The thought has seriously crossed my mind. Detroit looks like you could buy a cheap piece of land and build a house from scavenged materials if you were willing to do the scavenging.
Not even remotely. This is what runaway lending to speculators gets you. See also Ghost estate - Wikipedia
Ah, to clarify. Generally, Americans at least can get a 1 month or 3 month tourist visa to China. These can be extended in country for additional months.
A work visa is typically good for 1 year.
Foreigners have freedom to make their own living arrangements. There are a few off limit places. The fact is most foreigners rely upon their employers to provide housing, but this is not a requirement.
Your second paragraph is more accurate
Actually, to the OP, one thing china does not have is a shortage of people. If it’s a truly abanded ghost city, then it is uninhabitable. Or at least uninhabitable by a first world city slicker.
And they REALLY don’t have a shortage of people who can eventually be persuaded to live in or near Shanghai or Guangdong. Inner Mongolia? That’s a hard sell. Office space in these new ghost cities is around $70/month, but not many people aspire to live on the edge of the Gobi Desert.
How inhabitable are those buildings we’re seeing in pictures of Ordos? They look to be in good condition but if I’m understanding the situation right, they’ve been sitting unoccupied for ten years.
If the Chinese government made some kind of push to get people to move to Ordos - offering some kind of financial incentive or something - would the city actually be able to handle an influx of new resident?
My point is that those are not empty buildings with no people. Rent is $70/month but these places are inhabited. If they are truly empty, then those buildings are uninhabitable.
China cost of capital can be very abnormal. So, you do have cases where apartment blocks can be empty because whoever owns it doesn’t have any real cost. But big empty cities? No way.
Erdos plain is effectively the Gobi Desert. And the cashmere money has led to some really stupid building (see point about cost of capital). But there are people that live there.
Just took the train from Jinan to Shanghai today, and thought about this thread. West Jinan is construction project crazy, with miles and miles of really tall apartment buildings, mostly under construction, but a lot of the finished ones have little evidence of people living in them. I could swear I saw tumbleweeds in some of those developments. West Jinan literally has more skyscraper apartment buildings than cars, and Jinan is one car-loving city. And I saw plenty more empty-looking complexes with dozens of 40-story apartment buildings on the way south, including some just outside of Shanghai. Is this a housing bubble in slow motion?
Though not GQ factual-My theory about the vacant Chinese cities is that they are meant to allow orderly evacuation of the Chinese coastal areas when the sea level rises and inundates them.
(You saw it here first!)
Have you ever driven in China? This is the country where they had a three day traffic jam. Orderly evacuations are not going to happen.
China does do a lot to promote development inland, but not due to climate change. It’s about reducing strategic vulnerabilities and spreading economic growth a little evenly.
I would be more concerned about their building codes. Modern Chinese construction standards seem interesting: last year, whilst trying to find out why the US has rather more fire incidents than other places ( despite their very high standards of safety ) I saw a picture of a new block in China with the front face lying collapsed in a single sheet on the ground.
Coincidentally, in January I read about the Gongchen Tower, a kind of gatehouse, burnt down. However it was 600-years-old, which implies excellent building.
The lesson, as always, is Old is Better than New.
Several light fixtures in my apartment building–including one in my bathroom and one inside the main door–drip or gush water. I don’t see that very often in America. It’s occurred to me more than once that practical concerns take a backseat to political ones in a lot of construction projects here.
60 Minutes did a feature on this facet of China last spring: China's real estate bubble - CBS News