this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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Yeah, that's not what China did. They tried to manufacture demand. If you wanted to make housing affordable for all you build where there's demand.
The large majority of Chinese ghost cities became populated, because that's how long term planning works
While that may be true, though I don't know, I do know that they didn't fix the cost of housing in their country.
They have a nationwide homeownership rate between 90% and 95%. I think they're doing just fine.
That's not what the citizens are saying.
You mean that's not what Western media is accentuating about what some citizens are saying? China has a billion people with home ownerships rates that high. But even that high, it's still millions of people who don't own their homes, and most of them are in the big cities. It's not hard to find people who will complain about the cost of housing so you can write a news article that pretends that this is a problem for all citizens.
It's not. It's far and away a better situation in China than in the US.
Well if your data is coming from the Chinese government it's not trustworthy either. I notice you're providing a lot of statistics without sources. I think that's because you know nobody is going to believe those incredible numbers if they come from the CCP.
Cool story, roofus.
Source: https://dash.harvard.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/d07a648e-b821-4485-b59f-09f11679e500/content
American Economic Association's Journal of Economic Perspectives
That source kind of points to previously state and implied issues though. Where there is actual demand to live, housing pricing is increasing astronomically, but the buying of ghost investment property in low demand cities is where the money is flowing.
The use of property as investment in China, last I heard on the subject, is largely because of the lack of other investment vehicles as well.
So it's not buying themselves, and their kids a house to live in. Any more than a US based 401k is buying stocks to run a business. It's mostly a speculative comoditity market. Where they hope to sale the ownership of a thing they have never had in person to someone else that will probably never have in person.
Both seem kind of farcical on the whole tbh but what do I know
Do you know that between 90% and and 95% of people in China own the homes they live in? Because that sort of changes everything about the conversation.
The CPC incentivized the creation of ghost cities as part of their plan to get ahead of housing demand, which seems to have been successful considering the ghost cities have filled up.
Yes, there have been people in China that wanted to use housing as a speculative investment, which is what American economists believe everyone should do. But the CPC doesn't govern based on what's most profitable for a small group of speculative investors, so they have been popping their own housing bubble and both American economists and Chinese speculators go to Western media and proclaim how broken the Chinese economy is.
And still, 90% to 95% of Chinese people own the homes they live in.
Makes sense, right, since they're a country run by a communist party? The reason there aren't asset classes to invest in for retail investors in China is because China isn't focused on creating a speculative investment market to produce a path from working class to bourgeoisie through passive income, pump-and-dump schemes, insider trading, or dumb luck.
They're focused on ending poverty and meeting the needs of a billion people.
Honestly even with the community land trust model that real estate has in China (the land is actually leased from the state) that is a really awesome metric.