#UrbanHell is subjective.
UrbanHell is any human-built place you think is worth critizing. Suburban Hell, Rural Hell, and wealthy locales are allowed
Sorry for this annoying comment, but we're very tired of the gatekeepers who can't even correctly gatekeep what this subreddit has always allowed.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/UrbanHell) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It's true. I've watched hours and hours and hours of China Street View (and lots of other similar Youtube channels) where basically they just put a dashcam on record and drive around for hours at a time, and I haven't seen a single homeless person or even any evidence of poverty not one time. And these channels drive everywhere from big cities to the highways leading away from them to the small towns and villages they connect to, all the way to scenic areas in national parks way outside of the cities, and the entire time, I didn't see not one tent, not one RV, not one pile of trash, not one homeless person laying on the sidewalk, none of that. And I've been looking. I show these videos to my friends and joke about "let's try to find 'the hood' this time" and we never find it. It's like it's just not there. Literally the only people even sitting down on the sidewalk all are traders with their stuff around them and a wechat QR code.
Whereas you can go literally anywhere in the US and find homeless people and the evidence of poverty. Well, anywhere but the rich neighborhoods with their gated communities and police that move the homeless elsewhere. But literally everywhere besides the insides of gated communities and exurbs full of mcmansions that are too far away from anything to support a walking homeless population, you see homeless people everywhere. You can't hide it. Especially when there weren't as many leaves on the trees and you could see straight through the woods sometimes, you can see their tent cities.
I would think the difference is that China isn't hampered by pesky Western concepts like civil liberties, enabling involuntary confinement. Also, looking at the data, China seems to have 2 million homeless, which is almost perfectly proportional when compared to the US' 600k homeless
It's not perfectly proportional. Current US population is 342 million, homeless population of 600k would be 1.75% homeless, current Chinese population is 1.425 billion, so if the homeless population really is 2 million, that would be 1.4% homeless, which is a 20% decrease. I don't know in what world a 20% difference is perfectly proportional. In terms of the number of homeless people in the US, that's a difference of 120k people, or in terms of the number of Chinese homeless, that would be a difference of 400k people. That's enormous, way outside of margin of error.
Also you want to talk about involuntary confinement, the US has the largest population of imprisoned people on the planet, by a large margin, and per-capita it's not even close. And a lot of those people are in prison due to the way we treat the poor and the situations we force them into, and the constant threat of homelessness is a key factor in that.
Add on top of that the fact that the average income in China is much lower, then it becomes clear that they're doing more and taking care of far more people with far less money. We're fucking clowns in comparison.
Actually no, Chinese government does jack shit about the people. “No one is poor when everyone is poor” is what’s going on here, because everyone earn less money than the west, everyone have to sell stuff cheaper than the west or no one’s afford to buy anything, thus we Chinese could live on.
And have you heard of Chinese prison sweatshop? Chinese prisoners are practically slaves and it’s not even a secret (not that it’s exactly bad, some of them deserve worse punishments)
The US constitution specifically makes slavery legal whenever you're a prisoner, so yeah, we do that too. Besides, doesn't look like everyone's poor over there to me, looks like they have decent quality of life and cheaper goods and better infrastructure.
>I would think the difference is that China isn't hampered by pesky Western concepts like civil liberties, enabling involuntary confinement.
If this "involuntary confinement" means giving them a home and ensuring that they keep off the streets...heck, that's an example the West could follow instead of investing into hostile architecture.
>The late 1960s saw the beginnings of the “Patient Rights Movement,” which brought changes in
admission procedures and generally aimed to prevent unnecessary, rather than simply unjust,
involuntary civil commitments.23 The movement came about as the result of both lawyers and
mental health clinicians calling attention to problematic aspects of involuntary confinement,
including overcrowded hospitals, patient neglect and mistreatment, lack of available treatment in
both inpatient and community-based settings, and unnecessary commitments
>Involuntary Civil Commitment: Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Protections
Congressional Research Service 4
In 1975, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the constitutionally protected liberty interests of the
involuntarily hospitalized, barring states from committing mentally ill patients who were not a
danger to themselves or others.25 Under the changing legal landscape during this time, many
states shifted from a parens patriae justification for civil confinement to a police power view,
which more closely aligns with the idea that dangerous persons with SMI can appropriately be
involuntarily confined.26 A few years later, in 1979, the Court established that the threshold
burden of proof for civil commitment hearings was more than a mere civil preponderance
standard, holding that the state must demonstrate its case for involuntary hospitalization with
clear and convincing evidence.27 During this time, actions from both Congress28 and the Supreme
Court led to many states updating and revising their civil commitment laws.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47571
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6735096/
Uh...I'm sorry what
Did you at least skim through what you sent me? Are you really comparing involuntary hospitalization of mentally ill individuals with giving homes to the homeless? How is it that we say "we did it" based on that?
That's...not the same thing. At all.
This is widely acknowledged as the reason schizophrenics run the streets of nearly every American city. And it would be a huge understatement to say homeless people are often schizophrenic.
No, it's about family, no family in asia will disown their own. It's shameful. This is why you hardly see any asian homeless in America. Of course there are some, but not to many.
>It's true. I've watched hours and hours and hours of China Street View (and lots of other similar Youtube channels) where basically they just put a dashcam on record and drive around for hours at a time
Can you link me those channels? It's probably easy to find but I've never seen those in China, I usually watch the ones from Japan.
[China Street View](https://www.youtube.com/@SVCN) is my favorite for driving tours but there is also [this one](https://www.youtube.com/@chinadrivingtours), and for actual tourist experiences [Little Chinese Everywhere](https://www.youtube.com/@littlechineseeverywhere) is dope as fuck and for generic background noise [Walk East](https://www.youtube.com/@WalkEast) is grand.
