China Builds a Ghost Town

[marmar]

from the Infrastructurist:






China isn’t having any trouble getting people to ride its bullet trains, but it’s having a devil of a time attracting them into a brand new city. The Kangbashi New Area of Ordos, in Inner Mongolia, offers an impressive network of homes, roadways, offices, and public attractions all built within the past five years. The aerial view alone (above, via web urbanist) is a sight to behold. The Ordos city government moved into the sparkling new district, and roughly a million residents were supposed to follow suit.

Instead, as Al-Jazeera English reported back in fall 2009, Kangbashi is utterly empty. That remained the case by the time Time got there, with a camera ready to capture images of the city’s uninhabited splendor, the following spring:

Only a handful of cars drive down Kangbashi’s multilane highways, a few government offices are open during the day and an occasional pedestrian, appearing like a hallucination, can be seen trudging down a sidewalk, like a lone survivor of some horror-movie apocalypse.

This billion-dollar, unfulfilled vision has inspired fears of a new property bubble, writes the New York Times, and the scariest thing is that Kangbashi might not be unique:

Analysts estimate there could be as many as a dozen other Chinese cities just like Ordos, with sprawling ghost town annexes. In the southern city of Kunming, for example, a nearly 40-square-mile area called Chenggong has raised alarms because of similarly deserted roads, high-rises and government offices. And in Tianjin, in the northeast, the city spent lavishly on a huge district festooned with golf courses, hot springs and thousands of villas that are still empty five years after completion.

Strangely, plenty of people have purchased property in Kangbashi — they’re just not living in it (or, I presume, renting it). So instead of a true real estate problem, what Kangbashi appears to have is more of a planning problem, the Wall Street Journal wrote last May. For one thing, the new district is roughly 15 miles from the old center. With few residents in the area, restaurants and other services can’t survive, creating a troublesome cycle, since people aren’t attracted to areas without services.

On the plus side, I bet the traffic moves really well.


http://www.infrastructurist.com/2011/01/14/china-builds-a-ghost-town/

[notesdev]

1. It ain't just one

China has been building these empty cities all over the country.

You thought we had a housing bubble, China has entire cities which exist basically as vaporware investment vehicles. What's property in an abandoned city worth? It's going to be real nasty for them when this blows up, and it's doubtful we will escape the effects here.

[Johonny]

2. I don't think you purchased property

I thought in China the best you could do is buy the lease to the land. The Party owns all the land still.

[patricia92243]

3. I don't understand why??? China is purportadly over-crowded, so why wouldn't people jump at the

chance of a new home.

[Kip Humphrey]

4. a city without jobs = a city without people

[randr]

5. They should invite all the peoples displaced by global warming