[burglins]

Or maybe it's because if you're well-off, there's no reason to buy an expensive villa that looks just like the one next to it. Better to buy a smaller, more tasteful house that's uniquely yours?

IMO neighborhoods with a single house design copy-pasted are really unappealing, no matter the country.

[intrasight]

Teleport that whole thing to London or the Bay Area and they'd sell for millions each. Some people are fine with cookie-cutter affluence. And after good landscaping and tree growth, it wouldn't look so weird.

[brigadier132]

The don't sell for millions because of "cookie-cutter" affluence in London or the Bay Area, they sell because of the location and there are no other options.

[intrasight]

Yes. I meant of course to teleport to a nice neighborhood. No sense expending all that teleportation energy to just end up in another crappy place ;)

[yowzadave]

Depends on the design/typology. Uniform rowhouses can often look very beautiful--take any number of streets in Brooklyn Heights, or the newer projects by Peter Barber in London. It's not "repetition" as a general principle that's unappealing, it's the particular execution that's so common in cheap sprawl developments.

[r721]

Yeah, there was a quite similar story from Turkey:

>Inside a $200 million ghost town in Turkey filled with castles reminiscent of Disneyland — minus all the people

https://www.insider.com/turkey-abandoned-disney-castles-vill...

[swozey]

> $370,000 to $500,000 each

$370k would bring them around 180 million, $500k 250 million

I don't know anything about the returns on master communities, $25-50 million sounds pretty good.

In the end, though:

> What remained was 587 completed homes and $27 million in debt

Where are you supposed to park? In the grass? On the road? It's looks like its practically a one lane road. There's no garages...

[nicolaslem]

The pictures are so surreal, without context I would 100% think they are AI generated.

[Barrin92]

There are national differences to this, in Europe and Asia affluent people tend to move into city centers whereas in NA often the opposite is often the case (exceptions of course do apply), which makes these developments even more baffling in China.

It's literally a bunch of McMansions thrown at some plot of land. You see this a lot with real estate development in the emerging economies, as if developers looked at Western movies from the 80s and decided that is what high status looks like. A lot of really tacky retro-futuristic skylines that look terrible and out of place have come out of this as well in China or the gulf states.

[swozey]

Oof. I've lived in townhouses for so long that I didn't even stop and think for a second that they all look the same. I kind of thought my previous house was a bit ugly, but I couldn't afford the ones I actually liked the looks of so I guess my expectations are just super low.

[refurb]

They don't care about the home, they care about the land (the buyers that is). Rules in China penalize holding undeveloped land, so if it's approved for a housing development, something has to be built. And if you end up renting it out, what do they care what it's like?

[viscanti]

Maybe the well-off want things like paved roads and landscaping?