I don't knock them for over production, but build quality is a more common problem that I saw. Also not a fan of not being able to own the apartment, but their availability is dope. Their public transit is also dope, both inter and intra city transit.

The current Chinese housing crisis was not caused by building homes for people to live in, it was caused by developers selling homes that didn’t exist with the empty promise that the would totally, definitely be built. Then the homes were never built for humans to actually live in.

The joke of the "China is building empty cities" mythology is in how quickly they filled up with people. So you had this echoing "New City is empty!" scandal that reverberated all the way from Fujian to Qinghai.

There was a problem of housing speculation, as investors tried to get out ahead of the building frenzy. But the state government intervened to curb that practice. There was a problem of shady contractors and construction crews shaving quality for profit, even leading to a couple of high profile building collapses. But the state government sent out investigators, prosecuted delinquents, and provided restitution to the injured and defrauded. There was a problem of matching the housing stock to the available employment, particularly during the economic slowdown in the wake of SARS in the early '00s and then COVID in '19. But the state government intervened to quarantine, vaccinate, and restabilize the local economies.

Curiously, the US loves to report on the crises. We never like to talk about the recoveries. Instead, you get this doggedly fixation on pivotal moments in the past that endure long after they are relevant. It would be like reading newspapers and hearing radio about Florida, where everyone brought up the '08 Housing Crash at every opportunity. They dogmatically insisted that real estate prices can't recover, even in the middle of a construction boom and new speculation bubble a decade later.

This misinformation that persists in any kind of conversation is deafening. It's gotten to the point that some random guy can do a livestream YouTube vacation blog in Chengdu and western critics lose their fucking minds in disbelief. Like, the very idea that everyone in the country isn't still living in 1980s levels of rural poverty is entirely unimaginable.