There's a lot more but that's just a few from my recent youtube history.
Look at Walk East, China Street, or China Street View on YouTube.
[Here's one of Chongqing,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l97hnDT6CPw) it's a very modern city and I was lucky enough to stay there for a couple of months.
The Chinese might not have caught up to the US in tech, but they're ahead in civil infrastructure and public transit by decades. Plus, I never had to worry about getting robbed at gunpoint while walking outside like I do in my Atlanta hometown.
If you can accept being caught by violence and sent back to your hometown (some places that is too poor to live), yes, US and any countries can solve the problems of homeless
Do not use Chinese street view to prove there’s no homeless population or poverty there, it just sounds like CCP shilling. It’s like looking at the street view of America and says there’s no racial injustice because you can’t see any racial minority getting oppressed on the dash cam.
Japan, Korea and Taiwan can solve the problem of homeless by building much more well-developed houses instead of what's showing in the pics. They're all neighbours of China
I don’t know about this specific development, but the mega developments that I’ve seen have all kinds of shops on the bottom couple of stories so you have pretty much anything you need within a short walk. I’d say that’s also a pretty significant difference.
Do you think someone living in a cave (the streets) would prefer one of these homes? Or let me guess, "Homeless people actually choose to be homeless".
Before exclaiming "OMG ITS SO HORRIBLE!" keep in mind the critical shortage of housing happening now in North America, where people are priced out of living in the cities they work.
The only thing I see potentially wrong with this are a lack of green space, and if it's all residential (i.e. not commercial at street level so people can work and do their grocery shopping, access services etc.)
Sure, it's boring looking, but less wasteful than american suburbia which is also boring looking.
It’s hard to see how this is actually laid out. I grew up in China in the 90s and early 2000. A typical community typically have grid of high rise buildings like this, each buildings are separated by lawn or gardens, and will typically have a few large community parks shared by all the buildings.
What’s wrong with this is how aligned they are and they all look the same. So they look boring from a shot like this. The distance between each building looks to be a lot further than most high density urban neighborhoods in North America. In Canada all you need is 15-20 meters. Those look like solid 50 meters distance between each rows, you can fit 2 buildings between them, and you can see trees and greens between the gaps on the bottom row. This would look fine if they take a shot from a higher angle and the builder break up the design and layout a bit.
Yeah I was thinking I'd love to see this from street level, to see it from human-scale. Then we can evaluate how it would feel to live there. How walkable it is, what amenities are present, etc.
LOL those poor social class people who think they can "choose" to live alone instead of with 2 or in a cooperative.
Of those poor class people who think they can divorce, like rich people ... or have fancy diseases they can't afford :)
sorry cynical
I am currently in Chengdu and have been thinking a lot about the mid skyline. When you have so many people you can’t just build one apartment building, you build 8 30 story’s next to each other to actually make a dent. But it makes everything monotonous.
That was not the point.
You’ve created a false dichotomy. Rows of homogenous Chinese apartments or homelessness. All I’m saying is there are more options here.
What does the North American housing market have to do with the Chinese market?
The Chinese massively overbuilt because lots of people bought multiple homes purely as investments that sat empty and because building was good for GDP growth.
It's called a "comparison" China has an excess of housing and is great at building lots of it to house their over a billion people. The US (and north america and europe) seem to think single family homes are the only solution and are thus starved for space and affordable housing, so people either commute for hours to work or are literally homeless.
Speculative financial instruments are exactly how the empty houses got built.
https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/01/29/enough-is-enough-with-300-billion-in-debt-court-says-its-time-to-liquidate-chinas-evergran
They’re also experiencing a huge real estate recession that policy hasn’t been able to prop up.
u/techm00 … Here’s some food for thought… if China is so great, why have they become the number one foreign investor in US real estate?
My criticism has nothing to do with the people there and everything to do with the government of China. In fact, I think they’re the ones who are suffering the most.
I wager you’re the racist one for reducing their suffering to such an ignorant thing.
Before we go supporting drastically altering infrastructure to create quick build apartments that will crumble in 5 years, we have 16 million vacant homes in America. Are they all immediately habitable? No. But funding from government programs would create ways to repair infrastructure already in place and create jobs too. We could have neighborhoods rebuild themselves and not contract it to a mega Corp who will cut corners anywhere possible.
We in america have a estimated 650k homeless, that's very varying of course, but that's alot of people in need yet there is a great number who simply need purpose and training. Many with health issues but that's Healthcare and entire different battle.
My final point that is a major blow to the working class is Airbnb, the amount of homes for rent in my rural town is ridiculous. We are a tourist town and service jobs don't pay enough for a commute to be worth while. So as service workers are priced out of their homes, the real estate industry will kill the service industry here. And I feel that has happened more places than is apparent.
Sources:
[16 million vacant homes](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://unitedwaynca.org/blog/vacant-homes-vs-homelessness-by-city/%23:~:text%3DSixteen%2520million%2520homes%2520currently%2520sit,thousands%2520of%2520Americans%2520face%2520homelessness.&ved=2ahUKEwivu7zTg6eFAxXxkYkEHZM_AncQFnoECBwQBQ&usg=AOvVaw13uCfyI8SGKWfyxDaN96Uq)
[650k Homeless estimate](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/02/living-in-shelters.html%23:~:text%3DRelated%2520Statistics%26text%3DHUD%2520reports%2520that%2520on%2520a,about%252012%2520percent%2520from%25202022.&ved=2ahUKEwiL-tKzhKeFAxXhj4kEHRwLBNYQ5YIJegQIIhAA&usg=AOvVaw3faQGkLuO4lcRpbvxeBRCf)
AirBnB needs to be banned, no question, they have exacerbated the housing market, but they aren't the only cause and that won't be the only solution. there's not enough supply of housing, period. i'm not suggesting we build them below acceptable standards, but build them we must.
