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Even Adam Smith called landlords (which included commercial, residential, and mortgagers) essentially leaches- people who contribute nothing to the economy and live off value created not by their own hand. He considered real estate and rentals a natural monopoly and argued for them to be regulated and landlords themselves to be taxed. This was Adam Smith, the father of Capitalism.
OFC when the wealthy landowners were championing the adoption of Capitalism in the US and Europe, they weren't too keen on the anti-landlord stuff, so that got left out.
Strange he’s considered the father of capitalism, when he simply described it. The “invisible hand” appears once in The Wealth of Nations, yet it’s a foundation of capitalist orthodoxy. Like conservatives with the Bible, capitalists pick and choose the lines that suit them.
It's a social science, he layed the foundation. Some thesis aged better, some are more important.
Funny enough mostly when I read about the invisible hand it's in the context of "wHerE iNviSiBle hAnd" by an OP which does not understand that self regulation does not mean the outcome will be "fair" or "right".
This is true in pretty everything that gets popular. Intellectuals love nuance, and ideas that spread among them spread because of their nuance. The general population is not capable of nuance, it only accepts ideas that can be simplified to a single soundbite.
As an idea spreads among intellectuals and then to the general public, it is stripped limb by limb of everything that made the idea interesting in the first place until it is a small collection of soundbites. And because language is descriptive, words mean whatever they are used to mean, as the simplified version grows in popularity it starves the nuanced version, replacing the original as the definition of the concept.
At the end you end up here, where Adam Smith is viewed as contrary to capitalism. The same is true of more or less everything complicated concept that becomes mass market. It is true for the concept of computers, for example.
He did live in the era of Landed Gentry in Great Britain. They were essentially an entire class of landlords who made their livelihood off of renting out the land that they owned.
They would simply collected passive income, expect rent payments so high that the renters essentially gave up all the surplus value of their labor, hoarded wealth instead of reinvesting it in something like a business, and essentially held a monopoly over useful land.
He viewed them as a lazy and unproductive class of people, describing them as “extraordinarily indolent" and "incapable of the application of mind"
What’s the alternative in modern society where people move around a lot, especially when they’re younger, and don’t have money saved up for a down payment or cash purchase or when a large maintenance expense is needed? Someone with more stability and who is capable of committing to take responsibility of a place medium-to-long term is needed no?
This is a great question. I'm not sure why you got downvoted. (FTR I don't see a problem with short-term rentals with the right controls.)
-- TLDR --
The state (state/county/city) provides the property to operators/residents for the intended use, which to provide goods and services to residents (and tourists).
Under our current system, the primary purpose of property is to store and transfer wealth.
Unlike a landlord or a bank, the state shares in the risk of providing the goods and services in exchange for some value, but capped at like 1%-3% of gross receipts.
--
Let me first dispel two common beliefs (assuming you're from the US, though this is applicable in many western countries).
First, land deeds in the US are not ownership the way most people think of ownership. They are a transferable right to exclusive limited use. The government still "owns" the land. If you stop paying your property tax they will (eventually) take it back and offer the rights to someone else.
Second: a house naturally increasing in value as it ages is completely cultural. There are other countries where a 20 year old house is a liability the new buyer will have to pay to demo. The value of the house immediately starts to depreciate the moment it's built. Why would you want some 20 year old house with outdated tech and styling? A buyer is bidding on the land value minus the cost to demo the existing structure. If the house is 15 year old, you know what's coming in 5 years and bid accordingly.
So what is the purpose of "land". You hopefully didn't answer to store and transfer wealth. That's how our system in the US is set up.
I think an alternative is easier to explain with commercial property, but it also applies to residential property.
Let say I live in a small town. There's only one "main street". The purpose of that commercial zone and its land is to offer goods and services to the residents (and tourists).
I want to offer tech sales and repair to our town. I need and want a storefront. There are multiple empty commercial storefronts on Main Street. I go to the city council, tell them what I want to offer and how it benefits residents and generate increased tax revenue and whatnot, and which empty storefront I prefer. The city verifies I'm not doing anything illegal, has me sign an contract that makes me responsible for improvements (that I can remove if I move out), utilities, damage, and being in compliance with all laws and regulations. In exchange for a small percentage of my gross receipts- like 1%-5% with a no-profit cost cap, they four-wall me the empty space and maintain the core building.
The purpose of the Main Street property is to provide goods and services to the residents. Not enrich a landlord or bank who is holding the limited available property to extract as much of the value I create as possible.
Residential property can work under the same system. But you've made it this far even after all the edits I made to shrink my comment and deserve a break. Ask if you want me to add a residential example, or want to discuss any part of this.
One solution is Land value taxes, which reduce the profits from hoarding land and valuable locations but they don’t stop anyone profiting from providing accommodation - hotels, motels, and so on.
Of course, removing the speculative value would rebalance the market and make houses significantly cheaper. In those circumstances, people would not be so afraid to buy a house for six months or a year and then sell when they move, like many people do with cars.
It is also important to remember that landlords are not primarily providing accommodation, and when people criticise them it is not the accommodation part they are criticising. The Mafia ran Italian restaurants, but that wasn’t why people were afraid of them.
Local authorities own surplus housing stock and rent them out based on income. The council house system in the UK was built for that very purpose during the rebuilding effort after ww2 because they needed a mobile work force.
Well, to bring it back to the original topic, the way China do es it is by owning the land and leasing it's usage to people. Yes, you don't own the land... Not really much different from current really, but the state sets and controls the rent price.
This could be done in any modern society as a blend of the two. State-leased would provide the baseline and any other options would be in comparison to the state-leased option. If what you offer is worse than the state's then no one would bother looking at your shit deal. Iirc China also does a bunch of subsidizing for low and middle earners. There's a lot of reasons why they have a 90+% home ownership rate despite having such a high population size.
I’ll go and look it up, but willing to bet Smith was talking about rent seeking/economic rents here and not what you’re thinking of when you say landlord.
Contract rent (eg a lease on a place to live) is productive use of a valuable thing that’s not from the natural produce of the earth.
And to go one step further, Lenin said that Georgism (single tax on 100% of the rental value of unimproved land) is the most pure and perfected form of capitalism, as it rids itself of its pre capitalist feudal remnants and unlocks both the full progressive potential of capitalism, as well as sharpens its contradictions.
Whats funny is in China that is where they all invest. Families save up for their kids to buy a second home. Its the one asset they seem to trust. And a young man with multiple houses is a way to find dating opportunity.
What else are they supposed to do with all those dollars they're accumulating? Eat them? If we actually made stuff here they could trade those dollars for goods instead.
But ultimately it's because we let them. We should follow their example and not let foreigners do whatever they want here.
As a friendly reminder, China's ruling party is called Communist Party of China (CPC), not Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as western press and academia often frames it as.
Far from being a simple confusion, China's Communist Party takes its name out of the internationalist approach seekt by the Comintern back in the day. From Terms of Admission into Communist International, as adopted by the First Congress of the Communist International:
In view of the foregoing, parties wishing to join the Communist International must change their name. Any party seeking affiliation must call itself the Communist Party of the country in question (Section of the Third, Communist International). The question of a party’s name is not merely a formality, but a matter of major political importance. The Communist International has declared a resolute war on the bourgeois world and all yellow Social-Democratic parties. The difference between the Communist parties and the old and official “Social-Democratic”, or “socialist”, parties, which have betrayed the banner of the working class, must be made absolutely clear to every rank-and-file worker.
Similarly, the adoption of a wrong name to refer to the CPC consists of a double edged sword: on the one hand, it seeks to reduce the ideological basis behind the party's name to a more ethno-centric view of said organization and, on the other hand, it seeks to assert authority over it by attempting to externally draw the conditions and parameters on which it provides the CPC recognition.
