Or maybe it's because if you're well-off, there's no reason to buy an expensive villa that looks just like the one next to it. Better to buy a smaller, more tasteful house that's uniquely yours?

IMO neighborhoods with a single house design copy-pasted are really unappealing, no matter the country.

It's not quite the same as farmland being reclaimed literally between houses, but I remember going to Vegas in 2009 (I think, or late 2008). There was an in-progress casino that was dark; no work going on.

I asked the desk at the hotel I was staying at what was going on. When the market crashed, the company went out of business. He said the workers literally laid their tools down in the middle of a shift, walked out and locked the gates.

It was very, very strange, because the depth of the crash hadn't yet sunk in to my tiny pea-brain. That really drove home just how bad this was about to be.

(funny but unrelated story from that same trip. We were there for a technical conference on research in K-12 administrator training and development, in the same hotel was a furry convention. Explaining to 75+ year olds what a furry was, and why that man had a fox tail was one of the best, and most surreal experiences of my life)

The whole initial concept is so bizarre to me. The point of owning a grand mansion is to show it off. If it is identical with all the neighbours then that undercuts the mansion's value.

Honestly it feels like someone thought: "Let's make a neighbourhood for rich people." and didn't quite think it through what those people will need or want.

So, they claim that "a supply-demand imbalance" is to blame, but I find it unlikely that there is really no one in China (of all places) who would like a home of this size. More likely, either:

1) there is some fundamental problem structurally (e.g. no plumbing or no electricity) that makes these otherwise palatial homes unusable (by humans), or...

2) the financing was such that they cannot admit that they will sell for half what was expected, so the whole thing ended up in legal bankruptcy limbo

I don't know which it is, but I am reminded of how, in my home town of Austin, Texas, we have something like 10,000 homeless people but plenty of empty commercial real estate (some of it listed for rent but not actually plumbed up or otherwise available). It's a rather egregious misallocation of resources.

> Ghosts towns are not unusual in China, where an estimated 65 million homes are left empty. For decades, the country’s economy was driven by real estate, so much so that the government often encouraged large-scale developments. But an aging population and affordability concerns, among other factors, resulted in a supply-demand imbalance, at times creating entirely vacant cities. Thames Town, a suburb outside of Shanghai designed to emulate London, is now virtually empty. Kangbashi, or “the empty city,” in Ordos, however, is perhaps the most recognized of this phenomenon

Feels kinda like what's happening with the affordability of housing at least here in California. San Francisco starting being one example of this for similar and different reasons.

To give some context, the primary reason these kinds of massive housing projects are being built is to help local govts meet their revenue needs (eg. Pensions, Capital Expenses, Local Govt salaries) [0].

The Central Govt in China stopped subsidizing local and provincial govts in the 1990s as a way to force local govts to be more efficient along with incentivizing them to incentivize capitalist developments like a private housing market [1].

This financial mechanism is called a Local Government Financing Vehicle (LGFV) and this is what spurred the growth of ghost cities. [0] [1]

While a large number of local govts in China probably fudging GDP numbers, they're targeting different metrics and this is more of an issue with the less economically dynamic interior provinces like Ningxia, Sichuan, etc. The numbers in economically dynamic provinces like Guangdong, Shanghai, Beijing, Chongqing, Zhejiang, etc are generally reliable [2]

[0] - https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/is-there-a...

[1] - https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2016/wp16187.pdf

[2] - https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/TheReliabi...

This is a similar one: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/burj-al-babas

I think we will see more ghost towns being built to prop up the GDP

“Hurdles of cattle” is such an odd typo. Was this dictated voice to text or written by an AI? Or just a typo and no editing?

In the US, about 16 million homes are empty : https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=how+many+...

So per capita, it is about the same.