@tillshadeisgone @sapphicseagoat
But I don't dispute the homeownership rate! I only dispute the conclusions drawn from that rate.
> but I'm sorry I just don't find it very convincing to say that housing can still be secretly awful when very nearly 90% of people own a home. That's stretching credulity.
As I mentioned already, I spent most of my life, until recent few years, in Russia. Technically, homeownership rate there is over 90% (92.6% according to some statistics). The housing situation is still (very openly, not secretly) awful for people of our generation.
You're probably approaching this from the US perspective, where people become homeowners in a certain way, and this brings certain implications. It would be incorrect to translate this logic to Russia (or, from what I have heard, China).
The fact that someone technically owns 1/10th of the small apartment their parents or grandparents live in (because they too lived there in early 90s when it was "privatised"), in a small town with no jobs, doesn't mean anything (except that even if their parents are unwilling, they can still go back to that small town and force their way into the apartment and secure themselves a bed there and call the cops in case of kicking out). But this is a very popular scenario in Russia! This is exactly the way how most people aged 25-50 came to be "homeowners" in Russia.
Half of the people living in Moscow are renting (and paying half of their salary on rent); most of them are technically homeowners of _something_ (of a small share in their parents' apartment hundreds or thousands of kilometers away); most of them will also never be able to buy their own housing in the city they live in, and will have to pay half of their salary on rent for the foreseeable future. Maybe that's "stretching credulity", but that's just the way how things are.
I'm not saying that the situation or history of homeownership is completely the same in China (I'm not an expert on China), I'm just saying that it would be incorrect to make any such assumptions about housing from the percentage of homeowners when it comes to countries that didn't have the same economic system as US or Europe did for the last 100 years. (And China in that regard is much closer to Russia than it is to US or Europe.)
> One video said they live in Weihan and $200 a month in rent will get you very comfortable
You mean Weihai? The median salary there is apparently a bit under $600/month.
It's a small city by Chinese standards, and they don't have any form of rapid public transit apparently. Of course in any more or less dense city the situation is still going to be way better than it is in US suburbs.
Weihai is also very... diverse. As in, what's technically considered to be Weihai is a huge area, large parts of it very rural. So I'd expect that the prices vary very significantly too, "$200 a month in rent" doesn't say much unless you know where exactly in this territory it is.
(I can also mention that the going rate for decent single-bedroom apartments in the urbanized outskirts of my home city (population over a million people, in an area of less than a thousand of square kilometers / around 200-300sq.mi.) is also around $200/month; while typical going rate for single-room apartments within 3km of the central city square is around $400.
Doesn't mean that people's lives are good there; they are not, I have enough first-hand and second-hand knowledge of this. What matters is not the absolute cost of rent, but cost of rent relative to income. $200 for rent in my home city absolutely is not the same and does not have the same implications as $200 for rent in, say, Chicago or Seattle would be; it would just be incorrect to compare them this way! It is similarly incorrect to translate Weihai rental prices to USA without accounting for the huge difference in incomes.)
> I will say a LOT of people in China live in cities other than Shanghai
Yeah I only mentioned Shanghai because it is one of the cities where $3k/month salary (from the first video you mentioned) is at least realistic for some people of the upper middle class.
> however I just looked today to see more Shanghai specific prices and they are saying anywhere from $300 a month to $1000 a month for rent
I wonder where did you look? Because I looked too (but maybe my sources are bad, I looked at discussions on reddit (for example there is this thread from 3 years ago https://www.reddit.com/r/shanghai/comments/r5pk43/is_it_possible_to_live_in_shanghai_with_a_bit/ )), and it seems that $300 (2200 CNY) will only get one a small delapidated apartment in a village way outside of Shanghai proper, like 1.5 hours away from it by public transit; while $1k might get you a decent one-bedroom apartment around outer ring road. (And that's with median salary, as reported by the government-owned media, being $1500 in Shanghai.)
This corroborates what I heard directly from local people living in (other) major cities in China years ago.
And housing affordability crisis in Shanghai is a very well-known problem, I've seen the government mentioning it many times, they're building a lot of subsidized housing in Shanghai to address it (but still not nearly enough, not even making a dent), and rent that housing to workers for nominal pay (but those apartments that are rented for nominal pay, are rented via participating employers... so basically for the worker this means that employer provides them with the cheap rental housing on top of the salary. If you're lucky to work for such an employer.)
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carl marks
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