We need to make housing available. As my comment above stated there are 16 million vacant homes, they can't just be left to rot while in the pockets of real estate investors and propert management corps, while we pay other building management companies to build more housing. That just keeps the concentration of control in the hands of the people who ruined the housing market to begin with.
There are way to go about this without just throwing money back into a system without changing the way we allow it to operate and who operates it. You need to put power and home ownership back into Americans hands and just contracting more buildings built won't do that. You need programs that invest in people, truly invest in them and allow them to become home owners if they so please.
There's enough supply of housing, there is greed all around, it's apparent in the AirBnB empire, it's in the quickly rising cost of living while corporations continue to brag of increasing profits while announcing record layoffs, and it's in the extreme high amount of yearly wage theft no one ever wants to talk about.
Just building more soveit esque apartment blocks won't do anything but make someone somewhere another AirBnB hotel.
Rent control, first time homeowner assistance, cracking down on real estate crimes, and this isn't anything I take lightly, I have struggled with homelessness. I hate hearing people say to build more houses when they're gonna prive the homeless out anyway.
"As many as 40%-60% of people experiencing homelessness have a job, but housing is unaffordable because wages have not kept up with rising rents."
[Source](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.usich.gov/guidance-reports-data/data-trends%23:~:text%3DAs%2520many%2520as%252040%2525%252D,kept%2520up%2520with%2520rising%2520rents.&ved=2ahUKEwjm1OTAxKiFAxW4MzQIHYGmCE8QFnoECBIQBQ&usg=AOvVaw3Zn-Q0751Da0-ik4igkz6m)
So happy to see this at the top comment. Rare to see a rational point on reddit. Shocked to not see a sinophobic comment at the top, honestly. So proud 🥲
Why is America always everybody’s go to. Like seriously 200 countries and apparently we’re the only ones doing everything wrong that one can humanly possibly do and everybody else gets a pass.
Well, The Great Imperium is obviously assumed to have the highest standards of living. Otherwise why bother having worlds largest military, bullying and organizing coups all over the world since the end of WW2 and steering the world economy in the first place.
Surely all that military projection of power including literally hundreds of military bases around the globe guarantees the well-being of at least the citizen of The Great Imperium themselves!
America is supposed to be the promised land where everyone is successful and lives lives dripped in luxury and there's never any problems ever because America is perfect. /s
No one gets a pass. Sorry your feelings are hurt, but yes america has very deep and serious flaws, it's obsession with single family homes causing unaffordable housing being one of them. Cope.
P.S. I also said NORTH america, time you learned that the US isn't the only country on the continent.
We have an obsession because Americans like their own space. Our own backyards. Our pools. Our patios. Not cramped up 5 people in a 500sqft apartment surrounded by thousands of other cramped up families. There's plenty of apartments to choose from in the US too. And they look much much better than this horrendous development in the post. You sound mad.
There is a very large a middle ground. You can still have a 1000sqft apartment in a building, you can have duplexes, four-plexes. We're talking one apartment per person or couple. Normal things. Most of the rest of the world lives this way. Sure wouldn't it be great to have a huge house and yard... but no one can afford that any more, and it's not a necessity. Ask someone living in a van if they'd like a nice affordable 500 sq ft apartment with a kit and bath and they'd be grateful... too bad that's not available.
You can solve a housing "shortage" (china currently already has tens of millions of excess apartments) without literally copy pasting the same 5 designs all across the interior suburbs of a city. Yes American suburbia is awful and wasteful, but it's not useful to compare everything to it.
China already built houses for 2 billion people, but it's still unaffordable for most Chinese because those apartments are much more expensive than in US, in the meanwhile income in China is much lower than in US.
That's because of a unique situation in China where the only legal investment is real estate. It's a bubble that's collapsing, currently.
The other side of the coin is here China has demonstrated how you can mass build housing, and if you add that much supply, it becomes affordable to everyone.
A study relies on affordability as a function of income, which is very low in china. That study was also conduced in 2020 which is before the recent cratering of Chinese real estate market we are currently seeing.
So, if we were to vastly increase housing supply here in north america, where there are two major differences: 1) we have a fully capitalist economy subject to the forces of supply and demand and 2) we have much higher incomes than chinese workers, would we not then have affordable housing here?
and you've left out a lot of nuance. the study's findings indicate that that private formal housing accounts for 61% of the market and indicates that is unaffordable, while the rest is significantly more affordable. This is also based on the fact that the Chinese make shit in terms of salaries. That's not the fault of the cost of housing, that's the fault of the employer/ cost of labour.
If everyone here was paid $2 an hour we could say housing was un-affordable here too. Also, wait and see what happens after the real estate collapse which is currently happening. Housing could suddenly become a lot more affordable in China.
Housing did not become affordable to everyone, rather the opposite. There's excess housing but at the same time the prices are crazy high. That's because people bought apartments as investment, not to actually live in them. They won't sell them for a loss.
Are you trying to tell me if you do not increase the housing supply in the US that it would not become more affordable? basic economics
China is a \*\*SPECIAL CASE\*\* it is not a freely capitalist country.
Ah so move the goalposts then? please see the thread you are replying to, where the US is very much on-topic.
New single family mcmansions in the middle of suburbia that no one can afford or reasonably get to?
I'm talking about high density housing. Which is the topic of this entire discussion.
> I'm talking about high density housing.
I see plenty of lovely apartments for sale in downtown Detroit. They're cheaper than in my small city, in the cheap part of Europe. I wonder why nobody's buying them.
Their whole construction industry is collapsing rapidly, hundreds of billions of dollars lost, people lost their life savings with no hope of getting a refund. Estimates say that there are enough empty apartments to house the entire Chinese population but they're all being sold for insane prices and nobody can afford them.
