>Today, the real-estate situation in Ordos has turned macabre. Video billboards along the city's major roadways display mug shots of fugitive developers who have skipped town, fleeing their debts. There are rumors about the dynamiting of buildings in Kangbashi: about owners of unoccupied apartment towers who hope to create value through destruction, reselling freshly cleared land to new investors.
The NYT piece itself is much more carefully hedged. The TL;DR by the reporter: "IN SHORT, ORDOS is not empty, but it is odd"
A real estate bust implies that investors lost money but not necessarily a ghost town. Anyway the Ordos story was a lot more market driven than the other ones: for a while when coal price was dear Ordos boasted the highest per capita income in all of China. Also land is a lot cheaper in this unpopulated area.
Developers in China that focus on 2nd and 3rd tier cities are doing very poorly right now. The problem is that property became a speculative investment and an inflation hedge, but true demand has yet to materialize. The people who need housing can't afford these apartments, those that can afford them don't need to live there. Ugh.
Yeah they need the property tax real bad so at least investors will be incentivized to rent out their property instead of keeping their apartments vacant.
China is a big place, and the original article is a puff peice. I could see all the places described here growing furiously, while dozens more cities are lying empty and abandoned.
http://gizmodo.com/4-instant-cities-that-are-still-completel...
Quote:
>Today, the real-estate situation in Ordos has turned macabre. Video billboards along the city's major roadways display mug shots of fugitive developers who have skipped town, fleeing their debts. There are rumors about the dynamiting of buildings in Kangbashi: about owners of unoccupied apartment towers who hope to create value through destruction, reselling freshly cleared land to new investors.