage units or even atomic shelters if they were built in the cold war (marshall publicly stating we should nuke china will have that effect)
none of those are used that way, they have all been converted into migrant housing, if you walk down the ramp that was designed to have cars drive down but nobody drives in anymore then you'll see the bunks and see how open and exposed these people are because they have no privacy nor walls, you turn the corner and then boom, you see this
this is what they look like from the outside, this one here was converted into a shop
01-20-2024
, 12:17 AM
Quote:
There are definitely lots of empty districts in China. The city I lived in had a massive one. I had a friend who lived in one in Shanghai, the entire had maybe 10% occupancy and 1 restaurant serving several blocks. Oddly enough there was one cafe there too which was a cat cafe. It sounds like there's a good chance the area might have filled up though.
04-12-2024
, 08:47 PM
04-13-2024
, 09:04 AM
