| ▲ | seanmcdirmid 2 hours ago | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
> China treats housing primarily as providing a place for people to live, not a speculative asset. Where and who did you get this idea from? Speculation in China makes speculation in the USA look like child’s play. Speculation is such a huge part of China’s housing economy that the government has to constantly fight against it, or for it when they fight too hard and the economy starts to teeter, and then fight hard against it again when normal people can’t compete in a market full if Wenzhou housewives. I mean, that even Wenzhou housewife is still a meme for property speculator should give you a clue. The government only ever tolerated speculation in the first place because it used housing as a jobs program for a huge under employed rural population. Whatever the USA does to fix its problem, copying China’s problems isn’t going to help, and will actually make things worse. HSR isn’t used for commuting in China like the Shinkansen is used for commuting in Japan. It just isn’t very viable to transit from an HSR station to your job, HSR stations aren’t very central even in tier one cities. Example: you work in Beijing chaoyang and want to live in cheaper hebei, let’s say right on the HSR line so let’s not count commute times on your home end. But just getting from Beijing South to…anywhere let alone chaoyang (and chaoyang is huge, let’s say the CBD just for kicks), is going to take an hour or two even with the subway in place. What we need to copy from China is there ability to get projects done on time and on budget. But everything else…china has its own problems that it’s still working on. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | jmyeet 2 hours ago | parent [-] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
> Where and who did you get this idea from? Speculation in China makes speculation in the USA look like child’s play. This information is so out of date it borders on misinformation. China's real estate market "crashed" at least 5 years ago at this point. And it didn't just crash in the same way that, say, the Toronto condo market has crashed. It crashed because the government burst the bubble, deliberately, to make housing a priority not an investment. Put another way, like I said above, housing people was made a priority over investor returns. > HSR isn’t used for commuting in China China's HSR now has over 4 billion passenger movements a year [1]. It's largely an alternative to short=to-medium distance air travel eg Beijing to Shanghai is ~1200km, roughly equivalent to Chicago to NYC. What's commuting got to do with it? Are you comparing to Japan where people might live 2 hours commute away from work for various reasons? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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