That's always been my attitude. Yet the property taxes on the house I've lived in for 35 years keep going up based on what somebody else would pay for it if I sold it. Paying tax on the money I make if I ever do sell the house would make sense to me, but until that ever happens I'm being taxed on a number determined by real estate speculators. So what the actual fuck?
this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2025
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a great example of this country saying something and not doing anything resembling the idea at all. china has one of the most fucked real estate markets in the world. chinese speculation is notorious for fueling insane projects that fall apart, or wiping out working class communities with gentrification and displacing millions. the money pours into vietnam and cambodia where families lose their savings "investing in a condo" that hasn't been built yet. china is a country run by an ultra capitalist mafia.
they built trains which are great. im a leftist too. but you guys, holy fuck.
When I was there some 10 years ago, they were building entire cities that no one wanted to live in. Really weird seeing uninhabited downtown Chicago sized places in the distance.
Chinese property prices have been in continual decline for the past three years, when the bubble popped and the government has done little to incentivise further builds and mania.
Coupled with the aging population and falling birthrates, the mechanics simply aren’t there for it to happen again - so although Xi’s quote dates back to 2016 - it is very much true now in China.
There has been a sharp turn in national investment towards high-tech manufacturing, driven by EVs and associated industries, as the next engine for economic growth and prosperity.
Whether or not that actually plays out as intended is a seperate matter, but that’s really outside the scope of this discussion.
fueling insane projects that fall apart, or wiping out working class communities with gentrification and displacing millions.
LOL mr 'leftist' here regurgitating western propaganda.
Sure that terrible real estate market has resulted in the terrible situation that only 93% of people OWN their house.
I live in Asia and the real estate market in many of these cities is not viable. you rent
' Asia' can be a lot of countries, probably some western colony/vasal state if you're so vague about it.
93% is 93%
You mean their "dwelling", probably (includes houses and apartments). 93% def don't live in single-family homes.
That quote gave me whiplash as soon as I read who and when it was from.
China does many things wrong but housing isn't one of them.
Americans will decry the American housing crisis and simultaneously mock China for over production of housing which caused a housing price crash.
"I can't afford a house!" "China is so stupid, they have empty cities."
I don't knock them for over production, but build quality is a more common problem that I saw. Also not a fan of not being able to own the apartment, but their availability is dope. Their public transit is also dope, both inter and intra city transit.
Take a look at the build quality of $500,000 homes that are being built in the US today. They are absolute shit with some sparkly trim that stays nice long enough to distract you until the warranty expires.
$500k house with shitty laminate floors and MDF trim lmfao spoiler alert it's because the builders only care about money, craftsmanship is dead.
And that's more in line with the builds I saw over in China. I'm not defending our build quality (certainly not post 08 when a lot of construction companies went down or merged).
definitely way higher incidence of build quality issues than the US but at most they seem to be at least as rare as US car crashes
I dunno, it was almost an every building thing I saw. We had a floating ceiling grate collapse all along our walkway in the middle of the day. Big rusty snarled mess.
The current Chinese housing crisis was not caused by building homes for people to live in, it was caused by developers selling homes that didn’t exist with the empty promise that the would totally, definitely be built. Then the homes were never built for humans to actually live in.
The joke of the "China is building empty cities" mythology is in how quickly they filled up with people. So you had this echoing "New City is empty!" scandal that reverberated all the way from Fujian to Qinghai.
There was a problem of housing speculation, as investors tried to get out ahead of the building frenzy. But the state government intervened to curb that practice. There was a problem of shady contractors and construction crews shaving quality for profit, even leading to a couple of high profile building collapses. But the state government sent out investigators, prosecuted delinquents, and provided restitution to the injured and defrauded. There was a problem of matching the housing stock to the available employment, particularly during the economic slowdown in the wake of SARS in the early '00s and then COVID in '19. But the state government intervened to quarantine, vaccinate, and restabilize the local economies.
Curiously, the US loves to report on the crises. We never like to talk about the recoveries. Instead, you get this doggedly fixation on pivotal moments in the past that endure long after they are relevant. It would be like reading newspapers and hearing radio about Florida, where everyone brought up the '08 Housing Crash at every opportunity. They dogmatically insisted that real estate prices can't recover, even in the middle of a construction boom and new speculation bubble a decade later.
This misinformation that persists in any kind of conversation is deafening. It's gotten to the point that some random guy can do a livestream YouTube vacation blog in Chengdu and western critics lose their fucking minds in disbelief. Like, the very idea that everyone in the country isn't still living in 1980s levels of rural poverty is entirely unimaginable.
They're building infrastructure. Infrastructure enables economic growth.
The US builds nothing but more luxury homes, casinos and sports stadiums.... and whatever fast food trend is growing.
I know it's not quite that simple, but it sure feels like it sometimes.