I own a home and Id rather prices come down so they become more affordable again. I need to get a bigger house for my growing family anyway and the current prices are making it impossible to do this.
The majority of people lose out when prices rise because even if they do own a home they also consume housing, so this balances out to zero. Meanwhile their office rent goes up, their supermarket rent goes up, and so prices go up and wages go down. And this is multiplied if they have children. To profit you need to own multiple houses.
But what if they get so much cheeper that your mortgage goes under water? How can you swap homes in that case? I think people underestimate the role of debt in "line always goes up" policy.
Yeah, these people are crazy and have likely never been to China lol. Everyone and their grandma has been using housing as an investment tool in China for decades. Their minds would be blown if they went to China and spoke to an actual Chinese person and found out they have zero "class consciousness" and just want to make money and buy nice shit
Yeah people can't seem to be normal about it and it's a fairly new thing. I live there and people are so misinformed about it on both sides. Many people are starting to reject western propaganda so naturally they just gravitate toward Chinese propaganda and think they're immune to it somehow
This is wrong. Speculative assets in China has not grown while personal liquid savings are rising nonstop. As of now, the combined personal savings of Chinese are at 24 trillions, more than the total of the US M2 money supply. Imagine living in a society where savings are going up while everything gets cheaper.
Which has been making significant improvements to infrastructure and standard of living, while the USA is in decline in those areas, while becoming far more authoritarian lol.
To be honest, it's not rocket science to make improvements in China that was literal shithole not long ago and still needs tons of imporvements, but good for them!
Also, while trump literally acts like an authoritarian leader, there are chances for shitshow to be reversed in the future by new government. At the same time, China literally becomes more and more authoritarian because it never stopped and there are almost zero chances this direction will change unfortunately.
No, it's an example of developing country vs developed. When your country has almost nothing and at some point starts to develop real fast, this what actually happens. But when you are developed and have tons of legacy stuff, its even harder to make changes + politics doesn't help. Another good example is Russia, where government services are highly digitized therefore almost zero need to submit or request documents in person or by mail which is very convinient. China, the US and espessially EU suck ass in that. Such gaps are inevitable.
It shows that you may have never lived in developing autocracy as well as in developed democracy.
Freedom of the press is in decline. Trump has bullied the press and removed outlets from the whitehouse and the pentagon. The FCC has threatened news outlets and networks, such as them threatening Disney over Jimmy Kimmel. Stripped funding from PBS. Trump has rescinded visas over visas holder's speech.
Ice goons in the streets are arresting people without due process. National Guard troops occupying American cities.
I mean I know we're on Reddit we're supposed to pretend but nobody actually thinks the US has a decline in the standard of living over the last 25 years.
Funny that Pooh Bear would say that considering all the property that China owns for speculation in North America. I agree with the sentiment but the hypocrisy is real
This is probably in response to the fact that a huge portion of the country is locked in near permanent debt from buying apartments in complexes that'll never be finished thanks to their largest, corrupt real estate developer going belly up a while ago, as well as their large and growing homelessness problem.
The irony of lifting up Xie as peak socialist when he's the leader of one of the most hyper-capitalistic countries on earth is pretty funny
China does one thing well I will admit: they build
The United States need to build more. It’s going to be unpopular here but when you add rent control it makes housing supply decrease. See NYC multi-generational rent controlled apartments being handed down for 50 years.
Austria had a decent rent control system but it is heavily private and public funding. The only downside is you still might also wait several mounts for housing, but it is affordable.
in reality, would you live in a condo for 70 years+ or sell it for a newer condo? and 70 yrs is theoredical, you can renew the lease if it actually reached the limit, no one is gonna evict you out
You own the home just not the dirt it’s built on. No different to owning an apartment (as opposed to a house) in the west.
You go once every 70 years and pay like a few hundred dollars to renew the land lease. No different to paying property taxes (except China doesn’t have property taxes).
By the way the government in China is not legally allowed to order you to sell your property if they want to build on the land it’s on. (In the USA under eminent domain they can). This is why you see so many pictures online of roads in China going around tiny old houses, because the elderly people who own them don’t want to sell up and the government can’t make them.
Hahaha complaining about the housing crisis in the USA is completely right but pretending china is any better is ridiculous, china have more cities in the top 10 less affordable cities in the world than the USA, they built ghost towns just for speculation, and a lot of working class people in Shanghai and Shenzhen are living in cages because that's the only thing they can afford.
Chinas housing market is absolutely horrendous, and they are some of the biggest speculators in the world.
They buy houses before they are even build just to try and stay ahead on the curve - and it’s biting them a lot pt. as many construction companies are going under.- plus the tofu drake stuff going on.
Buying houses before they are build is actually a pretty common thing in the world. In Europe this is common, but then again we have strong building codes and enforcements (this is what is missing in the USA) if not build right, the building company has to fix it.
Building codes in the USA are state wide. You have countries the size of 1 state. You can’t compare building codes in Florida ( Miami ) to even north Florida. Or Oregon for example.
What are you trying to say? I would understand a house build in Florida needs a different building code compared to Oregon, but its ok to not enforce it?
what do you mean "not enforce it" there are building inspectors who do just that, inspect the building against the code and lets building owner to force builder to fix it. Just as in EU.
I think building codes in many parts of the US are a lot stronger than they are Europe. I mean I've lived in houses in Europe and houses in the U.S And your houses tend to be a lot more wonky When it comes to things like electricity and building materials Not to mention you people don't know how to put a freaking closet in the master bedroom.
This is wrong. Speculative assets in China has not grown while personal liquid savings are rising nonstop. As of now, the combined personal savings of Chinese are at 24 trillions, more than the total of the US M2 money supply. Imagine living in a society where savings are going up while everything gets cheaper.
Dude, do you even read what you post? the WMP is also a banks (investors) pirtfolio. So you present a graph that is "personal wealth vs fund investment" graph which has nothing to do with housing - which chinese people buy for their own cash for speculative purposes.
If anything - your graph shows that Chinese people dont use sane methods of leaving saving cash to proffessionals and instead manage them by themselves (including buying tofu housing).
Years ago the CCP needed to raise money. They raised capital by "selling" 70 year leases to the populace. People started buying these as investments and thus spawned the "ghost cities" in China. China is afraid to crackdown because many people have retirement money backing these houses.
They didn’t "let it fail." They prevented a normal failure: capital controls, forced project takeovers, state-directed lending, censored panic, and protected politically sensitive stakeholders. That’s the opposite of letting markets clear.
As China’s most embattled – and indebted – property developer is ordered to liquidate, the effects that Evergrande’s collapse will have on investors, debt holders and the hundreds of thousands of homebuyers who have paid deposits for homes remains uncertain.
This means that foreign bondholders – including Top Shine Global, which brought the winding-up petition against the Evergrande – will be “hung out to dry”, says George Magnus, an economist and associate at Soas University of London.
And a bailout is unlikely. The Chinese government “certainly don’t want to give priority to making good the losses of foreign creditors over domestic citizens,” says Magnus. “That just wouldn’t be a good look. So to the extent that somebody is going to pay a price, it will be the foreign bondholders.”
While the Chinese government has taken a number of measures to help shore up the property market and support the economy as a whole it has not swooped in to directly bail out developers.
Beijing has sent a "clear message on its intention of not bailing out the housing sector," Ms Wang adds.
The Chinese government has been careful to avoid the kind of measures that could encourage further risky behaviour by an already heavily indebted industry.
Your own links show the opposite of "letting it fail."
