cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/30936240
In the past 50 years, China has built around 500 new cities. The country’s sprawling new urban areas have been instrumental to its economic surge, but it’s not all rosy. In fact, a lot of these new buildings are empty.
By 2021, over 17% of the urban homes built in China since 2001 remained unoccupied. Although official data is lacking, that figure has undoubtedly only grown since 2021. By some estimates, there are between 20 million and 65 million empty houses in China, enough to house entire countries. This is a big problem, both economically and environmentally
A new study published in Nature Communications estimates that these unused homes collectively release 55.81 million tons of carbon dioxide annually — a staggering 6.9% of all emissions from China’s residential sector, or more than countries like Portugal or Mongolia.
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This also led to a boom in real estate investment which in turn, has had a predictable (but problematic) side effect: people started to see housing more as an asset than a place to live.
We’ve seen this story before. In countries like the United States before the 2008 financial crisis or Japan in the 1980s, speculative real estate investment created massive bubbles that eventually collapsed, leaving economic turmoil in their wake.
However, in the new study, researchers didn’t look at this. Instead, Hefan Zheng and colleagues from Tsinghua University, Beijing, looked at the environmental impact of these houses.
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Unused homes are not just an economic inefficiency — they are a major environmental liability.
The carbon footprint of these empty homes stems from two main sources.
The production of cement, steel, and other materials used in these buildings accounts for much of their environmental impact. Each square meter of newly built housing emits hundreds of kilograms of CO₂.
The other source is heat. Even when unoccupied, many of these homes consume energy. In northern China, where central heating systems operate city-wide, many empty homes still receive heating, wasting vast amounts of energy. In 2020, these unused homes produced about as much CO₂ as a mid-sized country.
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The scale of unused housing in China results from a mix of policy incentives, economic speculation, and urban planning misalignment. In particular, some of the investments seem to have been misguided.
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In addition to the economic ticking bomb that empty houses pose, the houses also pose an environmental conundrum. If China is serious about decarbonizing its residential sector, reducing unused housing should be a priority.
The most straightforward approach could be a tax. Introducing taxes on empty properties would discourage speculative holding and push owners to rent or sell unoccupied homes, making the entire system more efficient. Some cities could offer incentives to convert unused apartments into affordable housing or public rental units.
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However, if inaction prevails, these ghost homes will continue haunting China’s real estate market and its climate ambitions.
Yeah I should have clarified that when I said “that sounds incredibly low” I wasn’t talking about relative to other countries I was talking about my perception of how many vacant homes there were in china. Before reading the article I thought it was wayyyy more than that.
Anectodatally I’ve heard similar things from people who have visited china and talked to locals who would complain about the quality (primarily the aesthetics and lack of individuality) of buildings there. I feel the solution to that problem is actually building more/ different houses though ironically.
The amount of handringing over it was always excessive. China has undergone a massive rural -> urban migration. They still are. The large majority of homes are being used, and more will continue to be. I feel like a china apologist here, but this narrative about ghost cities has always been very silly.