Love too be every western media outlet, that at some point in the last ten years, has said the entire country of China, with over a billion inhabitants, is just a giant real estate ponzi scheme that will surely implode any day now. Love to be very correct and not coping with anything.
As if all of Canada isn’t a giant real estate ponzi scheme at this point. There’s an empty tract of land in my area that sold for like half a million a few years ago, and it’s probably going to sell for $800k right now. It’s not even in a nice location.
a giant real estate ponzi scheme
Remind me again, what happened in Albania after it became capitalist?
somebody actually remind him because i dont know what happened with the albanian real estate market
American would instead build Suburb Hell #172818 where all services are 10 mile apart at minimum and pedestrians forfeits their human rights.
Miles of rows of unaffordable, bank-owned McMansions complete with double-wide driveways to fit multiple F-150s, no sidewalks, and just enough distance to prevent anyone from forming any sort of community. The only nearby common space is a church parking lot and a Wendy’s with a double lane drive thru.
Development was subsidized by the local government and their solution to their growing homelessness problem is still to arrest everyone and make all flat surfaces as uncomfortable as possible.
Top recreational activities include xanax and drunkenly fighting with other parents at your kid’s little league baseball game.
BRO THIS IS WHAT IVE BEEN PUSHING FOR
i want you fucking idiots on twitter shouting about how awesome china is, USE china as collateral against the imperialists similar to the boom of progress in america that existed PURELY because of the USSR.
CHINA, GHOST CITIES, GOOD, TWEET
Damn, I’d love to have a gov’t that built subways and other transit way out where before they were needed. What foresight!
Almost like industrial/post industrial life exists along the transportation infrastructure and you can’t really build it wrong as people will naturally develop around the infrastructure.
Isn’t that what Joe Biden is doing? Make everything about a competition with PRC.
Trick Biden into fast tracking Communism by making it a competition on who does communism the best
HyperdriveCity Nebraska would be a disaster to realize.
For the space, someone will complain, there’s no avoiding it. Developers wont work if they cant make a profit, and that goes all the way down that chain. Ballooning prices so rents will never be $200 because everyone sees green and wants their piece.
The prices of goods would be gouged if they knew where it was going. “200 palettes of drywall to the middle of nowhere? That’s 20% extra with a 15% delivery markup.”
So the land could’ve been bought cheap, but developers ran the budget through the roof, so it’ll be just as expensive to build anywhere. The developer has to make a profit, so rental units are reconfigured to make more profit. Stores likely wont move in if there’s no chance to make a profit, and while units are $2000/month now, who’s making that much to live there? Certainly not the mall employees. So luxury rentals will sit empty. The malls will be empty because such a big city would have half-baked infrastructure because america. No one will go there, shop there, live there. The development will be a failure.
Then walmart will buy it up to make a company town at a steep discount.
Might be worth mentioning that a bunch of these Chinese supercities are on the coast. Nebraska is… not.
If you really want to turn, say, Omaha into a Supercity, the best approach is to do what Americans did a century ago to make it a Regular City. Build more rail infrastructure through it. Build more power and communication infrastructure through it. Chattanooga’s municipal fiber plan transformed the city by offering businesses and residents a cheap and reliable utility. Austin’s Google Fiber plan achieved similar results. Las Vegas grew up alongside the Hoover Dam (a big reason why it has so much relatively-cheap water and electricity). Houston’s the 3rd largest city in the country because it has a port that can survive a hurricane and a bunch of its neighbors don’t. Dallas? Rail. Chicago? Rail and canals that link up the Great Lakes. New York? Boston? LA? San Fransisco? All big port cities.
All these cities are a consequence of their business infrastructure. And if you go down the line on Chinese cities - from Hong Kong to Shanghai to Beijing to Taipei - they all tell the same story. Junctures of critical infrastructure attract people like a magnet.
How do new supercities get built? Typically, by staging a big transportation hub in their center.
All the consumerist crap comes on later. It’s the decorative fringe around an industrial core.
Novosibirsk, one of the largest Russian cities, was built literally around railway bridge and station.
Would building a high speed rail line (plus a bridge if needed) between two medium/large cities in the US work, if the new city could be created in between with a station?
A lot of couples work in two different cities and often both deal with hellish commutes. I think they’d be willing to move to an apartment to avoid that.
I’m an occasional player of Cities Skylines and I love the concept of building the city around the transportation network and not the other way around. I’m not very good at the game so I’m still just kind of fucking around but the idea makes so much sense to me. I’ve had a hard time trying to squeeze in a rail transportation system into an already-existing city.
Given the unqualified success that Chattanooga’s municipal internet has been, I’m kind of surprised at least a few other cities haven’t tried to emulate it. Like, it’s a ridiculously simple formula: offer people very cheap and very fast internet and you’ll get businesses and people wanting to move there.
I mean, I get why it doesn’t happen, because the telecoms will fight tooth and nail to stop it. And they’ve pre-emptively bribed enough state governments to pass laws that ban cities and counties from making their own ISPs. Jesus America is so v cool, isn’t it…
Given the unqualified success that Chattanooga’s municipal internet has been, I’m kind of surprised at least a few other cities haven’t tried to emulate it.
For all the talk of being “business friendly”, American politicians have been hell bent on strangling economic growth in the cradle at every opportunity. Because economic growth requires the democratization of capital and that’s not good for the folks that bankroll elections.
People will move there when it’s a unique benefit. When tons and tons of towns have free broadband, eventually it stops being a benefit and becomes a burden for local governments who are always strapped for cash because they’re run by corrupt moguls or complete morons who read the shit that leftwing podcasters mock and take it as gospel.
Off topic, but the way you make it sound, it seems like Xinjiang has a bright future, being the gateway of BRI and all.
There was a video posted here a few months back that showed how some of the buildings being built in China right now are just simply not possible under a free market system. Developers and investors want short term profits, but these Chinese buildings are planned for the long term and operate at a loss for the short term, but it’s entirely on purpose.
I know it’s because I love some classical empires and now China, but I still think there is no more impressive and magnificent display of a country’s strength than to simply raise a city when needed or desired.