Evergrande wasn’t allowed to go through a normal bankruptcy with price discovery and equal treatment of creditors. The state picked winners and losers, foreign bondholders were explicitly ‘hung out to dry’ while domestic political priorities were protected.
That’s not market failure. That’s administrative loss allocation under the Chinese Communist Party.
Unless you are 180 years old neither you or I are old enough to even know what a 'normal' bankruptcy looks like. In the United States the average home price rebounded after one year according to the fed's statistics, i.e. the risky behavior resumed fairly quickly. In China they're saying home prices won't bottom out until 2027.
Sounds like you're upset that they didn't throw a bunch of Chinese citizens out on the street
Again you said that "they let it fail". You are admitting that didn't happen.
That doesn’t make your point stronger. it dodges it. "Normal bankruptcy" doesn’t mean mass evictions; it means transparent insolvency and price discovery. We’ve seen that plenty of times in our lifetimes.
Saying prices won’t bottom until 2027 just admits the unwind is being politically managed and stretched out. And pretending that’s the same as "not throwing people into the street" is pure emotional misdirection.
Except if they did what you suggest people would be thrown out on the street. I know the idea that a government works for the majority of its people rather than upholding some silly 19th century principle is alien to you but ok. Take it up with them IG
As a friendly reminder, China's ruling party is called Communist Party of China (CPC), not Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as western press and academia often frames it as.
Far from being a simple confusion, China's Communist Party takes its name out of the internationalist approach seekt by the Comintern back in the day. From Terms of Admission into Communist International, as adopted by the First Congress of the Communist International:
In view of the foregoing, parties wishing to join the Communist International must change their name. Any party seeking affiliation must call itself the Communist Party of the country in question (Section of the Third, Communist International). The question of a party’s name is not merely a formality, but a matter of major political importance. The Communist International has declared a resolute war on the bourgeois world and all yellow Social-Democratic parties. The difference between the Communist parties and the old and official “Social-Democratic”, or “socialist”, parties, which have betrayed the banner of the working class, must be made absolutely clear to every rank-and-file worker.
Similarly, the adoption of a wrong name to refer to the CPC consists of a double edged sword: on the one hand, it seeks to reduce the ideological basis behind the party's name to a more ethno-centric view of said organization and, on the other hand, it seeks to assert authority over it by attempting to externally draw the conditions and parameters on which it provides the CPC recognition.
As a friendly reminder, China's ruling party is called Communist Party of China (CPC), not Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as western press and academia often frames it as.
Far from being a simple confusion, China's Communist Party takes its name out of the internationalist approach seekt by the Comintern back in the day. From Terms of Admission into Communist International, as adopted by the First Congress of the Communist International:
In view of the foregoing, parties wishing to join the Communist International must change their name. Any party seeking affiliation must call itself the Communist Party of the country in question (Section of the Third, Communist International). The question of a party’s name is not merely a formality, but a matter of major political importance. The Communist International has declared a resolute war on the bourgeois world and all yellow Social-Democratic parties. The difference between the Communist parties and the old and official “Social-Democratic”, or “socialist”, parties, which have betrayed the banner of the working class, must be made absolutely clear to every rank-and-file worker.
Similarly, the adoption of a wrong name to refer to the CPC consists of a double edged sword: on the one hand, it seeks to reduce the ideological basis behind the party's name to a more ethno-centric view of said organization and, on the other hand, it seeks to assert authority over it by attempting to externally draw the conditions and parameters on which it provides the CPC recognition.
The problem the United States says you need to agree with the right policy, but Trump is saying because unlike the United States China does not have a yearly property tax on house. How are you going to fund local government?
Chinese / Asians in general are a different story. They are usually less keen to invest into stock market / bonds / obligations and prefer things of material nature instead: land, property, gold. So, they do speculate, but at the same time the government regulates the market more closely. I don't think we can compare these two situations.
Both are good, and I'm saying this as someone who is disgusted at most of Trump's actions. We can't have houses for all if we don't build them, and we can't house people if a good portion of the housing stock is owned by rich landlords.
Ghost cities are just the government actually being proactive. Look at the cities the media were calling ghost cities a decade ago and they are proper cities now
Pretty much imposible to buy a home in any tier 1 city unless you are actually rich or simply bad at managing finances. Not to mention the fact that renting is actually cheaper in China if you can negotiate. China is a capitalist hellhole at the moment. Xi can say anything he want but he is still allowing rampant capitalism to ruin the lives of his people.
This is more complicated than most if this comment section implies.
I'm all for housing being regulated in order to reduce costs.
But that only works in a system where the government is gonna take care of you when you're old. Otherwise reducing home values hurts one of the most accessible appreciating assets on the American economy.
How many people fund their retirement by selling or renting their home they paid off over 30 years and moving into a condo or something cheaper. Its a lot.
China’s housing sector is currently in crisis as it is most families’ largest asset. China has a very large over-supply of housing due to speculative over-building and it also now has an obviously declining population. People have mortgages and the resale value of their homes has now declined by >30% and more. In a more politically active country there would have been more demonstrations (there have been some).
Now that there are enough empty homes in China to house all of Germany, prices have been falling rapidly, Xi's admitting this wasn't the best idea. It hasn't even fixed homelessness either - these investors don't want the poor migrants from outside the local Hukou lowering their land value ( https://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12324 ) Nobody does capitalism worse than a corrupt nominally socialist government.
He is right, but it doesnt mean it shouldn't be done.
Cheaper houses would only be good, because people don't own multiple houses and don't speculate with their houses.
He is right, but it doesnt mean it shouldn't be done.
Cheaper houses would only be good, because people don't own multiple houses and don't speculate with their houses.
I agree and I had this debate with fellow landlords in the UK (before I sold my business and left).
For long-term benefit of the nation, you NEED to build more houses and at a rate that meets the demand.
As a home owner, I don’t care if the value of my house goes down. Why would it? It means less taxes for me. My house is for living in, not to make money off of.
China, they could release a law what restrict housing market and landlords via given, selling house per hand only. While USA cant do shit about cause there is a huge lobbist power what will protect a today situation by all cost. So tramp just say" i give more loans to landlords conglomerate as well increase national debt by other 500b because i can. 1000Trillion to israel."
The first two parts of what Donald said is true (such a huge achievement for him, I know), but that's exactly why we need to build more in whatever country you're in. If you have a housing crisis, build some houses
Not counting the tofu dregs of companies cutting corners to save money,
The social norm of China is have your own place, and when companies see people desperate for housing, they promised it, the Chinese people would pre-buy apartments before the ground was even broke. The company would use the money to buy land, use that land for more loans to buy more land, use that more land to get more loans, and so on.
They "built" the apartments, but the company often went bust, predictedly, and the Chinese people who bought the apartments are left with an empty husk, if not an empty plot where they said they would build it.
America has ghost towns from towns being abandoned, China has ghost CITIES of unfinished apartment complexes, hundreds of meters high, all empty. And the Chinese people who bought in were left with 0 return from their purchase of the promise of an apartment.
Just because Xi said the obvious that homes are meant to be lived in doesn't nullify the housing crisis China is in
Maybe houses are overinflated anyways and th price should go down, it’ll be shit for me since I just bought one and I’d be paying a higher price than it’s worth, but you’re not hurting a boomer who bought it for 60k 50 years ago, and I’d rather have more young people getting homes.
I like the concept but housing is 25% of China's GDP. (It was 32 percent before the bubble collapsed). It's only 18% of America's GDP. Both countries speculate on housing
“Houses are very valuable, it’s a big part of their networth” … “I don’t want to know those numbers down”
“at the same time I want to make it possible for young people out there and other people to buy a house”
This is in relation to Trump declaring a national emergency on housing….
I understand y’all have a bias against this country, how it operates, and the current administration; But at least be honest people.
