GHOST CITY - Inside the Chinese Housing Bubble

I remember you [Music] so he mailed last time we left off we had arrived here this beautiful spot it's weird right the exact same place that's probably because we're filming the next episode directly after the one before well said mean dogs are still here to correct anyway we get a lot of requests to talk about ghost cities I know it's kind of a popular topic overseas um Chinese ghost cities but I was wondering how can we actually discuss the topic properly well first off we can't do it here that's for sure right right but I actually do know of a ghost town near our motorcycle shop actually okay were they about three years ago started building a ton of private villas for people right well of course and everything over there and I haven't seen anyone move in there yet okay that sounds like something we should go check out so how about we go check it out we could talk about the whole ghost city thing along the way sounds good cool okay see milk so probably the most famous sort of ghost city is that that one up in Inner Mongolia or Dorset both been there but you used to live up there so you probably know a lot more about it maybe you can tell everybody what that's all about sure now um I think still Ordos is actually the richest city per kept in China and it's because of rare earth minerals right yeah like coal deposits things like that right so what it means is you actually get a ton of people up there that you know are not well-educated but have a ton of money and I think it's in a lot of men's drive to continue you know building your empire right yeah so a lot of these people that had land and rare earth minerals what they did was sell them to the government to basically dig that up yeah and they made so much money that they wanted to continue doing business so they're opening things like massive property developments because that's where all the money was right and in a little part of Ordos actually in dongsung district it's called Kong basher and yeah okay and Western news media they call it Kong last year something okay Nikolas how to say if you're gonna do it okay it's doesn't take too much effort to learn a chinese word anyway um what happened was they ended up building an entire city that was super super swanky right in a very arid region we're running water 24/7 to have beautiful lawns kind of like this right yeah yeah everywhere and golf courses in unbelievable libraries and this and that and I'll tell you what when I went there was it was staggering what they managed to pull off in such a short time however what it led to was the famous story that you read in the West few years ago and still been pretty popular up until today yeah is that it's a ghost city meaning that there was I think I maybe ten or twenty thousand people in a city with a capacity of five hundred thousand right correct then it's weird because it's not just empty apartment blocks like we find here it's empty shops with people working there it's empty banks it's empty everything an entire infrastructure that is completely unused yeah and I kind of like took the media by storm because you had these eight lane roads with no cars on and then it was just kind of creepy to everyone that China would build such a massive massive city with absolutely no one in it now to finish off the introduction here I'll say that after all this time and after I moved here yeah Kong Basha or kangbashi you gonna call it Tang Bessie is actually almost all full yeah it's a success story and it's not a ghost city anymore but it leads to today's topic what's that well you know it may not be a ghost city anymore but it's certainly spurned off a whole bunch of other girls cities doesn't yeah and we're going to talk a lot about the Chinese economy but look it's going to take us a while to get to where we're going so I'm going to basically fast-forward and we'll continue this conversation when we get a little closer to our destination it sounds good and we're back we are not at the ghosts on yet but if you look up to the left here you will be able to see a bunch of new housing projects going up right now and even though all the housing I thought yet right in fact that's something I wanted to talk about I found out last week that even if there was full-scale urbanization in Shenzhen you know the city I live in yeah if there was full-scale urbanization right now it would take three to five years to fill up the current like excess real estate inventory that's there in all the empty houses and that's without building anything else and they are constantly every day building new stuff so you know that the supply is way more than the demand you know what I mean yeah that's naughty that's taking into account like a place of the big population where people struggle to find housing yeah yeah we're not even talking about these small towns like here that are just like literally 60% of the properties I can fill yeah that's right so anyway we are currently on our way you can actually see over there the big Olympic Stadium yep of cuejoe which doesn't look like it gets used very much yeah they had a concert there the other day okay and it's used for the Asia Olympics for some of the events yeah but it but for most of the time it looks like it's just disused I never see cars there or anything yeah you know I don't think there's anyone in there right now nah probably not but yeah that's just another another thing you see all these big projects going up everywhere we'll just real estate it's a good boy yeah and it's very seldom used anyway we are quite close on we you know the way how about you go ahead and lead us to our destination sure so yeah like a little practice here actually my friend was riding his motorcycle about