To increase GDP growth several cities in China have been constructed, which are now home to very few inhabitants and are therefore called Ghost Cities. After having constructed the city it turned out that only a few people were willing to live in the new city others stayed away or couldn’t afford an apartment. Often prices are too high for the Chinese citizens willing to live there. This inefficiency is a serious problem. A substantial part of the lower class population is living with the entire family in small one-room homes together with more households. In many cases the houses in the Hutongs, the name of the districts where the majority of the
Chinese working class lives, are even removed to create space for new constructions of apartment buildings (Dateline, 2011).
Over the last five years many ghost cities have been developed and estimates are that there are
12 to 24 new ghost cities constructed every year. Furthermore it is said that there are around
64 million empty apartments in China (Tulloch, n.d.). If all these cities stay unoccupied, this can result in a serious real estate problem and eventually lead to a real estate bubble that …show more content…
All real estate is owned by the government and can be bought as a right or license to live in it. This right only lasts for seventy years, for houses, though. After this period the government reclaims possession of the house. However, mostly it will never get this far due to the building techniques used. In
China, most buildings will not last the full seventy years but tear down much earlier. The technique used is not as solid and good as the western world uses and this results in buildings that will not survive that long (PWC, 2013). Furthermore, the Chinese are only allowed to live in the region were they were born, so they cannot move from the Beijing region to the
Shanghai region. This, however, should not be a problem that causes the ghost cities, or a factor that impedes the solving of them. These cities are being constructed in multiple places in every region.
As already mentioned, Chinese ghost cities take some time to be used, but it turns out that in the end the cities will be occupied. As ING speaker said during the company visit, he knew a ghost city that turned around to a thriving city only a few months later. He has seen this