You socialists have some good points every so often, don’t ruin it with nonsense like this that is created to polarize people. Or don’t; This is likely an echo chamber anyways.
There are legitimate reasons to be wary of making house prices fall. Everyone who bought the house when it was super expensive will now have an enormous loan and they cant pay it off by selling the house.
This isnt good, you can argue its a bandaid that needs to be ripped off, but its not good.
The chief difference here is that Xi still has a filter, whereas Trump's decline has advanced too far and he says anything that comes into his head.
I'm quite certain Xi is well-aware that if he cracks down too hard on the housing bubble, millions of his citizens will see the numbers go down and blame him. Just as Trump admits here.
Another difference I suppose is that Xi still has the intellectual capacity to think he can address that and bring the problems in his society into balance. Whereas Trump's wits have left him and he's taking one day at a time just hoping not to be found out before he dies.
You know there is this thing about Putin, that if something bad locally is happening people will ask for president's help, and if it gets out of hand he comes and fix local corrupt politicians.
The irony is that these issues are often systematic and coming as direct order or at least consequence of central decisions, Putin's decisions. The phenomen some of you may call as "scapegoating"
This is the same for China, their entire housing crisis isn't because magic happened, it was very precisely inducted by government itself. You need to own house to be considered local amd have, funny privileges like idk, school for your kids. Housing is worth speculating in because heavy government control doesn't really allow people to put their money elsewhere, and local government shuffling land in order to artificially boost their budgets because they have GDP quotas from central government is cherry on the top.
Idk if you guys are aware, that when compared to USA, in China money often isn't enough to buy a house. Good districts will have literally loteries (edit I got hiccup and accidentally clicked "send" half way through writing...).
The point being, Xi saying what he does is pure cynical populistic hypocrisy. Considering structural differences and history of crisis in both countries it's simply stupid to put both of these guys next to eachother, and try to make a point other that the fact that Trump may not be right in his head.
Huuuh? Why is Op using China to make this point? China is one of the biggest housing speculators in town. Evergrande went bankrupt because of its housing speculation blew up in its face and they took a whole bunch of people down with them. China literally IS NOT the one to be using to make this point about housing policy.
A house is only worth something when you sell it. But boomers will also say they want to age in place. So they want their homes to be good for sale but they also plan to not sell.
The irony is that in China there absolutely are entire housing buildings that are built for the sole purpose of selling off in the future…..
Property speculation is literally their main way to play markets seeing as their stock market is all government controlled and capped and cryptocurrency trading is illegal…..
How silly can this subreddit be when it comes to China. They don’t have a housing policy for god’s sake. That was a “real estate development “ policy. Period. Nothing to compare! You genius!
Hmm, and still it's China where people invest everything they got into housing with a hope it'll be worth more. Not to mention that they build in the middle of nowhere, where nobody wants it and it turns to shit ghost town.
True but at least they are actually building housing. They just need to crack down and retrofit tofu dregs.
Not that American housing is of particularly high quality either…
You cannot retrofit tofu dreg, it`s whole purpose is to cash in the maximum amount of money for oneself and the rest is used to pretend something has been constructed. Its high scale corruption, not just poor quality.
You say this as if Xi Jinping practices what he preaches. Look no further than Serpentza and Laowhy86 for examples of China using real estate as a de facto investment with no intent of maintaining, much less inhabiting, the housing one uses as an investment.
If your sources on China are those two well-known anti-China racist YouTubers, I bet you didn’t go to college and have never been told by a professor that even Wikipedia can’t be used as a citation, let alone YouTube videos. And your life is just sad if you don’t even have a college degree LMAO.
In physics class, I’d cite papers, because papers have incentive to tell the truth when useful to engineering that has to deliver the facts to clients with more incentive to genuinely seek them and less to ignore them in favour of their agenda.
By comparison, political “science” is more emotionally charged at the expense of factuality on the best of days. I’m not sure what political “science” has to say about China, but I do know that it’s a notoriously non-transparent society to the point where direct evidence is more limited (though serpentza and laowhy86 at least have video evidence backing up their worldview, including of these ghost cities and poorly maintained housing structures), and circumstantial evidence sometimes has to supplement it. And at this point, when it comes to “interpreting” said circumstantial evidence I’d sooner trust people who’ve been there, who’ve mingled with the locals, documented their time there, etc… than any detractors of theirs who merely assert them to be racist without elaborating, or some mainstream media that advertises products made in China.
Inflation goes up, wages stagnate, you can afford the new homes, new cars are more expensive, but hey, at least your “net worth” is up…. It’s a scam to keep people happy while people are miserable.
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Even Adam Smith called landlords (which included commercial, residential, and mortgagers) essentially leaches- people who contribute nothing to the economy and live off value created not by their own hand. He considered real estate and rentals a natural monopoly and argued for them to be regulated and landlords themselves to be taxed. This was Adam Smith, the father of Capitalism.
OFC when the wealthy landowners were championing the adoption of Capitalism in the US and Europe, they weren't too keen on the anti-landlord stuff, so that got left out.
Well, he didn't go that far to call them leaches unless you can source that quote.
He did accept that renting was normal but called it "unproductive income" in this three sources of income.
He does not call them leaches, but:
"The landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of the earth."
Parasitic behavior, at least.
Strange he’s considered the father of capitalism, when he simply described it. The “invisible hand” appears once in The Wealth of Nations, yet it’s a foundation of capitalist orthodoxy. Like conservatives with the Bible, capitalists pick and choose the lines that suit them.
It's a social science, he layed the foundation. Some thesis aged better, some are more important.
Funny enough mostly when I read about the invisible hand it's in the context of "wHerE iNviSiBle hAnd" by an OP which does not understand that self regulation does not mean the outcome will be "fair" or "right".
This is true in pretty everything that gets popular. Intellectuals love nuance, and ideas that spread among them spread because of their nuance. The general population is not capable of nuance, it only accepts ideas that can be simplified to a single soundbite.
As an idea spreads among intellectuals and then to the general public, it is stripped limb by limb of everything that made the idea interesting in the first place until it is a small collection of soundbites. And because language is descriptive, words mean whatever they are used to mean, as the simplified version grows in popularity it starves the nuanced version, replacing the original as the definition of the concept.
At the end you end up here, where Adam Smith is viewed as contrary to capitalism. The same is true of more or less everything complicated concept that becomes mass market. It is true for the concept of computers, for example.
He did live in the era of Landed Gentry in Great Britain. They were essentially an entire class of landlords who made their livelihood off of renting out the land that they owned.
They would simply collected passive income, expect rent payments so high that the renters essentially gave up all the surplus value of their labor, hoarded wealth instead of reinvesting it in something like a business, and essentially held a monopoly over useful land.
He viewed them as a lazy and unproductive class of people, describing them as “extraordinarily indolent" and "incapable of the application of mind"
I love mfers who are like "socialism doesn't account for human nature"
And how does capitalism account for human nature? By giving in. That's how.
What’s the alternative in modern society where people move around a lot, especially when they’re younger, and don’t have money saved up for a down payment or cash purchase or when a large maintenance expense is needed? Someone with more stability and who is capable of committing to take responsibility of a place medium-to-long term is needed no?
This is a great question. I'm not sure why you got downvoted. (FTR I don't see a problem with short-term rentals with the right controls.)
-- TLDR --
The state (state/county/city) provides the property to operators/residents for the intended use, which to provide goods and services to residents (and tourists).
Under our current system, the primary purpose of property is to store and transfer wealth.
Unlike a landlord or a bank, the state shares in the risk of providing the goods and services in exchange for some value, but capped at like 1%-3% of gross receipts.
