that fact that we more empty homes degrading from abandonment into nothingness in this country than homeless people is surest sign that we have terrible system.
Not sure which country you’re referring to.
In September 2023, He Keng, a former deputy head of the National Bureau of Statistics, said that unfinished and finished-but-vacant apartment projects in China could conceivably house the entire Chinese population of 1.4 billion. (1)
there are more vacant homes that homeless people in my country and that fact is so incendiary to our sensibilities that it enshitifies things like google so; when you look up this fact; all of the results are going to lead you to explanations as to why it’s misleading and that there aren’t enough “appropriate” homes for homeless people.
all of the articles are hoping couch the unspoken classism divisions as “nuanced arguments” so when they say that there aren’t enough “appropriate” homes for homeless people; it’s dog-whistle-implying that homeless people don’t deserve the same desirable homes that can earn profit for the capitalists and that it’s the state’s responsibility to “deal” with them; amongst other dog whistles.
And what’s China’s homelessness statistics especially compared to the US?
Can you please share links to China’s homelessness statistics? Maybe my search engine is junk because I’m struggling to find any information later than 2011 (before some of the efforts to reduce it).
In my building, half the units are just sitting here empty. Guess what country the owner is from?
i’m happy to see the empty apartments where i live; it means that it helps drive down the cost of rent and it’s working, somewhat.
I’m guessing they’re empty because they can’t be rented, and not because they aren’t for rent.
Isn’t the housing situation significantly worse in China? You put entire down payments and then pay the mortgage for the house to still yet be built. And last year so many defaults happened that no houses were being built and no one was being returned their money when they wanted out.
The grass is not greener on their side. It’s still fucked, just a different fucked.
Those are the speculative houses xi is arguing against here. China doesn’t have involuntary homeless, that’s mainly why ‘ghost’ cities were built. Now the private housing market is fucked right now, and there’s a good chance there will never be privately built homes again in China. But that has nothing to do with the housing supply, and does not affect homeownership or housing rates
90% of families in China own their home, with 80% of these homes are owned outright. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/07/10/why-are-there-no-slums-in-china/
What is the “hukou” system and what does it have to do with socialism?
One unique characteristic of China’s urbanization process is that, although policies encouraged migration to cities for industrial and service jobs, rural residents never lost their access to land in the countryside. In the 1950s, the Communist Party of China (CPC) led a nationwide land reform process, abolishing private land ownership and transforming it into collective ownership. During the economic reform period, beginning in 1978, a “Household Responsibility System” (家庭联产承包责任制 jiātíng lián chǎn chéngbāo zérèn zhì) was created, which reallocated rural agricultural land into the hands of individual households. Though agricultural production was deeply impacted, collective land ownership remained and land was never privatized.
Today, China has one of the highest homeownership rates in the world, surpassing 90 percent, and this includes the millions of migrant workers who rent homes in other cities. This means that when encountering economic troubles, such as unemployment, urban migrant workers can return to their hometowns, where they own a home, can engage in agricultural production, and search for work locally. This structural buffer plays a critical role in absorbing the impacts of major economic and social crises. For example, during the 2008 global financial crisis, China’s export-oriented economy, especially of manufactured goods, was severely hit, causing about 30 million migrant workers to lose their jobs. Similarly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when service and manufacturing jobs were seriously impacted, many migrant workers returned to their homes and land in the countryside.
Beyond land reform, a system was created to manage the mass migration of people from the countryside to the cities, to ensure that the movement of people aligned with the national planning needs of such a populous country. Though China has had some form of migration restriction for over 2,000 years, in the late 1950s, the country established a new “household registration system” (户口 or hùkǒu) to regulate rural-to-urban migration. Every Chinese person has an assigned urban or rural hukou status that grants them access to social welfare benefits (subsidized public housing, education, health care, pension, and unemployment insurance, etc.) in their hometown, but which are restricted in the cities they move to for work. While reformation of the hukou system is ongoing, the lack of urban hukou status forces many migrant parents to spend long periods away from their families and they must leave their children in their grandparents’ care in their hometowns, referred to as “left-behind children” (留守儿童 liúshǒu értóng). Though the number has been decreasing over the years, there are still an estimated seven million children in this situation. Today, 65.22 percent of China’s population lives in cities, but only 45.4 percent have urban hukou. Although this system deterred the creation of large urban slums, it also reinforced serious inequities of social welfare between urban and rural areas, and between residents within a city based on their hukou status.
Didn’t China just had a huge crisis in the property market?
Property speculation crashed. It wasn’t a homelessness crisis, but an intentional popping of a speculative bubble because Capitalists got greedy and homes were too expensive.
It seems they overbuilt on purpose, which seems like a great idea if you care more about shelter for the population than the financial wellbeing of the speculators.
Is there any data on homelessness in China? There’s entire cities built and standing empty so I suppose there could potentially be zero homeless people, but if they were built by capitalists than I suppose it wouldn’t be surprising if it followed the same pattern as in the west, with empty homes for people can’t afford?
Not really, the government wound down the real estate market intentionally to refocus the economy on tech and industry.
Im not sure we should be listening to this guy of all people, but i cosign the message still
