Newly built Chinese "ghost towns" lay vacant

[Bruce Dazzling]

So what's this all about?

The ghost towns of China: Amazing satellite images show cities meant to be home to millions lying deserted

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 10:53 AM on 18th December 2010

These amazing satellite images show sprawling cities built in remote parts of China that have been left completely abandoned, sometimes years after their construction.

Elaborate public buildings and open spaces are completely unused, with the exception of a few government vehicles near communist authority offices.

Some estimates put the number of empty homes at as many as 64 million, with up to 20 new cities being built every year in the country's vast swathes of free land.

Much more, including loads of satellite photos at the link.

[norton ash]

And here I was mulling over where the hell we could put 64 million evacuees from Japan.

thanks, BD

[nathan28]

So what's this all about?

Obviously. Those cities were fully populated, it's just that the Repti International Je Freemas Jesuit PTB hid the mass population control efforts that took place. They probably ate all the corpses on SPECTRA where we couldn't see it.

Okay, that's a little facetious, but what with the Illuminati depopulation plan not working out so well since vaccines, birth control, FEMA camps and communism have done such a poor job controlling the population, the Repti International Je Freemas Jesuit PTB are busy building empty cities to make it look like their Malthusian Death Plan has entered Stage 2.

Oh fuck, there's a serious explanaiton in the article. Man, if only Bill Cooper were alive today to straighten all these "practical" explanations out and fit them back into my paranoid post-Christian cryptoreactionary worldview.

The mostly empty city of Bayannao¿er, which boasts a beautiful town hall and World Bank-sponsored water reclamation building...

Property prices have remained stubbornly high despite the government adopting a slew of measures...

Massive stimulus measures taken since 2008 to fend off the financial crisis injected huge amounts of liquidity in the market and have been blamed for fuelling real estate prices.

'The government target is not clear and policy is incoherent,' CASS senior research Ni Pengfei was quoted saying.

According to research carried out by Time magazine, fixed-asset investment in the Asian country accounted for more than 90 per cent of its overall growth - with residential and commercial real estate investment making up nearly a quarter of that.

Regional governments across China have been building massive real estate projects, including Kangbashi in Inner Mongolia and Zhengzhou New District, which have remained empty, because of the high prices and interest in investment.

[nathan28]

And here I was mulling over where the hell we could put 64 million evacuees from Japan.

thanks, BD

Thank you, I almost ran out of patience again until I saw a little sliver of hope.

[Bruce Dazzling]

You're right, Nathan.

There's nothing of any interest here at all, beyond an opportunity for you to create an all-encompassing crazy conspiracy theory, only to then shoot it down and make yourself look all smart and stuff.

Oh fuck, there's a serious explanaiton in the article. Man, if only Bill Cooper were alive today to straighten all these "practical" explanations out and fit them back into my paranoid post-Christian cryptoreactionary worldview.

Right, because the truth is always right there, in the mainstream press article, and I made all of those references that you just vaguely yet smugly associated with me.

Listen, it's a pretty interesting article about a pretty extraordinary state of affairs, and I was hoping for some of what RI is famous for; intelligent discussion and analysis from people who have perspectives different from my own.

Thanks for shitting in the punch bowl. And so quickly, too.

[82_28]

The 28s are having a hard time of it this week.

Bruce, you're always awesome. Nathan, I can never tell whether you're serious or not, but still think you're awesome too! Yay.

But really, all told, everything has been thought provoking in the link and the thread.

[Bruce Dazzling]

Thanks, 82.

I normally enjoy Nathan's input, but, well...

Anyway, in the event that the explanation in the article isn't 100% accurate (crazy, I know!), it occurred to me that the Chinese government could be secretly planning (again, crazy!) for a need to relocate vast swaths of their population due to catastrophic earth changes that have been predicted and appear to be happening right before our very eyes.

[StarmanSkye]

Jeez, one of those 'new' cities might be an interesting option for discouraged 'western' victims of neoliberal serfdom to move to -- to sit-out the spectacle of USA Inc. collapsing into its corporate-fascist footprint post 2012 somesuch or whenever ...

Sure are some damn EERIE spooky ghosttown images alright. I still don't get the method or reason behind the madness of building cities that sit-around empty tho. A lot of cheap-credit hot cash chasing the housing bubble, compounded by government initiatives to relieve the upside pressure on housing-prices by undermining unrelieved housing demand? But why build where people don't already live or have the incentive to move to?

What am I missing?

There's an awful lot about China that's a deep impenetrable mystery.

[nathan28]

Gee, Bruce, I didn't direct my ire at you so much as my imaginary conspiritard enemy, but you certainly took it that way. So...

Jeez, one of those 'new' cities might be an interesting option for discouraged 'western' victims of neoliberal serfdom to move to -- to sit-out the spectacle of USA Inc. collapsing into its corporate-fascist footprint post 2012 somesuch or whenever ...