--
Let me first dispel two common beliefs (assuming you're from the US, though this is applicable in many western countries).
First, land deeds in the US are not ownership the way most people think of ownership. They are a transferable right to exclusive limited use. The government still "owns" the land. If you stop paying your property tax they will (eventually) take it back and offer the rights to someone else.
Second: a house naturally increasing in value as it ages is completely cultural. There are other countries where a 20 year old house is a liability the new buyer will have to pay to demo. The value of the house immediately starts to depreciate the moment it's built. Why would you want some 20 year old house with outdated tech and styling? A buyer is bidding on the land value minus the cost to demo the existing structure. If the house is 15 year old, you know what's coming in 5 years and bid accordingly.
So what is the purpose of "land". You hopefully didn't answer to store and transfer wealth. That's how our system in the US is set up.
I think an alternative is easier to explain with commercial property, but it also applies to residential property.
Let say I live in a small town. There's only one "main street". The purpose of that commercial zone and its land is to offer goods and services to the residents (and tourists).
I want to offer tech sales and repair to our town. I need and want a storefront. There are multiple empty commercial storefronts on Main Street. I go to the city council, tell them what I want to offer and how it benefits residents and generate increased tax revenue and whatnot, and which empty storefront I prefer. The city verifies I'm not doing anything illegal, has me sign an contract that makes me responsible for improvements (that I can remove if I move out), utilities, damage, and being in compliance with all laws and regulations. In exchange for a small percentage of my gross receipts- like 1%-5% with a no-profit cost cap, they four-wall me the empty space and maintain the core building.
The purpose of the Main Street property is to provide goods and services to the residents. Not enrich a landlord or bank who is holding the limited available property to extract as much of the value I create as possible.
Residential property can work under the same system. But you've made it this far even after all the edits I made to shrink my comment and deserve a break. Ask if you want me to add a residential example, or want to discuss any part of this.
One solution is Land value taxes, which reduce the profits from hoarding land and valuable locations but they don’t stop anyone profiting from providing accommodation - hotels, motels, and so on.
Of course, removing the speculative value would rebalance the market and make houses significantly cheaper. In those circumstances, people would not be so afraid to buy a house for six months or a year and then sell when they move, like many people do with cars.
It is also important to remember that landlords are not primarily providing accommodation, and when people criticise them it is not the accommodation part they are criticising. The Mafia ran Italian restaurants, but that wasn’t why people were afraid of them.
Local authorities own surplus housing stock and rent them out based on income. The council house system in the UK was built for that very purpose during the rebuilding effort after ww2 because they needed a mobile work force.
Well, to bring it back to the original topic, the way China do es it is by owning the land and leasing it's usage to people. Yes, you don't own the land... Not really much different from current really, but the state sets and controls the rent price.
This could be done in any modern society as a blend of the two. State-leased would provide the baseline and any other options would be in comparison to the state-leased option. If what you offer is worse than the state's then no one would bother looking at your shit deal. Iirc China also does a bunch of subsidizing for low and middle earners. There's a lot of reasons why they have a 90+% home ownership rate despite having such a high population size.
Well, housing is not a natural produce of the earth, far from it.
Imho he was mostly addressing the rural aristocracy, that lived off the remnants of the feudal structure. Not really meaningful these days.
That is not saying that housing is a productive investment in the sense that a factory is.
Was he talking about LAND (which is a product of the earth) or something built out?
I’ll go and look it up, but willing to bet Smith was talking about rent seeking/economic rents here and not what you’re thinking of when you say landlord.
Contract rent (eg a lease on a place to live) is productive use of a valuable thing that’s not from the natural produce of the earth.
And to go one step further, Lenin said that Georgism (single tax on 100% of the rental value of unimproved land) is the most pure and perfected form of capitalism, as it rids itself of its pre capitalist feudal remnants and unlocks both the full progressive potential of capitalism, as well as sharpens its contradictions.
Shhh, don't tell neo-conservatives the politics of Adam Smith, you'll hurt their brain!
Did he say this in the wealth of nations?
Houses are not for trading and speculating on.
Whats funny is in China that is where they all invest. Families save up for their kids to buy a second home. Its the one asset they seem to trust. And a young man with multiple houses is a way to find dating opportunity.
Everyone in China uses housing as investment tho. Like every other family owns 2 houses that sit empty to store their money.
Then why does the CCP speculate on Western housing markets and buy up swathes of single family homes to leave empty?
What else are they supposed to do with all those dollars they're accumulating? Eat them? If we actually made stuff here they could trade those dollars for goods instead.
But ultimately it's because we let them. We should follow their example and not let foreigners do whatever they want here.
Foreigners can and should do what they want in America. That's literally the American Dream.
What should not be allowed is foreign private equity and foreign state actors.
As a friendly reminder, China's ruling party is called Communist Party of China (CPC), not Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as western press and academia often frames it as.
Far from being a simple confusion, China's Communist Party takes its name out of the internationalist approach seekt by the Comintern back in the day. From Terms of Admission into Communist International, as adopted by the First Congress of the Communist International:
Similarly, the adoption of a wrong name to refer to the CPC consists of a double edged sword: on the one hand, it seeks to reduce the ideological basis behind the party's name to a more ethno-centric view of said organization and, on the other hand, it seeks to assert authority over it by attempting to externally draw the conditions and parameters on which it provides the CPC recognition.
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I own a home and Id rather prices come down so they become more affordable again. I need to get a bigger house for my growing family anyway and the current prices are making it impossible to do this.
You are right of course.
The majority of people lose out when prices rise because even if they do own a home they also consume housing, so this balances out to zero. Meanwhile their office rent goes up, their supermarket rent goes up, and so prices go up and wages go down. And this is multiplied if they have children. To profit you need to own multiple houses.
House price inflation is a cancer.
I don’t plan on selling so would appreciate lower property tax from low valuation
i mean those that don't want house prices to go down is only the one that owns more that 2
But what if they get so much cheeper that your mortgage goes under water? How can you swap homes in that case? I think people underestimate the role of debt in "line always goes up" policy.
The Constitution of China performs better than the USA's.
yeah but it suck that they don't enforce that part of constiution until it to late
Bureaucracy is indeed an incomplete insurance condition. Perhaps citizens deserve the right to better government insurance standards.
yeah this happen when you make a promotion in the party based on GPD growth people just sending on useless things just to boost the GDP number
Grass is green
The East is Red
Housing speculation is actually bigger there than in America. It's not always true because the dictator said it. Not in China just as much in America.
Yeah, these people are crazy and have likely never been to China lol. Everyone and their grandma has been using housing as an investment tool in China for decades. Their minds would be blown if they went to China and spoke to an actual Chinese person and found out they have zero "class consciousness" and just want to make money and buy nice shit
China is the country I've found people to be even more obsessed about than the US.
Yeah people can't seem to be normal about it and it's a fairly new thing. I live there and people are so misinformed about it on both sides. Many people are starting to reject western propaganda so naturally they just gravitate toward Chinese propaganda and think they're immune to it somehow
Actually, there is a word missing in my post 😁 that changed the meaning significantly, although both are true.
It was supposed to be "people obsessed about money.(...)".
https://preview.redd.it/sd9zitvetv8g1.jpeg?width=1420&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=93c4b488a403051864e7be2539b61cbc94d43616
This is wrong. Speculative assets in China has not grown while personal liquid savings are rising nonstop. As of now, the combined personal savings of Chinese are at 24 trillions, more than the total of the US M2 money supply. Imagine living in a society where savings are going up while everything gets cheaper.
This is cultural to save money. Mostly due to tumultuous time of the cultural revolution.
Financial PTSD.
