The Chinese guy is gazing down on the American with such sympathy, and the look in his eyes says "When will you rise up and join us, comrade?"
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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Why is it trending down? (90% of general pop, 70% of millennials). Is it just people living at home or whatever? Getting pretty late for millennials to still be living at home lol.
It's not necessarily trending down. Millenials have had fewer years to save up for buying or to find a partner and start a stable life (usual home-buyer is in a long term relationship)
Likely renters in cities. Lots of young people go to the cities, and housing is expensive there.
I do think it's just people living at home, it's not that uncommon outside US/Canada actually.
Footnote: Ownership understood as long-term leases that eventually revert to the government.
You still own the building/apartment. The lease is for the land and will be renewed once it ends.
And this depends on where you are. Urban land is publicly owned. Even if it wasn't, you still need a mechanism to seize land. China doesn't have to wait for a lease to end to do this, just as the US can seize any property they want. This is just how it works anywhere. Property ownership isn't some eternal category, it is always at the whim of the state.
The difference between how someone in China owns their home and how someone owns their home in the US is similar in practice. But in China you don't pay property taxes lol.
Wait till you find out that every sovereign actually owns the territory and you are only buying property rights as defined by that sovereign.
Then, look up property taxes in China and compare them to the USA.
It's amazing how much more liberty Chinese people have compared to Americans on the dimension of owning their own domicile.
The average Chinese home equals 29.4x the average Chinese income. In the US it is 3.3x. I'm not sure how that qualifies as more when Chinese income is eaten up by housing at rates that are quite literally embarrassing.
The average Chinese income is a useless number when you consider that they have spent the last 75 years pulling 800 million people out of devastating poverty into "just above the poverty line". You can't use average income for anything useful with a population that massive and with income inequality that spans literal peasant farmers through business tycoons.
You can easily figure out that your numbers are meaningless, even if they are accurate, because a larger percentage of Chinese citizens own their own homes when compared to the USA. If your numbers were meaningful, then they would be predictive. Unfortunately, just because your numbers are accurate doesn't make them predictive. The USA has a lower home ownership rate per capita despite the averages working out to such a massive difference in the other direction, hence, your choice of aggregate is the problem here.
90% of people in China own their homes and 80% of them own them outright without mortgages of any kind.
Because of this, and the extremely low cost of living expenses, it is entirely possible to save for your own children's home purchase, which is pretty much what happens in China. Healthcare is free, generational homes provide elder care. Tuition at university costs are extremely low. There are no property taxes. A one-person income in China, therefore, can be saved in a way that is completely unimaginable in the USA. A family doesn't even need to save for college tuition because it's just that cheap. The only thing to save for, then, is buying a home for your child when they come of age.
For the well off, that means buying it outright immediately. For the less well off, that means the child graduates from schooling, enters the work force, lives at home, saves their own money, and they pool the money with their parents and their grandparents to buy a home. Maybe they become part of the 20% that take out a loan to do it, but again, there are no other costs that can bankrupt your family, unlike the USA.
It will shock everyone in the USA if not only they knew how expensive housing prices were but also that a full 90% of people in China own their homes because they can afford it, that 80% are debt free, and that there are no property taxes.
And that this is true despite the income levels being so low!
- China had such a terrible starting point because the Chinese Communist Party made terrible policy decisions in the 1950's and 1960's.
- You do realize Chinese home ownership rates exist only by fact that children do not move out of their parents' house. The cost of housing makes it impossible and the one child policy makes inheritance practical. Home ownership rates literally only exist because the country is in a slow self-destruction. It could not exist if the Chinese bothered having babies or found it possible to move out of their parents' house.
There's a reason why so many Chinese are immigrating to the United States. China is no utopia.
LOL, lmao even
China has a terrible starting point because it was an agrarian society with 90% of it's population living on a dollar a year prior to the revolution. That's because it was under a century of subjugation by European imperialists who forced China at gun point to continue allowing European drug dealers to destroy the country with opium getting 60% of the population addicted. They took over the port cities and administered tarrifs on behalf of China and took all the proceeds. And the Japanese invaded and occupied them.
Then they had a devastating civil war that put the CPC in power, but the Europeans refused to allow total victory so they kept Hong Kong and they blockaded the island of Taiwan in order to protect their fascist puppet who spent the next several decades prosecuting the White Terror under their protection.
Then the party tried to rapidly industrialize and solve their cyclical famines problem, but they had to do it without the benefit of any knowledgeable workers, any equipment, any chemical production, any Western support, and any research corpus for their climates and their crops. And they made bad decisions that had negative consequences that they learned from adapted to.
The idea that children don't move out of their parental homes is absolutely not true. You're going to have to get a source for that.
And the idea that so many Chinese people are dissatisfied with their country is belied by the Harvard 15-year study that showed 95.5% of people approved of the party and the national government and its officials.
Utopia is never the standard we use, and no one is claiming utopia. But if you're going to set the standard at UTOPIA, China is far closer to utopia than the USA.
China also had a major drought during the Great Leap Forward. They would have had a hard time even if they hadn't collectivized their agriculture.
Numbers without sources come from asses. — Famous Chinese proverb
You can spitball it with rough averages. Average Chinese housing costs about $200k to buy (more in the city, less in rural areas) and the average income is somewhere around $6k or $7k per year. Again, more in urban areas, less in rural areas. Do the math.
US average household income is about $80k. Average housing is $325k. Again, varies by location. Just a quick spitballing of numbers illustrates the vast difference in affordability.
The bottom line is it isn't even close!
the average income is somewhere around $6k or $7k per year.
Okay you're not even close. It's hilarious that you think it sounds reasonable though. Apply a little thought next time.
The problem with your spitballing is that you use averages. Averages are disproportionally influenced by very high and very low numbers in the set of numbers the average is calculated from. Median numbers please.
That critique aside, your point still does not change that fact that a much larger precentage of chinese owns their own home compared to US citizens. In absolute numbers, it is of course even more devastating.
Even if one agrees with your spitballing, then it would follow that citizens in the PRC can save much more money to afford homes than those in the USA, who can not.
Your criticism would make sense if China had a higher gini coefficient but they do not. Plus, it is well-known that Chinese home ownership rates are a product of the one child policy tied with the fact that young Chinese can never afford their own house. Each family's one child just never moves out. It is very common to live with your parents your entire life and to assume their house once they are dead. In the US it is very common for families to have several children and for the children to move out once they are adults.
Wait till you find out that eminent domain exists in pretty much every country, also see what happens if you stop paying your property tax.
Eminent domain requires compensation equal to the value of the property. China uses eminent domain much more frequently than any country in the west. Some describe that as a virtue, others as a vice. Where I live you cannot lose your property due to failure to pay property tax unless it is an investment property. The state can place a lien against it, however.
China uses eminent domain much more frequently than any country in the west
[citation needed]
Last I checked, there are plenty of pictures of China building around people's homes because they refused to let them go. Meanwhile, in the west, it's pretty common to buy people out even if they don't want to sell. The point here however, is not about splitting hairs, but that what China does isn't actually all that different. The key difference in China is that companies like BlackRock can't hoard property and force majority of the population to become serfs.
But I might need that equity in heaven…
Actually I don’t know exactly how home property works, but I wouldn’t assume it’s the same as how capital property works, meaning property for offices, factories, farming, mining, etc.