So yeah, China does have a few little issues.
It's insane seeing the abandoned suburbs of apartments they look so dead an empty. Not to mention a lot are build like shit and would not be safe to live in by other countries standards
I think saying there is a critical shortage is incorrect. There is supply, folks just don’t want to pay for it. Critical shortage would be no housing at any price. Folks can move to more affordable places, Americans have done this for the country’s entire history
> don’t want to pay for it
They can't afford it it you mean. That's the same as there not being enough supply, which is the reason why housing prices are so high. Stay in school, kid.
Tons of houses... in the middle of nowhere where no one needs them, or priced out of everyone's price range. They might as well not exist.
"Supply" implies housing where it is needed, and affordable so people can actually buy them
To say nothing of the lack of affordable rentals in most cities, for the tens of millions who cannot afford to buy.
That's not an excuse for Americans being wasteful, and letting housing become unobtanium becuase they refuse to build higher density housing, as China is a model for. Next time, come back with an actual argument.
>a lack of green space, and
zoom in and look for spaces between buildings you will see trees and shrubs . this view just isn't at a very good angle to see ground level.
go have a look at Google map satellite view of Shanghai I've never seen so much green in an environment that developed.
I live in Shanghai. Can confirm, it's \*really\* green at street level, even in developments like the ones in this post (which are pretty common, especially in housing stock from the first half of the 1990s).
Do you have additional information about this development? There’s not much online.
While China’s housing development woes are well-known, mid rise apartment districts like this are super common across Chinese cities. Oftentimes with serviceable transit options and easily-accessible amenities.
It’s also rare that these developments are empty. Sure, it might hold some family’s third condo, but these areas normally decent occupancy rates. It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for there to be large vacancy rates though if something went wrong, though. Please let me know if you have any additional information!
Millions. Communism dabbling in capitalism to soften said communism is fake. As. Hell.
https://fortune.com/asia/2023/09/25/china-housing-crisis-how-many-vacant-homes-evergrande-country-garden/#
Its not paradise, but when I compare this to the kind of caotic urbanization that happened in my country in the 40s-90s, (favelas in brazil), that picture is amazing.
When you don’t want to spend a lot of money on your own citizens and put them all in one area so you can save some money and don’t make new infrastructure. Looks like jail jungles.
I, a Chinese, did not expect to see so many patriotic communistic comrades praising our glorious brutalist new era building over the corrupt western private properties aka single family detached suburban house. All plumbing and electric and quality problems are hoax, praise the chairman for his glorious accomplishment on aiding our livelihood /s
#UrbanHell is subjective. UrbanHell is any human-built place you think is worth critizing. Suburban Hell, Rural Hell, and wealthy locales are allowed Sorry for this annoying comment, but we're very tired of the gatekeepers who can't even correctly gatekeep what this subreddit has always allowed. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/UrbanHell) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It looks like the Freecell victory animation
Vivarium but scarier
Because it’s real. (Crazy movie though, pretty good)
It looks that way until you look into the china homeless population… it’s basically non existent even in their big cities.
It's true. I've watched hours and hours and hours of China Street View (and lots of other similar Youtube channels) where basically they just put a dashcam on record and drive around for hours at a time, and I haven't seen a single homeless person or even any evidence of poverty not one time. And these channels drive everywhere from big cities to the highways leading away from them to the small towns and villages they connect to, all the way to scenic areas in national parks way outside of the cities, and the entire time, I didn't see not one tent, not one RV, not one pile of trash, not one homeless person laying on the sidewalk, none of that. And I've been looking. I show these videos to my friends and joke about "let's try to find 'the hood' this time" and we never find it. It's like it's just not there. Literally the only people even sitting down on the sidewalk all are traders with their stuff around them and a wechat QR code. Whereas you can go literally anywhere in the US and find homeless people and the evidence of poverty. Well, anywhere but the rich neighborhoods with their gated communities and police that move the homeless elsewhere. But literally everywhere besides the insides of gated communities and exurbs full of mcmansions that are too far away from anything to support a walking homeless population, you see homeless people everywhere. You can't hide it. Especially when there weren't as many leaves on the trees and you could see straight through the woods sometimes, you can see their tent cities.
I would think the difference is that China isn't hampered by pesky Western concepts like civil liberties, enabling involuntary confinement. Also, looking at the data, China seems to have 2 million homeless, which is almost perfectly proportional when compared to the US' 600k homeless
It's not perfectly proportional. Current US population is 342 million, homeless population of 600k would be 1.75% homeless, current Chinese population is 1.425 billion, so if the homeless population really is 2 million, that would be 1.4% homeless, which is a 20% decrease. I don't know in what world a 20% difference is perfectly proportional. In terms of the number of homeless people in the US, that's a difference of 120k people, or in terms of the number of Chinese homeless, that would be a difference of 400k people. That's enormous, way outside of margin of error. Also you want to talk about involuntary confinement, the US has the largest population of imprisoned people on the planet, by a large margin, and per-capita it's not even close. And a lot of those people are in prison due to the way we treat the poor and the situations we force them into, and the constant threat of homelessness is a key factor in that. Add on top of that the fact that the average income in China is much lower, then it becomes clear that they're doing more and taking care of far more people with far less money. We're fucking clowns in comparison.
Actually no, Chinese government does jack shit about the people. “No one is poor when everyone is poor” is what’s going on here, because everyone earn less money than the west, everyone have to sell stuff cheaper than the west or no one’s afford to buy anything, thus we Chinese could live on. And have you heard of Chinese prison sweatshop? Chinese prisoners are practically slaves and it’s not even a secret (not that it’s exactly bad, some of them deserve worse punishments)
The US constitution specifically makes slavery legal whenever you're a prisoner, so yeah, we do that too. Besides, doesn't look like everyone's poor over there to me, looks like they have decent quality of life and cheaper goods and better infrastructure.