It’s an authoritarian country lol
Which has been making significant improvements to infrastructure and standard of living, while the USA is in decline in those areas, while becoming far more authoritarian lol.
To be honest, it's not rocket science to make improvements in China that was literal shithole not long ago and still needs tons of imporvements, but good for them! Also, while trump literally acts like an authoritarian leader, there are chances for shitshow to be reversed in the future by new government. At the same time, China literally becomes more and more authoritarian because it never stopped and there are almost zero chances this direction will change unfortunately.
China actually listens to citizen’s demands though. Doesn’t seem to be the case in the U.S.
Last i remember their citizens making demands there was a famous picture of a tank massacre. Where was that again?
Tiananmen Square
Shall I also bring up all the things the U.S. has done (both domestically and internationally) or are we done with this nonsense?
Are you claiming that the U.S. listens to the people’s demands? 🤣
??? Kent State shootings???
Ahahaha yeah, China listened so well that it censored negative comments in social media:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/world/asia/china-censorship-pessimism-despair.html
You know, the definition of listening is forbidding to actually complain /s
High speed rail? They now have a train system that is 500 years ahead of us.
Aaaand? If your life is defined solely by high speed rail, then life is very simple for you, but your comments ads zero value to the conversation.
Just saying that as an example of how China is making life better for its people while we decline.
No, it's an example of developing country vs developed. When your country has almost nothing and at some point starts to develop real fast, this what actually happens. But when you are developed and have tons of legacy stuff, its even harder to make changes + politics doesn't help. Another good example is Russia, where government services are highly digitized therefore almost zero need to submit or request documents in person or by mail which is very convinient. China, the US and espessially EU suck ass in that. Such gaps are inevitable.
It shows that you may have never lived in developing autocracy as well as in developed democracy.
Far more? In what way?
Freedom of the press is in decline. Trump has bullied the press and removed outlets from the whitehouse and the pentagon. The FCC has threatened news outlets and networks, such as them threatening Disney over Jimmy Kimmel. Stripped funding from PBS. Trump has rescinded visas over visas holder's speech.
Ice goons in the streets are arresting people without due process. National Guard troops occupying American cities.
I mean I know we're on Reddit we're supposed to pretend but nobody actually thinks the US has a decline in the standard of living over the last 25 years.
Living standards are rising in the US
yeah but you can agree with what he say
Back talking about China is untolerated.
Untolerated by whom? What? Lmao
In authoritarian countries constitution means nothing if it goes against the will of the dictator. I think this should be obvious.
Is everyone ignoring the fact that China is currently in a massive real estate/housing crisis? You know the one fuelled by MARKET SPECULATION.
That's the context of the quote
Better a real estate speculation crisis than an affordability crisis.
But the more important thing is that China is actually more free market with housing.
In China developers can build freely to match demand (and very often exceed it thus the crisis).
But in the US local government ban developers from building more housing to keep housing prices high.
Homeowners are rent seekers and they are much more effective in the US than in China which has a way freer market.
Did he fucking say that, like actually!? Damn, what a motherfucker
He did in fact say it.
what do you expect from a fromer real-estate developer
Funny that Pooh Bear would say that considering all the property that China owns for speculation in North America. I agree with the sentiment but the hypocrisy is real
This is probably in response to the fact that a huge portion of the country is locked in near permanent debt from buying apartments in complexes that'll never be finished thanks to their largest, corrupt real estate developer going belly up a while ago, as well as their large and growing homelessness problem.
The irony of lifting up Xie as peak socialist when he's the leader of one of the most hyper-capitalistic countries on earth is pretty funny
Have you seen Chinese housing speculators? The us is child’s play compared to the Chinese housing market.
Elderly home owners trying to gatekeep houses from the next generation. For their own greed.
After citizens united it doesn’t matter what we prefer it matters what the billionaires prefer.
Aren’t there landlords in China?
China does one thing well I will admit: they build
The United States need to build more. It’s going to be unpopular here but when you add rent control it makes housing supply decrease. See NYC multi-generational rent controlled apartments being handed down for 50 years.
Austria had a decent rent control system but it is heavily private and public funding. The only downside is you still might also wait several mounts for housing, but it is affordable.
90% of households own their own home in China.
70 year lease. They made home ownership incredibly cheap which fueled speculation. Sound familiar?
in reality, would you live in a condo for 70 years+ or sell it for a newer condo? and 70 yrs is theoredical, you can renew the lease if it actually reached the limit, no one is gonna evict you out
I think, my point, which I admit isn't clear, it's not the same as home ownership. Transfer of the lease is not like selling the property either.
Though eminent domain exists in America.
land is owned by government, so it's the closest thing you'll get
The lease is on the land not the home. You own the home once you buy it. No property taxes either.
Distinction without a difference. Can I take my home and move it?
Edit: most home "ownership" in China is in urban apartments.
You own the home just not the dirt it’s built on. No different to owning an apartment (as opposed to a house) in the west.
You go once every 70 years and pay like a few hundred dollars to renew the land lease. No different to paying property taxes (except China doesn’t have property taxes).
By the way the government in China is not legally allowed to order you to sell your property if they want to build on the land it’s on. (In the USA under eminent domain they can). This is why you see so many pictures online of roads in China going around tiny old houses, because the elderly people who own them don’t want to sell up and the government can’t make them.
Be for real
Distinction without a difference.
So no different than any other high density population
yeah and lot of them are empty and unfinished can you imagine down payment for a hose that don't build yet china did that
Hahaha complaining about the housing crisis in the USA is completely right but pretending china is any better is ridiculous, china have more cities in the top 10 less affordable cities in the world than the USA, they built ghost towns just for speculation, and a lot of working class people in Shanghai and Shenzhen are living in cages because that's the only thing they can afford.
Chinas housing market is absolutely horrendous, and they are some of the biggest speculators in the world.
They buy houses before they are even build just to try and stay ahead on the curve - and it’s biting them a lot pt. as many construction companies are going under.- plus the tofu drake stuff going on.
Buying houses before they are build is actually a pretty common thing in the world. In Europe this is common, but then again we have strong building codes and enforcements (this is what is missing in the USA) if not build right, the building company has to fix it.
Building codes in the USA are state wide. You have countries the size of 1 state. You can’t compare building codes in Florida ( Miami ) to even north Florida. Or Oregon for example.
What are you trying to say? I would understand a house build in Florida needs a different building code compared to Oregon, but its ok to not enforce it?
what do you mean "not enforce it" there are building inspectors who do just that, inspect the building against the code and lets building owner to force builder to fix it. Just as in EU.
What point are you trying to say that is actually tangent to the topic of discussion?
I think building codes in many parts of the US are a lot stronger than they are Europe. I mean I've lived in houses in Europe and houses in the U.S And your houses tend to be a lot more wonky When it comes to things like electricity and building materials Not to mention you people don't know how to put a freaking closet in the master bedroom.
This is wrong. Speculative assets in China has not grown while personal liquid savings are rising nonstop. As of now, the combined personal savings of Chinese are at 24 trillions, more than the total of the US M2 money supply. Imagine living in a society where savings are going up while everything gets cheaper.
https://preview.redd.it/ixt2tmsptv8g1.jpeg?width=1420&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1f9467a9a7ce015bcf13184ce9895739b9f8ab19
Dude, do you even read what you post? the WMP is also a banks (investors) pirtfolio. So you present a graph that is "personal wealth vs fund investment" graph which has nothing to do with housing - which chinese people buy for their own cash for speculative purposes.
If anything - your graph shows that Chinese people dont use sane methods of leaving saving cash to proffessionals and instead manage them by themselves (including buying tofu housing).
Just stahp.
Good luck in China. Let us know when you get there. please take all your friends and remember there is no coming back.
