[nordsieck]

> China and America could avert the "2nd cold war" by having dangerously over-leveraged idled Chinese builders (Evergrande, Country Garden, etc.) partner with American construction companies and put their idle/money-burning build capacity to solving America's own real-estate shortages.

I don't think that works.

If the Chinese builders are idle, it isn't because they don't have work to complete - the entire crisis is because people basically prepaid for their homes and the builders have yet to complete a lot of them (I think there's a strong implication of embezzlement here). And the Chinese government is desperately trying to find a solution that will get complete homes to the people who have paid for them.

In any case, I don't think a lack of construction companies and/or workers is the problem. It's that local governments are making it impossible to build. We're not going to get more homes built to attacking something other than the bottleneck.

[smileysteve]

Context

"Even 1.4 billion people can’t fill all of China’s vacant homes, ex-official admits "

https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/23/business/china-too-many-homes...

[ClumsyPilot]

So one system has too many homes, the other has not enough? I know which I would prefer.

[acover]

Houses in China are 40x your income. In the USA they are 6x

[linuxlizard]

I have a modest proposal. We (USA) could send our retirees to China which would fill up some of the overabundance of housing there while releasing housing here. An article floated by a while ago saying Boomers are the fastest growing homeless demographic.

[tessierashpool]

we have an overabundance of housing here too, though. LendingTree research pegged it as 16 million empty homes.