The Evergrande Metropolis residential complex, Huaian, China. Zhao Qirui/VCG via Getty Images
- A former Chinese official said the country’s entire population cannot fill their empty homes.
- He Keng said China’s 1.4 billion population probably wasn’t enough to fill all the empty houses.
- China has long been plagued by a real estate crisis, with many vacant properties and ghost towns.
A former Chinese government official said the country’s total population of 1.4 billion would not be enough to fill all the empty houses, Portal reported, citing a video from state news agency China News Service.
China’s real estate woes gained greater attention in 2021 when industry giant Evergrande became the world’s most indebted company and defaulted.
At that point, there were at least 65 million vacant properties in the country, which would have been enough to house France’s entire population, Insider previously reported.
“How many empty houses are there currently? Each expert gives a completely different figure, with the most extreme suggesting that the current number of empty houses is enough for three billion people,” said He Keng, a former deputy head of the statistics bureau. per Portal. “This estimate may be a bit high, but 1.4 billion people are unlikely to be able to fill it.”
China has long relied on real estate development as a safe investment to boost economic growth. But this has led to oversupply and endless rows of high-rise buildings stand empty.
“They built up an oversupply and then sold it. And that’s why you see the vacancies,” Li Gan, an economics professor at Texas A&M University, told Insider in 2021.
Many construction projects have also become so-called “rotten-tail” projects after being stalled or abandoned halfway through.
Cities like Shenyang in the country’s northeast were seen as new hotspots for China’s super-rich with flashy European-style villas.
But the development project by the real estate giant Greenland Group, which began in 2010, was abandoned just two years later.
Today, farmers have taken over the ghost town, plowing the land and letting cattle roam freely around the empty villas.
Cattle wander between half-finished villas in Shenyang. Jade Gao/AFP via Getty Images
Ordos, near the border with Mongolia, was intended to accommodate over a million people and become a cultural and economic center. But in 2016, the population was only about 100,000 and it was described as “the largest ghost town in the world.”
The government has since taken measures to move some of the country’s best schools to the region, which has led to an influx of families and high-performing students, leading to a rise in population and property prices, Japanese publication Nikkei Asia reported Year 2021.
Despite these efforts, Inner Mongolia, the autonomous region of China where Ordos is located, is still one of the slowest-growing regions in the country, according to the report.
“We cannot shake the fear that we will create a new ghost town as new developments gain momentum,” said a real estate developer from Ordos, according to Nikkei Asia.
NOW WATCH: Popular Videos from Insider Inc.
Is loading…