Cope this helps.
Years ago the CCP needed to raise money. They raised capital by "selling" 70 year leases to the populace. People started buying these as investments and thus spawned the "ghost cities" in China. China is afraid to crackdown because many people have retirement money backing these houses.
What are you talking about? Remember Evergrande? China let it fail
They didn’t "let it fail." They prevented a normal failure: capital controls, forced project takeovers, state-directed lending, censored panic, and protected politically sensitive stakeholders. That’s the opposite of letting markets clear.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/30/evergrande-collapse-china-property-developer-liquidation-details-impact
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c14g7r44566o
Your own links show the opposite of "letting it fail." Evergrande wasn’t allowed to go through a normal bankruptcy with price discovery and equal treatment of creditors. The state picked winners and losers, foreign bondholders were explicitly ‘hung out to dry’ while domestic political priorities were protected. That’s not market failure. That’s administrative loss allocation under the Chinese Communist Party.
Unless you are 180 years old neither you or I are old enough to even know what a 'normal' bankruptcy looks like. In the United States the average home price rebounded after one year according to the fed's statistics, i.e. the risky behavior resumed fairly quickly. In China they're saying home prices won't bottom out until 2027.
Sounds like you're upset that they didn't throw a bunch of Chinese citizens out on the street
Again you said that "they let it fail". You are admitting that didn't happen.
That doesn’t make your point stronger. it dodges it. "Normal bankruptcy" doesn’t mean mass evictions; it means transparent insolvency and price discovery. We’ve seen that plenty of times in our lifetimes. Saying prices won’t bottom until 2027 just admits the unwind is being politically managed and stretched out. And pretending that’s the same as "not throwing people into the street" is pure emotional misdirection.
Except if they did what you suggest people would be thrown out on the street. I know the idea that a government works for the majority of its people rather than upholding some silly 19th century principle is alien to you but ok. Take it up with them IG
As a friendly reminder, China's ruling party is called Communist Party of China (CPC), not Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as western press and academia often frames it as.
Far from being a simple confusion, China's Communist Party takes its name out of the internationalist approach seekt by the Comintern back in the day. From Terms of Admission into Communist International, as adopted by the First Congress of the Communist International:
Similarly, the adoption of a wrong name to refer to the CPC consists of a double edged sword: on the one hand, it seeks to reduce the ideological basis behind the party's name to a more ethno-centric view of said organization and, on the other hand, it seeks to assert authority over it by attempting to externally draw the conditions and parameters on which it provides the CPC recognition.
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As a friendly reminder, China's ruling party is called Communist Party of China (CPC), not Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as western press and academia often frames it as.
Far from being a simple confusion, China's Communist Party takes its name out of the internationalist approach seekt by the Comintern back in the day. From Terms of Admission into Communist International, as adopted by the First Congress of the Communist International:
Similarly, the adoption of a wrong name to refer to the CPC consists of a double edged sword: on the one hand, it seeks to reduce the ideological basis behind the party's name to a more ethno-centric view of said organization and, on the other hand, it seeks to assert authority over it by attempting to externally draw the conditions and parameters on which it provides the CPC recognition.
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The quote from trump was ripped out of context
The problem the United States says you need to agree with the right policy, but Trump is saying because unlike the United States China does not have a yearly property tax on house. How are you going to fund local government?
Free market
Chinese / Asians in general are a different story. They are usually less keen to invest into stock market / bonds / obligations and prefer things of material nature instead: land, property, gold. So, they do speculate, but at the same time the government regulates the market more closely. I don't think we can compare these two situations.
housing and property inside china is a huge speculative market, theyre both the same
Both are good, and I'm saying this as someone who is disgusted at most of Trump's actions. We can't have houses for all if we don't build them, and we can't house people if a good portion of the housing stock is owned by rich landlords.
Broken clock and all
Considering that China has huge speculation housing crysis, where entire blocks are built empty and are owned just as ever inflating asset.
Isn’t in China investing in properties like the main way for people to put their savings in? Hence those ghost cities in Chine where nobody lives.
Weird choice to put Xi in the meme. I think Austria would be much better in this context as they have some decent social housing rules.
Ghost cities are just the government actually being proactive. Look at the cities the media were calling ghost cities a decade ago and they are proper cities now
The chinese one 100%. Our housing 'solution' is BS.
Pretty much imposible to buy a home in any tier 1 city unless you are actually rich or simply bad at managing finances. Not to mention the fact that renting is actually cheaper in China if you can negotiate. China is a capitalist hellhole at the moment. Xi can say anything he want but he is still allowing rampant capitalism to ruin the lives of his people.
This is more complicated than most if this comment section implies.
I'm all for housing being regulated in order to reduce costs.
But that only works in a system where the government is gonna take care of you when you're old. Otherwise reducing home values hurts one of the most accessible appreciating assets on the American economy.
How many people fund their retirement by selling or renting their home they paid off over 30 years and moving into a condo or something cheaper. Its a lot.
China’s housing sector is currently in crisis as it is most families’ largest asset. China has a very large over-supply of housing due to speculative over-building and it also now has an obviously declining population. People have mortgages and the resale value of their homes has now declined by >30% and more. In a more politically active country there would have been more demonstrations (there have been some).
In China, the government itself has used apartments as a form of speculation for decades now. Conspiring with developers, they sell land to build more units than anyone needs and pitch these properties as investments. The result is a third of local government revenue - more in some provinces - came from land sales as of https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/2024/chinese-local-governments-reliance-land-revenue-drops-property-downturn. )
Upper middle class Chinese people may own 3 apartments, sold under the premise that prices will always go up. ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0264275118318201 )
Now that there are enough empty homes in China to house all of Germany, prices have been falling rapidly, Xi's admitting this wasn't the best idea. It hasn't even fixed homelessness either - these investors don't want the poor migrants from outside the local Hukou lowering their land value ( https://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12324 ) Nobody does capitalism worse than a corrupt nominally socialist government.
So… Trump isn’t really correct.
The USA has built more housing.
The price of housing hasn’t gone down.
The quality of housing has.
Housing has not become more available.
Trump is objectively true. Building more houses tips the balance of supply and demand.
He is right, but it doesnt mean it shouldn't be done. Cheaper houses would only be good, because people don't own multiple houses and don't speculate with their houses.
I agree and I had this debate with fellow landlords in the UK (before I sold my business and left).
For long-term benefit of the nation, you NEED to build more houses and at a rate that meets the demand.
What are with all the libs saying the dumbest shit and actively arguing against their own interests.
Like lmfao.
As a home owner, I don’t care if the value of my house goes down. Why would it? It means less taxes for me. My house is for living in, not to make money off of.
China, they could release a law what restrict housing market and landlords via given, selling house per hand only. While USA cant do shit about cause there is a huge lobbist power what will protect a today situation by all cost. So tramp just say" i give more loans to landlords conglomerate as well increase national debt by other 500b because i can. 1000Trillion to israel."
Chinese housing is built with the intention of filling it as they become more urbanized
400m in poverty in one of these countries.
Houses aren't free in either.
lächerlich, dass Xi das sagt, wenn er einen guten Teil des Wirtschaftswachstums auf Bauprojekten aufbaut, um sie dann wieder abzureißen.
The first two parts of what Donald said is true (such a huge achievement for him, I know), but that's exactly why we need to build more in whatever country you're in. If you have a housing crisis, build some houses
To all the westerners here in this bubble, please take a plane ticket with your commie loser friends and don't come back.
Says the professional land lord and scoundrel president of ours.
China went through a MASSIVE housing crisis
Not counting the tofu dregs of companies cutting corners to save money,
The social norm of China is have your own place, and when companies see people desperate for housing, they promised it, the Chinese people would pre-buy apartments before the ground was even broke. The company would use the money to buy land, use that land for more loans to buy more land, use that more land to get more loans, and so on.