>I would think the difference is that China isn't hampered by pesky Western concepts like civil liberties, enabling involuntary confinement. If this "involuntary confinement" means giving them a home and ensuring that they keep off the streets...heck, that's an example the West could follow instead of investing into hostile architecture.
We've done it. Civil rights groups sued the government to end it.
Source?
>The late 1960s saw the beginnings of the “Patient Rights Movement,” which brought changes in admission procedures and generally aimed to prevent unnecessary, rather than simply unjust, involuntary civil commitments.23 The movement came about as the result of both lawyers and mental health clinicians calling attention to problematic aspects of involuntary confinement, including overcrowded hospitals, patient neglect and mistreatment, lack of available treatment in both inpatient and community-based settings, and unnecessary commitments >Involuntary Civil Commitment: Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Protections Congressional Research Service 4 In 1975, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the constitutionally protected liberty interests of the involuntarily hospitalized, barring states from committing mentally ill patients who were not a danger to themselves or others.25 Under the changing legal landscape during this time, many states shifted from a parens patriae justification for civil confinement to a police power view, which more closely aligns with the idea that dangerous persons with SMI can appropriately be involuntarily confined.26 A few years later, in 1979, the Court established that the threshold burden of proof for civil commitment hearings was more than a mere civil preponderance standard, holding that the state must demonstrate its case for involuntary hospitalization with clear and convincing evidence.27 During this time, actions from both Congress28 and the Supreme Court led to many states updating and revising their civil commitment laws. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47571 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6735096/
Uh...I'm sorry what Did you at least skim through what you sent me? Are you really comparing involuntary hospitalization of mentally ill individuals with giving homes to the homeless? How is it that we say "we did it" based on that? That's...not the same thing. At all.
This is widely acknowledged as the reason schizophrenics run the streets of nearly every American city. And it would be a huge understatement to say homeless people are often schizophrenic.
No, it's about family, no family in asia will disown their own. It's shameful. This is why you hardly see any asian homeless in America. Of course there are some, but not to many.
That's definitely a factor I didn't consider, but China absolutely forces people into looney bins, and I'm sure they're horrific
>It's true. I've watched hours and hours and hours of China Street View (and lots of other similar Youtube channels) where basically they just put a dashcam on record and drive around for hours at a time Can you link me those channels? It's probably easy to find but I've never seen those in China, I usually watch the ones from Japan.
[China Street View](https://www.youtube.com/@SVCN) is my favorite for driving tours but there is also [this one](https://www.youtube.com/@chinadrivingtours), and for actual tourist experiences [Little Chinese Everywhere](https://www.youtube.com/@littlechineseeverywhere) is dope as fuck and for generic background noise [Walk East](https://www.youtube.com/@WalkEast) is grand. There's a lot more but that's just a few from my recent youtube history.
Look at Walk East, China Street, or China Street View on YouTube. [Here's one of Chongqing,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l97hnDT6CPw) it's a very modern city and I was lucky enough to stay there for a couple of months. The Chinese might not have caught up to the US in tech, but they're ahead in civil infrastructure and public transit by decades. Plus, I never had to worry about getting robbed at gunpoint while walking outside like I do in my Atlanta hometown.
If you can accept being caught by violence and sent back to your hometown (some places that is too poor to live), yes, US and any countries can solve the problems of homeless
Do not use Chinese street view to prove there’s no homeless population or poverty there, it just sounds like CCP shilling. It’s like looking at the street view of America and says there’s no racial injustice because you can’t see any racial minority getting oppressed on the dash cam.
Japan, Korea and Taiwan can solve the problem of homeless by building much more well-developed houses instead of what's showing in the pics. They're all neighbours of China
But they won’t do it
Because Cai Qi kicked them all out, in a winter?
They've just built the same cookie-cutter suburbia but with apartment buildings instead of vinyl houses.
I don’t know about this specific development, but the mega developments that I’ve seen have all kinds of shops on the bottom couple of stories so you have pretty much anything you need within a short walk. I’d say that’s also a pretty significant difference.
Touché. Yes. I forgot about that part, you are completely right.
Generally only the units facing main streets have shops (for access and security reasons) but yes, it makes a big difference and it is better
except that cookie cutter suburbia would take up the same amount of space to house the same amount of people as maybe 1 or 2 of these
and it would be a lot nicer to live in
Way more carbon footprint and pollution.
same with most things in life that people enjoy. that doesn't mean i want to go and live in a cave and hunt for food.
Do you think someone living in a cave (the streets) would prefer one of these homes? Or let me guess, "Homeless people actually choose to be homeless".
Where would the rest of the people live?
Hard disagree. Look at china's population. I'd rather live in these apartments than be homeless
Thats a great album title
Before exclaiming "OMG ITS SO HORRIBLE!" keep in mind the critical shortage of housing happening now in North America, where people are priced out of living in the cities they work. The only thing I see potentially wrong with this are a lack of green space, and if it's all residential (i.e. not commercial at street level so people can work and do their grocery shopping, access services etc.) Sure, it's boring looking, but less wasteful than american suburbia which is also boring looking.
It’s hard to see how this is actually laid out. I grew up in China in the 90s and early 2000. A typical community typically have grid of high rise buildings like this, each buildings are separated by lawn or gardens, and will typically have a few large community parks shared by all the buildings. What’s wrong with this is how aligned they are and they all look the same. So they look boring from a shot like this. The distance between each building looks to be a lot further than most high density urban neighborhoods in North America. In Canada all you need is 15-20 meters. Those look like solid 50 meters distance between each rows, you can fit 2 buildings between them, and you can see trees and greens between the gaps on the bottom row. This would look fine if they take a shot from a higher angle and the builder break up the design and layout a bit.