I know it’s not quite that simple,
It's kinda worse than that. The US financialized the luxury homes and casinos and sports stadiums. So they're paying a vig on a vig to give a tiny minority the 1980s conception of luxury.
Enormous sums of money just get recirculated into speculative investment. This has created the cryptocurrency surge - yet another layer of speculative investment - and the ballooning investment in AI as a means of automating marketing and debt collection.
We've done the Economy That Just Makes Paperclips except without the paperclips.
Tax the land
This is the central issue to Australia's housing affordability and availability crisis
Yup, and with more than two decades of rat-box quality appartments sold primarily as investment vehicles have pushed first-home further and further out - placing a massive burden on infrastructure to keep up.
The problem is, the vast majority of our politicians are heavily invested into the property market and are therefore disincentivised to do anything substantial to fix it.
Even those with only one property to their name, wouldn’t want to do anything substantial to cause property values to decline. They are in the unenviable position of trying to freeze property prices where they currently are for the next ~50 years or so and let society catch up in terms of buying power.
It’s definitely doable, but the risks of fucking it up greatly out-weigh the potential successes, so no one really seems willing to pick up the mantle.
Slow and phased changes to tax legislation to remove incentives with suitable grace and transition periods for people to offload assets would see a dramatic improvement to property prices for buyers. The impact on sellers would be determined by the market but we could expect lower prices due to an influx of volume.
The other issue is that Australia's economy is held up by big banks which are in turn propped up by their mortgage debts. A reduction to property values will see a downturn on the ASX. All the more reason for Australia to reinvigorate its manufacturing footprint and diversify its economics.
Getting rich off of a property portfolio is lazy and unproductive. Try operating a business that is useful to someone or pushing the boundary of innovation. Instead we have all those boomers out there filing away their monthly statements from their property manager saying "YoU JuSt GoTtA WoRk hArDeR!" What a joke.
The problem is that any dramatic fall in house prices risks an absolute calamity economically as innocent people who are only working to pay off the roof over their heads find themselves underwater on their mortgage.
Bankruptcies are painful not just economically, but also socially and mentally - which is why we really need to ‘thread the needle’ in such a way that housing costs stagnate for multiple generations, rather than drastically fall backwards.
One other option would be to allow home owners to somehow claim primary/residential losses against their income tax - but that could likely be an imperfect solution that would probably face too many headwinds politically to ever pass.
But the most obvious, low hanging fruit would be to roll-back Howard-era changes to Negative Gearing and Capital Gains benefits, as well as imposing restrictions on who can buy residential properties in Australia (eg. require a PR to be able to purchase a primary place of residence, citizenship to purchase additional properties).
The problem though is that whichever political party would ever be brave enough to pass this legislation (let’s be honest, it would only ever be Labor and not the LNP), risks being absolutely slaughtered in the media, losing the subsequent election, only to have the incoming government undo said changes.
I hate to say this, but there are many things that China is doing right.
I dunno why you have to hate saying that; China and the Chinese govt are doing freaking awesome things that the world should envy, and they deserves lavish praise. Period. And I’m speaking as a red blooded Texan.
They’re into some shit, too. And have problems, including major ones conflated with the real estate crisis.
It can be both. Westerners don’t have to be walking stereotypes that ponder ‘China evil’ with every other thought, like Lemmygrad seems to think. I mean, what leg to I have to stand on?
It doesn’t mean we have to just accept the human rights violations or papered over crises or whatever either.
Upvote for reasonableness.
Let's not ignore that to get to this point, they had to kill most of the landlords, and then keep the rest of the industry under the heavy boot of the state.
Not to say it was the wrong thing to do, but it wasn't policy alone that made China a cheap place to live.
All Chinese tier 1 and 2 cities face the same issue as US. People can't afford to buy housing on their income unless families help out.
And yet their home ownership is still greater than 90%. Ownership is for your lifetime without property tax. Yes families work together to afford homes but it is normal in asian cultures to live with your family for a long time. I wouldn't call their housing situation comparable to the US.
93% actually.
Land of opportunity and freedom: 67%
If the whole extended family lives together then their situation isn't really the same either
Remember when Mao executed landlords?
He seemed crazy at the time.
I mean, he was crazy, for that and many other reasons. It's not like all landlords are money-grubbing greedy fucks with no other marketable skills. I'm sure many could've transitioned tp normal work just fine.
... Though the VCs buying up entire city blocks of houses at a time? Yea, they can be strung up from the trees...
Do you truly, actually, believe that the reign of Mao was a net positive?
No, just that his stance on landlords may be worth revisiting.
Adam Smith was also anti-landlord, FWIW.
Mao wasn't even the one who executed landlords. He just never really cracked down on the pissed off serfs running kangaroo courts on the people who wronged them.