They "built" the apartments, but the company often went bust, predictedly, and the Chinese people who bought the apartments are left with an empty husk, if not an empty plot where they said they would build it.
America has ghost towns from towns being abandoned, China has ghost CITIES of unfinished apartment complexes, hundreds of meters high, all empty. And the Chinese people who bought in were left with 0 return from their purchase of the promise of an apartment.
Just because Xi said the obvious that homes are meant to be lived in doesn't nullify the housing crisis China is in
Funny that China has housing bubble even bigger than in US.
Is this an actual quote from Trump? He says stupid stuff but idk
Get rid of banks and watch the chaos.
i agreed with xi but this is his speech after china housing bobble brust
Comparing China to the US like comparing your slightly less abusive uncle to the full blown pedophile uncle on 5 Guinness.
did trump actually say that because that's kind of insane.
though i guess he is the worst president in history
If you make sure only rich people can buy those houses, you can even consolidate their wealth.
Maybe houses are overinflated anyways and th price should go down, it’ll be shit for me since I just bought one and I’d be paying a higher price than it’s worth, but you’re not hurting a boomer who bought it for 60k 50 years ago, and I’d rather have more young people getting homes.
I like the concept but housing is 25% of China's GDP. (It was 32 percent before the bubble collapsed). It's only 18% of America's GDP. Both countries speculate on housing
Trump in this context says
“There’s 2 thoughts on housing”…
“Houses are very valuable, it’s a big part of their networth” … “I don’t want to know those numbers down”
“at the same time I want to make it possible for young people out there and other people to buy a house”
This is in relation to Trump declaring a national emergency on housing….
I understand y’all have a bias against this country, how it operates, and the current administration; But at least be honest people.
You socialists have some good points every so often, don’t ruin it with nonsense like this that is created to polarize people. Or don’t; This is likely an echo chamber anyways.
In the next sentence he says housing should be affordable. The way this things are quoted is disinforms everyone
There are legitimate reasons to be wary of making house prices fall. Everyone who bought the house when it was super expensive will now have an enormous loan and they cant pay it off by selling the house.
This isnt good, you can argue its a bandaid that needs to be ripped off, but its not good.
It’s kinda funny because china has a huge Realestate speculation market. More wealth is in Realestate than stocks for example
A house is a liability
The chief difference here is that Xi still has a filter, whereas Trump's decline has advanced too far and he says anything that comes into his head.
I'm quite certain Xi is well-aware that if he cracks down too hard on the housing bubble, millions of his citizens will see the numbers go down and blame him. Just as Trump admits here.
Another difference I suppose is that Xi still has the intellectual capacity to think he can address that and bring the problems in his society into balance. Whereas Trump's wits have left him and he's taking one day at a time just hoping not to be found out before he dies.
You know there is this thing about Putin, that if something bad locally is happening people will ask for president's help, and if it gets out of hand he comes and fix local corrupt politicians.
The irony is that these issues are often systematic and coming as direct order or at least consequence of central decisions, Putin's decisions. The phenomen some of you may call as "scapegoating"
This is the same for China, their entire housing crisis isn't because magic happened, it was very precisely inducted by government itself. You need to own house to be considered local amd have, funny privileges like idk, school for your kids. Housing is worth speculating in because heavy government control doesn't really allow people to put their money elsewhere, and local government shuffling land in order to artificially boost their budgets because they have GDP quotas from central government is cherry on the top.
Idk if you guys are aware, that when compared to USA, in China money often isn't enough to buy a house. Good districts will have literally loteries (edit I got hiccup and accidentally clicked "send" half way through writing...). The point being, Xi saying what he does is pure cynical populistic hypocrisy. Considering structural differences and history of crisis in both countries it's simply stupid to put both of these guys next to eachother, and try to make a point other that the fact that Trump may not be right in his head.
This is funny because in practice china follows the “Trump” policy more
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_property_sector_crisis_(2020–present)
Huuuh? Why is Op using China to make this point? China is one of the biggest housing speculators in town. Evergrande went bankrupt because of its housing speculation blew up in its face and they took a whole bunch of people down with them. China literally IS NOT the one to be using to make this point about housing policy.
At least Trump telling truth.
A house is only worth something when you sell it. But boomers will also say they want to age in place. So they want their homes to be good for sale but they also plan to not sell.
Houses in China though are 100% viewed as the place to protect your wealth, ironically.
The one where supply meets demand, and prices are not decided by politicians but the markets ability to meet said demand. Free markets are the future
The irony is that in China there absolutely are entire housing buildings that are built for the sole purpose of selling off in the future…..
Property speculation is literally their main way to play markets seeing as their stock market is all government controlled and capped and cryptocurrency trading is illegal…..
How silly can this subreddit be when it comes to China. They don’t have a housing policy for god’s sake. That was a “real estate development “ policy. Period. Nothing to compare! You genius!
This is a clear black and white issue and the truth definitely doesn’t lie somewhere in between. /s
Hmm, and still it's China where people invest everything they got into housing with a hope it'll be worth more. Not to mention that they build in the middle of nowhere, where nobody wants it and it turns to shit ghost town.
Crazy how China views housing. We are backwards.
Meanwhile, entire neighborhoods in China are being demolished because of speculation.
They are also being demolished because they are unlivable.
Its not inconsistent, as the whole reason behind Xi making that speech is because of the crazy property market in China.
Yeah, after it´s gotten so bad that they couldn´t hide it anymore.
source?
you can google it poor quality construction is well know in china
again, source?
True but at least they are actually building housing. They just need to crack down and retrofit tofu dregs. Not that American housing is of particularly high quality either…
You cannot retrofit tofu dreg, it`s whole purpose is to cash in the maximum amount of money for oneself and the rest is used to pretend something has been constructed. Its high scale corruption, not just poor quality.
This is fun. Chinese domestic investors speculating on houses have made Americans look like amateurs.
You say this as if Xi Jinping practices what he preaches. Look no further than Serpentza and Laowhy86 for examples of China using real estate as a de facto investment with no intent of maintaining, much less inhabiting, the housing one uses as an investment.
If your sources on China are those two well-known anti-China racist YouTubers, I bet you didn’t go to college and have never been told by a professor that even Wikipedia can’t be used as a citation, let alone YouTube videos. And your life is just sad if you don’t even have a college degree LMAO.
BSc. Years ago.
In physics class, I’d cite papers, because papers have incentive to tell the truth when useful to engineering that has to deliver the facts to clients with more incentive to genuinely seek them and less to ignore them in favour of their agenda.
By comparison, political “science” is more emotionally charged at the expense of factuality on the best of days. I’m not sure what political “science” has to say about China, but I do know that it’s a notoriously non-transparent society to the point where direct evidence is more limited (though serpentza and laowhy86 at least have video evidence backing up their worldview, including of these ghost cities and poorly maintained housing structures), and circumstantial evidence sometimes has to supplement it. And at this point, when it comes to “interpreting” said circumstantial evidence I’d sooner trust people who’ve been there, who’ve mingled with the locals, documented their time there, etc… than any detractors of theirs who merely assert them to be racist without elaborating, or some mainstream media that advertises products made in China.
Spoken like someone who's never had to cite a source in their life. That is literally Day 1 stuff. You clearly lack basic academic training lol.
So it’s better for everyone if we build more homes? Imagine the profits one can make, oh wait zoning laws said no
Inflation goes up, wages stagnate, you can afford the new homes, new cars are more expensive, but hey, at least your “net worth” is up…. It’s a scam to keep people happy while people are miserable.