Sure are some damn EERIE spooky ghosttown images alright.

And there are a bunch of damn eerie spooky ghosttowns to be found all across North America. Get on any country highway and after a while you'll drive through one, or more. Where I live now there are entire blocks that are vacant, and buildings ten stories tall without any signs of life, save maybe the fire-fighter's spraypainted "condemned" symbols. I can see two empty houses from my door. I may be the only person I see on the sidewalk all day long, and this is an urban area.

No, I'm not in Detroit but there, god help them, the city is down to something like 20% its former population. You have block after block of abanodoned multi-story office and apartment buildings. It looks like aliens bombed it from outer space fifty years ago.

What's "eerie" isn't the empty buildings. It's walking along the sidewalk wondering how long it would take anyone to find you, never mind call an ambulance, if you fell, got mugged or hit by a car. Funny thing is, you get the exact same eerie feeling walking down the built-for-55-mph-traffic sidewalk-free streets of any suburban subdevelopment, it's just that the lights are on in the buildings.

There's very little reason to need an in-depth discussion of the "MSM LIES!!!!1!" about why Detroit and so much of urban America are empty, practical ghost-towns. We actually have some very good ideas: white flight (b/c of schools), property value manipulation (largely via schools), loss of local manufacturering to globalized supply chains, increasing suburbanization, band-aid revitalization policies, etc., etc.

Nothing is really all that ??? about any of that. It is thoroughly economic. I would hardly be surprised to learn that China's ghost-towns--which appear on the one hand to be a failed effort to keep prices low by raising supply, and on the other appear to be a pork-belly larder for developers to grab up subsidies--come from similar measures that are largely all political-economic.

So why don’t people want to live here, in a sparkling state-of-the-art city filled with modern architecture? Mostly, for now, moving to Kangbashi is an inconvenience. The new district is a thirty-minute drive from the old district where the bulk of Ordos residents still live, and the slow pace of relocation has stalled important supporting services like restaurants and markets.

(image via: time)

It may seem like a bizarre folly on behalf of the Chinese government, borne of severely misplaced optimism. But Ordos is indeed expanding at a rapid pace, home to a growing number of coal millionaires and producing China’s highest gross domestic product per capita. And pouring money into such new urban areas is part of a plan by China’s government to increase its middle class, benefiting the nation’s economy as a whole. Despite the current eerie silence of its streets, it’s probably safe to say that Kangbashi won’t be empty for long.

http://weburbanist.com/2011/01/10/the-e ... host-town/

Ruins of Detroit: "...the fabulous and vanishing ruins of my beloved Detroit."
Planetizen: Portland's Empty Urban Renewal Area
B'lyn Paper: Toxic timebomb? Neighbors want halt on Broadway tower until site is cleaned
WU: The (WU)ltimate 33-Part Guide to Abandoned Places
WU: Sleeping Giants: 12 Sky-High Abandoned Buildings
WU: Abandonment: 8 Cities That Might Not Make It
WU: Silent Skyscrapers: The Ghost Towers of Bangkok

There's an awful lot about China that's a deep impenetrable mystery.

If I ride the Orient Express to see the Mysterious East to meet the Inscrutable Chinamen, do I get free tickets to the ROFLCOPTER? A lot has changed since the 1920s, you should ask someone to show you this thing called "Wikipedia" to help catch up.



Not a whole lot of flame there, sadly.

[Bruce Dazzling]

Nathan,

I understand what you're saying, and what you're proposing may explain a little bit of what's going on in China, but pre-existing cities that fail due to a crumbling tax base (Detroit), ill-advised urban renewal projects that go belly up (Portland), and empty skyscrapers (Bangkok and Rio) really aren't analogous to the creation of entirely new "sprawling cities filled with office towers, administrative centres, museums, theatres and sports facilities, built in remote parts of China that have been left completely abandoned, sometimes years after their construction."

And again, "64 million new empty homes, with up to 20 new cities being built every year in the country's vast swathes of free land."

That just doesn't compare to collapsing Detroit, the over-jealous urban renewal that took place in Portland, or the miscalculations that led to the skyscrapers in Bankok and Rio.

[Saurian Tail]

I first became somewhat aware of this situation from this eerie PBS video ...

Utopia, Part 3: The World's Largest Shopping Mall"

I couldn't get the embedding to work, so here is a direct link: http://video.pbs.org/video/1218530801

I thought is was creepy that the largest mall in the world is a ghost town ... and now it turns out that whole cities are ghost towns!

All I can think is that all that US and EU cash has to go somewhere. The world monetary system is absolutely fubar.

