While the U.S. is facing a housing shortage and affordability crisis that has Gen Zers questioning whether they’ll ever be able to achieve the idealized, white-picket fence American Dream, China is in the middle of a very different kind of housing nightmare. Years of debt-fueled overbuilding have left the country with rows and rows of empty homes—as well as almost entirely vacant “ghost cities.” And now a former government official says the number of empty residences is so big that a country of 1.4 billion people is struggling to fill them.
“How many vacant homes are there now?” He Keng, the former deputy head of China’s statistics bureau, said at an event in the southern industrial city of Dongguan over the weekend, Reuters first reported. “Each expert gives a very different number, with the most extreme believing the current number of vacant homes are enough for 3 billion people.”