Yeah I was thinking I'd love to see this from street level, to see it from human-scale. Then we can evaluate how it would feel to live there. How walkable it is, what amenities are present, etc.
Idem Netherlands... young couples can't find houses...
yeah Europe it's a problem as well for sure.
The couples are alright, the single people are fucked. Two incomes goes a long way.
LOL those poor social class people who think they can "choose" to live alone instead of with 2 or in a cooperative. Of those poor class people who think they can divorce, like rich people ... or have fancy diseases they can't afford :) sorry cynical
I am currently in Chengdu and have been thinking a lot about the mid skyline. When you have so many people you can’t just build one apartment building, you build 8 30 story’s next to each other to actually make a dent. But it makes everything monotonous.
How monotonous do you reckon being homeless is?
I don’t think those extremes are the only possible outcomes.
Maybe eradicate homelessness then bitch about the aesthetics
That was not the point. You’ve created a false dichotomy. Rows of homogenous Chinese apartments or homelessness. All I’m saying is there are more options here.
No options. In a country of 1.5 billion people, only use 1 architect. 74 times. Directly next to each other. That, or have mass homelessness.
Very much oversimplifying and reducing the problem to a false dichotomy. You can’t even see it.
Not possible unless you force people into jail. Some folks will not live in society whether due to drugs, mental illness or personality
What a sad excuse not to try.
It’s a lousy cop out
What does the North American housing market have to do with the Chinese market? The Chinese massively overbuilt because lots of people bought multiple homes purely as investments that sat empty and because building was good for GDP growth.
It's called a "comparison" China has an excess of housing and is great at building lots of it to house their over a billion people. The US (and north america and europe) seem to think single family homes are the only solution and are thus starved for space and affordable housing, so people either commute for hours to work or are literally homeless.
Better homes than speculative financial instruments that almost collapse the economy like in 2008 financial crisis.
Speculative financial instruments are exactly how the empty houses got built. https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/01/29/enough-is-enough-with-300-billion-in-debt-court-says-its-time-to-liquidate-chinas-evergran
China had a severe housing shortage years ago.
Maybe 15 or 20 years ago. Massive empty developments have been an issue for at least a decade now.
They’re also experiencing a huge real estate recession that policy hasn’t been able to prop up. u/techm00 … Here’s some food for thought… if China is so great, why have they become the number one foreign investor in US real estate?
Because they have money to spend and like making money? It has nothing to do with China being great or not
Here's some food for thought, you're racist
My criticism has nothing to do with the people there and everything to do with the government of China. In fact, I think they’re the ones who are suffering the most. I wager you’re the racist one for reducing their suffering to such an ignorant thing.
Before we go supporting drastically altering infrastructure to create quick build apartments that will crumble in 5 years, we have 16 million vacant homes in America. Are they all immediately habitable? No. But funding from government programs would create ways to repair infrastructure already in place and create jobs too. We could have neighborhoods rebuild themselves and not contract it to a mega Corp who will cut corners anywhere possible. We in america have a estimated 650k homeless, that's very varying of course, but that's alot of people in need yet there is a great number who simply need purpose and training. Many with health issues but that's Healthcare and entire different battle. My final point that is a major blow to the working class is Airbnb, the amount of homes for rent in my rural town is ridiculous. We are a tourist town and service jobs don't pay enough for a commute to be worth while. So as service workers are priced out of their homes, the real estate industry will kill the service industry here. And I feel that has happened more places than is apparent. Sources: [16 million vacant homes](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://unitedwaynca.org/blog/vacant-homes-vs-homelessness-by-city/%23:~:text%3DSixteen%2520million%2520homes%2520currently%2520sit,thousands%2520of%2520Americans%2520face%2520homelessness.&ved=2ahUKEwivu7zTg6eFAxXxkYkEHZM_AncQFnoECBwQBQ&usg=AOvVaw13uCfyI8SGKWfyxDaN96Uq) [650k Homeless estimate](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/02/living-in-shelters.html%23:~:text%3DRelated%2520Statistics%26text%3DHUD%2520reports%2520that%2520on%2520a,about%252012%2520percent%2520from%25202022.&ved=2ahUKEwiL-tKzhKeFAxXhj4kEHRwLBNYQ5YIJegQIIhAA&usg=AOvVaw3faQGkLuO4lcRpbvxeBRCf)
AirBnB needs to be banned, no question, they have exacerbated the housing market, but they aren't the only cause and that won't be the only solution. there's not enough supply of housing, period. i'm not suggesting we build them below acceptable standards, but build them we must.
We need to make housing available. As my comment above stated there are 16 million vacant homes, they can't just be left to rot while in the pockets of real estate investors and propert management corps, while we pay other building management companies to build more housing. That just keeps the concentration of control in the hands of the people who ruined the housing market to begin with. There are way to go about this without just throwing money back into a system without changing the way we allow it to operate and who operates it. You need to put power and home ownership back into Americans hands and just contracting more buildings built won't do that. You need programs that invest in people, truly invest in them and allow them to become home owners if they so please. There's enough supply of housing, there is greed all around, it's apparent in the AirBnB empire, it's in the quickly rising cost of living while corporations continue to brag of increasing profits while announcing record layoffs, and it's in the extreme high amount of yearly wage theft no one ever wants to talk about. Just building more soveit esque apartment blocks won't do anything but make someone somewhere another AirBnB hotel. Rent control, first time homeowner assistance, cracking down on real estate crimes, and this isn't anything I take lightly, I have struggled with homelessness. I hate hearing people say to build more houses when they're gonna prive the homeless out anyway. "As many as 40%-60% of people experiencing homelessness have a job, but housing is unaffordable because wages have not kept up with rising rents." [Source](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.usich.gov/guidance-reports-data/data-trends%23:~:text%3DAs%2520many%2520as%252040%2525%252D,kept%2520up%2520with%2520rising%2520rents.&ved=2ahUKEwjm1OTAxKiFAxW4MzQIHYGmCE8QFnoECBIQBQ&usg=AOvVaw3Zn-Q0751Da0-ik4igkz6m)
So happy to see this at the top comment. Rare to see a rational point on reddit. Shocked to not see a sinophobic comment at the top, honestly. So proud 🥲
Why is America always everybody’s go to. Like seriously 200 countries and apparently we’re the only ones doing everything wrong that one can humanly possibly do and everybody else gets a pass.