-ST

[elfismiles]

In China, some new cities are ghost towns
May 19 04:31 AM US/Eastern
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id ... _article=1

[semper occultus]

updated Mail article :

China's ghost towns: New satellite pictures show massive skyscraper cities which are STILL completely empty

The most recent pictures of unused housing emerged as China announced plans to build 20 cities a year for the next 20 years.Gillem Tulloch, an aanlyst for Forensic Asia Limited, described one of the areas in Chenggong, as a 'forest of skyscrapers'.
When asked what has happened in the past six months since the ghost cities were built, he said: 'China built more of them.
'China consumes more steel, iron ore and cement per capita than any industrial nation in history.


www.dailymail.co.uk

[Joe Hillshoist]

This is the reason why china has a fucking ridiculous rate of growth and why as a few people mentioned whats left of the money system is fubar.

Then again, 64 million people is only 5% of the Chinese population, so if that many rural dwellers move to cities looking for work in the next up to 5 years, then its quite possible this will be a masterpiece of forward planning.

Quite possible, but personally I don't think its gonna happen that way. Its more likely to be a disaster of forward planning than a masterpiece.

[MacCruiskeen]

Easy credit, feverish speculation, rampant greed... in short, business as usual in our great Neoliberal Era. The same thing happened in Ireland, where thousands of new empty houses have spread across the country like a pox.

There's even a Wiki entry on Ireland's "ghost estates":

Ghost estate
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



A ghost estate is an unoccupied housing estate built in Ireland during the period of economic growth when Ireland was known as the Celtic tiger. A massive surplus of housing, combined with the late-2000s recession, resulted in a large number of estates being abandoned, unoccupied or uncompleted. There are currently more than 600 ghost estates in Ireland, and a government agency report has estimated the number of empty homes in Ireland at greater than 300,000.[1][2] In October 2010, The Department of the Environment reported, using a restricted brief, that there were 33,000 complete or nearly complete empty homes after a national audit and that there were a further 10,000 homes at various stages of construction. [1] The phrase was introduced by journalist and economist David McWilliams when describing the Irish property bubble in 2006.[1] It was used as the title of a poetry collection by Irish writer William Wall in 2011[3].

The government-funded research institute, the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis (NIRSA) defines a ghost estate as "a development of ten houses or more in which fifty per cent or less of homes are occupied or completed".[4] During Ireland's economic boom, which began in the mid-1990s and lasted until 2007, local government incentives, an influx of labour from Eastern Europe and abundant, easily available consumer credit combined with house price inflation in Dublin, resulted in a large number of housing estates being built in commuter towns and villages surrounding the country's capital.[1][2] As the boom continued, tax incentives were offered under the Rural Renewal Tax Incentives Scheme to encourage developers to build in smaller towns and rural areas further from Dublin, in counties including Cavan, Longford and Roscommon.[2][5] In 2008, it was reported that Irish banks had lent 25 billion euro to builders and property developers for the construction of apartments and houses.[6]

Estimates on the number of empty houses varies widely. In October 2008, it was estimated that Ireland had up to 50,000 homes - a year's supply - sitting vacant.[7] A new survey in January 2009 suggested a surplus of at least 100,000 homes, although the Construction Industry Federation, a body representing the Irish construction industry, quoted a surplus of around 35,000.[8] A further study, conducted by NIRSA in January 2010 produced data showing there were more than 300,000 vacant new homes in Ireland, and 621 ghost estates.[9] Additionally, many of the estates are in areas where the number of homes built greatly exceeds the number required, and which are too far from major employment centres; Leitrim, for example, has a housing surplus of 401%.[2][9][10] The Construction Industry Federation states a figure of 40,000 empty homes, while the Housing Minister Michael Finneran told the Cabinet that the number was between 100,000 and 140,000, although a government spokesperson later said that the number was "not precise" and that they did not "have an exact figure".[9][11] The exact number of unused or incomplete houses is unknown; a nationwide audit is currently being undertaken, with the results due in Summer 2010.[12]

In 2009, the Irish government announced that it would invest €20m in long-term leases for houses in ghost estates which would be used to decrease the waiting list for social housing, a plan criticised by some housing associations, who pointed out the lack of schools and services available to those living on the estates.[13] Minister Michael Finneran had earlier said that the government would not purchase empty houses in ghost estates to add to its social housing programme.[14]

The National Asset Management Agency (NAMA), a body created in 2009 by the government to act as a bad bank which will take on non-performing assets owned by Irish banks for land and property development deals, may acquire many ghost estates, even if the developer remains solvent.[10] Commentators have suggested that local authorities may be encouraged to purchase some of the surplus housing.[12] Every family on Ireland's waiting list for social housing could be accommodated in unused housing, with "hundreds of thousands left over".[1] However some estates lack infrastructure such as roads and lighting, and have no access to schools and other amenities, and have been described as having, "no potential to be economically viable."[15] In April 2010, Ciarán Cuffe, Minister of State at the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, announced that the government may force housing developers to bulldoze unfinished estates on which they cannot complete work.[4]

See also

* Irish property bubble

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_estate