three years ago outside of this place and he was just peeking around because like there's all these epic signs and it looked like they're building a little golf course there and stuff is peeking around right yeah and he parks his motorcycle because he sees that people are walking around checking out the houses and actually we can see some of these up here okay these are the the apartment blocks not the villas right but these these were being built about three years ago and advertised all over the city I saw that this plot here is being advertised everywhere it's very inconvenient because it's way outside the city there's nothing around here there's no shops or anything like that right so I nobody really moved in to be honest if you look at it so where we're going people kind of were interested in the low housing cause the price there to buy it but no one actually ended up buying it so my friend walked around there and because he was a foreigner and I think they thought he wanted to buy a house I actually handed him a glass of champagne oh nice which I thought was really really funny they're doing everything pulling out all the stops to try to get the rich people here okay but yeah I have not been inside it so I figured we go check it out yeah it looks kind of interesting yeah what's it it's called um triumph okay triumph the triumph in and wasted money that is a triumph in waste money hey we actually came here we go and we looked at those funny shops we did look at the houses no we looked at all the fake shops remember like the fake Rolex shades you remember that actually all right yeah like none of these are legitimate shops anyway you keep talking about this issue yeah well the issue is that they we've got the situation now where the entire economy in China is based off real estate right okay that's what it boiled down to know the average person like the average Chinese person the only option they have to invest is to buy property and speculate basically because there's such a demand for property that the price keeps going up and up and up and they can sell it in a couple of years and make huge profits sometimes even a hundred percent profit on what they they pay right sure so this is late to this very greedy sort of speculation cash grab thing where people are like loaning money from from illegal sources like shadow banks or just from banks to buy more property so they have tons of property and no one's living in them and they're just basically waiting for the prices to go up so they can sell them to get more money yeah and there's a huge problem that government's been trying to cool this down for ages right they've actually been implementing all sorts of things like Oh married couples are only allowed to own one property or two properties so then people are actually getting divorced still living together still being husband and wife but on paper getting divorced so that they can buy more property you know things like that right so this is this is an example of a go yeah this is a more populated go stone there's a lot of people that are here just to see this which is interesting there's like a little Museum that says the the rich upper life experience but if you look the apartments that are actually they have clothes hanging in the windows or curtains is like three in the entire space you see empty empty empty empty and the funny thing is you say yeah it's a new development no this is over three years old now three years old the initial building there's a thing though here in China that if you buy a property if you do any like decoration or renovation if you like you buy a concrete block it literally has nothing inside no you get ready in the windows there's nothing in there we'll try get a close-up if you do any kind of construction in there it actually lowers the value of the property yeah but if you keep it bare-bones like completely stock empty it's worth more when you sell it yeah they can't drunk shale which means like decoration and if you do your own decoration then your other people that move in are going to change it which daily cost so all of these are completely empty yeah we'll stop and get some footage on the way back we'll just go to the end here and again I got to keep saying this but these are three years old this is not a new building this wasn't maybe a last month yeah exactly and then behind you can see they're currently building new ones there's new ones and then I also want to say this right behind this yeah there's like incredibly incredibly poor like impoverished houses like they got a well for water that kind of stuff they're not sure this is really weird yeah it's unfortunate but this is what's happened in China is you've got this huge real estate boom because that's what's driving the economy and the local government makes money by selling this land to the real estate developers right it will pay a hell of a lot of money and then they will just sell all these properties and you know earn tons of money and they'll go ahead and build more stuff you know so and we got a great another great example here something I got a show I think we can get oh man the air is awful out your pollution is terrible yeah can you see these yes I can these are farm houses and what i minuted they're for farmers right let's let's go down take a closer okay yeah these will not be used let me talk about this for a second why why won't these be used well if you look you got a wonder if you look at this massive ghost town that we just went through yeah I'll take some footage here okay yeah where did they get all this open land to do so there is certainly stuff here before this was not an empty lot right yeah what happens is it places like this right we're probably previously farm houses and things