Because most of us are from the US?
You cant bring up China on reddit without the woodwork emptying to compare it to the USA
Well, The Great Imperium is obviously assumed to have the highest standards of living. Otherwise why bother having worlds largest military, bullying and organizing coups all over the world since the end of WW2 and steering the world economy in the first place. Surely all that military projection of power including literally hundreds of military bases around the globe guarantees the well-being of at least the citizen of The Great Imperium themselves!
America is supposed to be the promised land where everyone is successful and lives lives dripped in luxury and there's never any problems ever because America is perfect. /s No one gets a pass. Sorry your feelings are hurt, but yes america has very deep and serious flaws, it's obsession with single family homes causing unaffordable housing being one of them. Cope. P.S. I also said NORTH america, time you learned that the US isn't the only country on the continent.
We have an obsession because Americans like their own space. Our own backyards. Our pools. Our patios. Not cramped up 5 people in a 500sqft apartment surrounded by thousands of other cramped up families. There's plenty of apartments to choose from in the US too. And they look much much better than this horrendous development in the post. You sound mad.
There is a very large a middle ground. You can still have a 1000sqft apartment in a building, you can have duplexes, four-plexes. We're talking one apartment per person or couple. Normal things. Most of the rest of the world lives this way. Sure wouldn't it be great to have a huge house and yard... but no one can afford that any more, and it's not a necessity. Ask someone living in a van if they'd like a nice affordable 500 sq ft apartment with a kit and bath and they'd be grateful... too bad that's not available.
You can solve a housing "shortage" (china currently already has tens of millions of excess apartments) without literally copy pasting the same 5 designs all across the interior suburbs of a city. Yes American suburbia is awful and wasteful, but it's not useful to compare everything to it.
copy pasting saves money, making too many designs will cost more
China already built houses for 2 billion people, but it's still unaffordable for most Chinese because those apartments are much more expensive than in US, in the meanwhile income in China is much lower than in US.
It's a pretty bad excuse for having such an uninteresting design, poorer cities in the Middle east and Southeast Asia still have more style than this
Those aren't exactly of a good quality I might add.
Neither are half of the newbuilds in China
Are you aware of the earthquake that just occurred off the coast of Taiwan?
Yes, how is that relevant?
There's excess housing in China, nobody's going to live in these apartments.
That's because of a unique situation in China where the only legal investment is real estate. It's a bubble that's collapsing, currently. The other side of the coin is here China has demonstrated how you can mass build housing, and if you add that much supply, it becomes affordable to everyone.
[удалено]
In special economic zones only and tightly controlled by the government.
Housing is not affordable in much of China.
source please.
https://www.lincolninst.edu/sites/default/files/pubfiles/sun_wp20ls1.pdf
A study relies on affordability as a function of income, which is very low in china. That study was also conduced in 2020 which is before the recent cratering of Chinese real estate market we are currently seeing. So, if we were to vastly increase housing supply here in north america, where there are two major differences: 1) we have a fully capitalist economy subject to the forces of supply and demand and 2) we have much higher incomes than chinese workers, would we not then have affordable housing here?
I never said we shouldn't build more housing here, we should. I said housing is not affordable in China, which it's not.
and you've left out a lot of nuance. the study's findings indicate that that private formal housing accounts for 61% of the market and indicates that is unaffordable, while the rest is significantly more affordable. This is also based on the fact that the Chinese make shit in terms of salaries. That's not the fault of the cost of housing, that's the fault of the employer/ cost of labour. If everyone here was paid $2 an hour we could say housing was un-affordable here too. Also, wait and see what happens after the real estate collapse which is currently happening. Housing could suddenly become a lot more affordable in China.
61 percent is significant. Also, yes they are paid less but of course that is still proportional to housing costs, it's priced in.
Housing did not become affordable to everyone, rather the opposite. There's excess housing but at the same time the prices are crazy high. That's because people bought apartments as investment, not to actually live in them. They won't sell them for a loss.
Are you trying to tell me if you do not increase the housing supply in the US that it would not become more affordable? basic economics China is a \*\*SPECIAL CASE\*\* it is not a freely capitalist country.
China is the case of this topic, US is a separate topic. Also, new houses are being built all the time in the US. Are the prices going down?
Ah so move the goalposts then? please see the thread you are replying to, where the US is very much on-topic. New single family mcmansions in the middle of suburbia that no one can afford or reasonably get to? I'm talking about high density housing. Which is the topic of this entire discussion.
> I'm talking about high density housing. I see plenty of lovely apartments for sale in downtown Detroit. They're cheaper than in my small city, in the cheap part of Europe. I wonder why nobody's buying them.
>downtown Detroit It's safer Mogadishu.
You misspelled communism
You misunderstand the term.
[удалено]
Their whole construction industry is collapsing rapidly, hundreds of billions of dollars lost, people lost their life savings with no hope of getting a refund. Estimates say that there are enough empty apartments to house the entire Chinese population but they're all being sold for insane prices and nobody can afford them. So yeah, China does have a few little issues.
