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.
The sheer size of it is a problem apparently. You can’t just quote something out of context.
65 million is about 5% of the population of China, I think that’s a fine amount of excess so people living communally have an easy option to move out to and for young adults moving out of home. I don’t think impact on environment/ economy is that big a deal from my perspective. My perspective being someone who pays over 10 times the amount of rent my parents did, housing being such a large expense of mine that it can be considered my only expense and everything else is a rounding error and being constantly stressed about having a place to live. I would have 0 problems if my government were to vastly increase its investment in housing even at the expense of the environment.
@Fleur_
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Yeah believe it or not peoples primary concerns are food, housing and health and everyone is willing to cause environmental stress to achieve these things. That said I do think more should be done to promote a sustainable environment but I don’t think letting people go without housing is worth whatever environmental benefits there is to not building houses.