like that so why are they building new farm houses here right well because the people the farmers that owned the land here get the cheapest building materials and they'll make these pop up basically out of nowhere a month or two takes to build some of the treasure why because the government were property developers have to pay them a government set compensation perfil per floor so there's put all the scaffolding up and they're trying to make these as big as possible before they get the mandatory boot right get out of here this is our area exactly and they just rake in the money and move it downtown the city you this bizarre thing look at this this situation you've got this is a new one being built then you've got all those ones that have been out around for three years right behind them you've got all these other ones busy being built and blow your mind the entire cityscape is a ghost town yeah all the way back there nobody lives here and then obviously the the next thing is where we're standing right now and over there will be the next bit of land that they're going to appropriate for building more the entrepreneurial farmers of the old temple are going to get quite the payload yeah yeah and that's exactly what's happening here and well you know they say that this is the biggest housing bubble in the whole world we're standing in it yeah there's a whole lot of speculation as to when it's going to burst a lot of people are worried about it but I'm sure you've noticed Chinese people seem to think that it's a sure thing yes it's not going to go down now so they keep like I keep trying to tell my friends and you know people that I care about here chill out a little bit like I'm not saying don't invest but stuff like borrowing so much money and stop trying to buy so much property like just chill the hell out you know get your own house you know like living it whatever I think it's a good investment but this can't last forever there's a problem when right now we're literally I'm just gonna throw this out there let's say how much do you how many people are in that building if you could fill it up how many families or how many people in that building yeah I just got about like 30 stories and maybe about six apartments per story so let's just say what like I don't know thousand people yeah if we're looking right now at potentially 500,000 to a million capacity property right now yet has not been filled for five years then there's obviously an issue sure that's right totally and look in the distance there you'll see there's tons of other ones under construction you see the sky cranes everywhere and there's notes inside up and up and up no one inside and yeah literally there's just too much supply you know however there still seems to be demand absolutely okay so I think to wrap it up yeah let's wrap it up over here shall we sure now guys see Mike and I were talking about this and we were thinking how could we be positive about this like this whole housing boom thing that this bubble because at least in our opinion we're not trying to be naysayers but it can't go on forever it's gonna have to slow down it's gonna have to come down what's positive about it I'll say this if China goes through an economic disaster and everyone's starving and kind of running around and clamoring for places to live there is absolutely no shortage of housing that's for sure oh yeah there will always be housing in China so there's enough apartments just in this area that we're standing around here to like house everybody in like five cities surrounding here so in fact if you're homeless and can afford a plane ticket come here you can live in one of these empty boxes you probably won't get caught for a while yeah anyway that's it for this one guys anything you want to say to our subscribers before we sign off well whether you're a ghost or live in a ghost town or even a haunted house I appreciate it if you like comment and subscribe yes and until next time guys we'd like you to stay awesome but you see we don't have today we just don't have the drone to do a fancy shoot up from here so I think we're just gonna have to put some epic random drone from what we filmed last week sounds good all right so until next time guys please enjoy this epic random drone footage and as always stay awesome [Music] Oh I remember [Music] I remember you you

Channel: ADVChina

Views: 1,161,716

Rating: 4.8999038 out of 5

Keywords: ghost city china, ghost city, china housing bubble 2015, adv china, chinese ghost cities, china housing bubble 2016, china housing bubble 60 minutes, 60 minutes ghost cities in china, ghost cities in china 60 minutes, ghost cities in china youtube, ghost cities in china, china housing bubble burst, ghost cities in china wiki, Gillem Tulloch, uninhabited, South, Ghost, ordos china, housing bubble 2016, Cities, empty, Dateline, mall, Dongguan, apartments, china, centre, Ordos, Beijing, China's

Id: BcyYyyaPz84

Length: 15min 52sec (952 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 16 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/growgos]

Just a video from two of my favourite China (foreigners) vloggers, where they explore a "Ghost city", a city where there has been massive construction developments that remain unoccupied and explain why this phenomenon has been so prevalent in China these last several years.

[u/[deleted]]

[deleted]

What is this?

[u/[deleted]]

Are "ghost cities" found anywhere else in the world, or is this a mainland Chinese phenomenon?

How could this type of internal economic stimulus possibly have long term benefits? Or is the goal simply to create the perception of growth, knowing full well that eventually the jig will be up but, by then, some kind of benefits would have been realized?