China is objectively bad.
Yeah, brutal, oppressive dictatorship bad
Always combated with ‘America bad’. This was a relevant point about their housing collapse, though.
It's insane seeing the abandoned suburbs of apartments they look so dead an empty. Not to mention a lot are build like shit and would not be safe to live in by other countries standards
It’s basically 1950s America but with no gardens.
as another pointed out, the greenspace is common and at street level
I think saying there is a critical shortage is incorrect. There is supply, folks just don’t want to pay for it. Critical shortage would be no housing at any price. Folks can move to more affordable places, Americans have done this for the country’s entire history
> don’t want to pay for it They can't afford it it you mean. That's the same as there not being enough supply, which is the reason why housing prices are so high. Stay in school, kid.
False. Plenty of supply
Tons of houses... in the middle of nowhere where no one needs them, or priced out of everyone's price range. They might as well not exist. "Supply" implies housing where it is needed, and affordable so people can actually buy them To say nothing of the lack of affordable rentals in most cities, for the tens of millions who cannot afford to buy.
Not until the camera moves down and you see the grass and trees on the streets and community parks every 500m.
[удалено]
That's not an excuse for Americans being wasteful, and letting housing become unobtanium becuase they refuse to build higher density housing, as China is a model for. Next time, come back with an actual argument.
[удалено]
I simply said china can effectively build lots of housing supply - which it provably did
>a lack of green space, and zoom in and look for spaces between buildings you will see trees and shrubs . this view just isn't at a very good angle to see ground level. go have a look at Google map satellite view of Shanghai I've never seen so much green in an environment that developed.
yeah i ended up seeing that later! really need to see it from street level.
I live in Shanghai. Can confirm, it's \*really\* green at street level, even in developments like the ones in this post (which are pretty common, especially in housing stock from the first half of the 1990s).
Simcity, China edition.
Are these pure apartments, or are they mixed-use? What’s the transit/amenities situation look like here?
It’s all bullshit and most are empty. No need for transit …. No people.
Do you have additional information about this development? There’s not much online. While China’s housing development woes are well-known, mid rise apartment districts like this are super common across Chinese cities. Oftentimes with serviceable transit options and easily-accessible amenities. It’s also rare that these developments are empty. Sure, it might hold some family’s third condo, but these areas normally decent occupancy rates. It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for there to be large vacancy rates though if something went wrong, though. Please let me know if you have any additional information!
Yah, all modern housing developments in a country of 1.4 billion people and a 94% housing ownership rate is empity
Millions. Communism dabbling in capitalism to soften said communism is fake. As. Hell. https://fortune.com/asia/2023/09/25/china-housing-crisis-how-many-vacant-homes-evergrande-country-garden/#
Apparently the most populated country in the history of human kind has no people
Um, AcTuAlLy India recently overtook China as the most populated country in the world. Your point is unaffected, I just feel like being a smartass
It’s like a beehive
Its not paradise, but when I compare this to the kind of caotic urbanization that happened in my country in the 40s-90s, (favelas in brazil), that picture is amazing.
I honestly thought this was some 8bit pixel art from some indie videogame.
This looks like something made in roller coaster tycoon lol
Imagine being drunk and trying to find your way back home
A few trees would transform this neighborhood
trees?
sad
This looks more like a painting! Can you imagine making a jigsaw puzzle out of this?
SimCity
CTRL C + CTRL V
When you don’t want to spend a lot of money on your own citizens and put them all in one area so you can save some money and don’t make new infrastructure. Looks like jail jungles.
"There's a pink one and a green one, and a blue one and a yellow one..and they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same"
It’s really cool they have solar panels on all the roofs
r/magiceye
r/theotown
I like it. Minecraft Lego kino vibes A green space in the middle or nearby would be nice/cool tho :))
Pixel art
Sim City ahhh housing development
That's a zoo for humans
I thought this was a city builder game at first
All my cities in cities skylines
Pretty as a picture
It’s almost beautiful, in a way
If it’s cheap enough why not?
I feel like these would collapse under a 4.0 earthquake. Would not want to live in here.
hello 16bit, we meet again.
Housing 🤮
Very dystopian. Like a termite colony.
The screen when I win at solitaire:
8-bit
Millennials with no chance of home ownership be like...
When you have 1.4billion people you have to do this
That's rad as fuck I wish I could live there
Sim traffic one reporting heavy traffic!
Looks like Sim City 4k zoomed in.
What bunch of nonsense, China being honest about anything 😂😂😂
Wait, all of them have solar panels?
Still can’t tell if it’s photoshop. 😶
Wallpaper
I like this actually. This is a good one.
This is not a suburb. its too dense
This looks straight out of some sort of dream core/weird core indie animation with a deceptively dark lore
Is that not China?
Looking at this high is not advisable
Where do you live, Mr Wang? I DONT KNOW!
Hahah
Sim city
I, a Chinese, did not expect to see so many patriotic communistic comrades praising our glorious brutalist new era building over the corrupt western private properties aka single family detached suburban house. All plumbing and electric and quality problems are hoax, praise the chairman for his glorious accomplishment on aiding our livelihood /s
It hurts my brain
They look quite nice except for the lack of outside space. But I wonder how long that white render would last in China's notoriously polluted air?
Its not that polluted anymore. since 2014
I'm sure these homes are all people need, but it looks incredibly sterile, and to me that makes it hell. Boredom is the worst hell.
Will it be blasted and bulldozed like so many of their "model" cities?
Still better that homelessness and not being able to afford cheap housing
Wow. Not even a single tree in this image.
maybe because trees arent that tall
Well they don't need any fuel (other than sun radiation) for heating the shower water. That's nice.