So what? USA has more empty homes per capita (17 million for 330 million citizens, vs. 60 million in China for over 1.3 billion). If you compare it by density it looks even worse for the USA.

In any case, it's not really a useful, or meaningful metric anyway.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-21/china-property-bust-e...

https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?t=Vacancy&d=ACS%201-Yea...

> So what? USA has more empty homes per capita (17 million for 330 million citizens, vs. 60 million in China for over 1.3 billion)

I have no horse in this game, but 17/300 = 5.2% and 90/1300 = 6.9%. (edit: wikipedia says population of China is 1.4 billion, which would give 6.4%).

you're using the wrong numbers here.

17/330 = 5.2% 60/1400 = 4.2%

the grandparent poster was mistaken (the 90 million represented the amount of people the empty housing could house, not the amount of empty homes itself) so I found real number and included the link.

Oh! That makes a difference.

Yeah but out of that USA total, how many vacant properties are from foreign investors, let alone Chinese investors trying to stash their wealth out of reach of the CCP.

A Chinese friend once explained to me that local governments in China have very little ability to tax. Taxes all get sent to the central government and the central government never sends enough back to the local government. The most efficient way for a local government to raise revenue is to turn farmland into developable land and sell it to developers. Many of these empty homes come from such schemes. Obviously some of these developments turn into vibrant communities, but there are some that remain mostly empty and are held by individuals who are speculating that the prices of these empty condos will go up.