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Baidu Data Research Reveals China's Ghost Cities (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Chinese web services giant, Baidu, has embarked on a new study in which it uses location information from users' mobile devices, as well as mapping and building data, to identify areas with high volumes of construction with relatively low population densities — known as 'ghost cities.' The researchers, in the published findings Ghost Cities: Analysis Based on Positioning Data in China, were able to discount areas which experienced high levels of tourism which skew the figures in peak seasons. The Baidu Big Data team discovered 50 ghost cities, although only 20 of these were revealed in the report to avoid potential harm to the real estate market in these areas.
How about relocating Syrian refugees into these unused housing units?
The primary way for Chinese people to legally invest money is to buy property, so many of these units go to property speculators trying to earn a return. Also, China plans far in advance, and the people have been moving from the country to the cities at an amazing rate there, so they are taking the long view and building housing for the boom that has been ongoing for decades. They won't always be ghost cities, but currently no one lives there.
http://blogs.reuters.com/great...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I think it's been mentioned before that China is moving a lot of its rural population into cities to allow them to provide government services more efficiently, as well as create a larger consumer culture. At the same time, one of the only stable stores of wealth for Chinese is real estate. As many articles lately have mentioned, the stock market is even more speculative than ours and not suitable for long term investing. The only issue now is filling all these empty spaces so the original investors can get their money out.
We'll see what they have in mind for this next phase, but China has been remarkably good at long term central planning. It's something missing in Western countries -- the full control of authoritarianism while doing anything necessary to grow the economy. It'll be interesting to see what happens.