China: the paradox of being able to buy an apartment for 2000 Euros
A former mining town in China rose to internet fame in real estate after the story of a young woman who moved there and bought a 46-square-meter apartment for just 15,000 yuan ($ 2,000) went viral.
The northeastern city of Hegang in Heilongjiang used to be a coal-mining town, but ran into crisis when fossil deposits ran out several years ago. Then the local authorities, in an attempt to revive the city, have tried to make it a center for young professionals who cannot afford an apartment in megacities and who are looking for a more peaceful life.
This city made headlines in China when a young professional named Zhao made a video in which she was happy to have bought an apartment for only 15,000 Yuan, about 2000 Euros.
Zhao had rented an apartment in Nanjing, the capital of East China's Jiangsu Province, before deciding to take the plunge and move to downtown Hegang last year and buy the small second-hand apartment, he told Star Video. .
By comparison, the average price of a home in Nanjing was recently valued at more than 32,000 Yuan (4,450 Euros) for a single square meter, according to real estate company 5i5j. This means that an apartment similar in size to Zhao's Hegang would cost nearly 100 times more in Nanjing.
Zhao then claimed that she spent 50,000 Yuan (about 7,000 Euros) to renovate her new home and another 1,000 yuan a month for a domestic worker to take care of daily chores such as cleaning and cooking.
“It is so cheap that I can buy it without much effort and I can decorate it according to my tastes. I can live a life without the pressure of the home loan, ”he said.
Her work as a digital artist allows her to work remotely from home in any city, so even a small and peripheral center like Hegang can suit her.
China has a big real estate problem: on the one hand huge prices for major urban centers, on the other peripheral centers where prices collapse, also because there is no demographic push, so real estate demand is stagnant. These centers, however, are a possibility of realization and for those young professionals who, otherwise, would have almost failed in large urban centers, because they would not be able to achieve independence. A forced rediscovery of rurality that shows an often ignored aspect of the many “Chinas” that live side by side.
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The article China: the paradox of being able to buy an apartment for 2000 Euros comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/cina-il-paradosso-di-potersi-comprare-un-appartamento-per-2000-euro/ on Fri, 28 Oct 2022 17:32:38 +0000.