Even China’s population of 1.4 billion would not be enough to fill all the empty apartments littered across the country, a former official said on Saturday, in a rare public critique of the country’s crisis-hit property market.
China’s property sector, once the pillar of the economy, has slumped since 2021 when real estate giant China Evergrande Group (3333.HK) defaulted on its debt obligations following a clampdown on new borrowing.
Big-name developers such as Country Garden Holdings (2007.HK) continue to teeter close to default even to this day, keeping home-buyer sentiment depressed.
As of the end of August, the combined floor area of unsold homes stood at 648 million square metres (7 billion square feet), the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) show.
That would be equal to 7.2 million homes, according to Reuters calculations, based on the average home size of 90 square metres.
The pure fantasy of affording the absurd mortgage anywhere decent and also having children and actually having a life (a car, a holiday once a year or less, healthy food) were a significant factor in my partner and mine’s recent decision to not have any children. Just not affordable in Spain. We don’t have family to palm kids off on so, what are you going to do? Have kids and starve, give them a subsistence upbringing, or survive and keep our own heads above water?
The exact same thing is happenning in Portugal.
At least 2 decades of measures to pump up house prices (both by boosting the demand side and by limiting the supply side) leading the young adults to either leave the country of refraining from having children, leading to well below replacement birth rates, an aging population and all problems that come from it (I very much doubt that I’ll ever have a state pension from Portugal).
And then on top of that the Global Warming Climate Models predict that almost all of Spain and Portugal (except near the coast) will become a literal desert.
Meanwhile the policians who passed lost of “pro realestate investor” measures to make themselves and their friends wealthier, all the while killing the life opportunities for the younger generations (and “younger” by now means “in your late 30s”), causing the massive age pyramid problems we’re having, put on their most innocent *surprised Piachu* face when talking about the population ageing problem.
In between the countries becoming unaffordable to live and grow a family in for anybody not already well in their 40s and the desertification due to Global Warming we’re completelly totally screwed here in the Iberian Peninsula.