The type of building is irrelavant to the problem. Anything that works for apartment complexes works just as well for a single family house. It’s always the land underneath that’s the issue.

And at the ond of the day any solution that include getting rid of landlords comes down to the government seizing “unused” or “inappropriately used” land more aggresively. Something that just doesn’t sit right with most people.

I can’t unsee it anymore. It really does look like one.

The situation is way more complicated, it isn’t a simple scam. It certainly didn’t start out that way. The developers fully inteded on building these homes (at least until recently). And the business model was sound and generally works.

Pre-selling of units in apartments/condos is common around the world and a key part of securing the cashflow for the project. Chinese developers were operating just as anywhere else. The model is - use internal funding + pre-selling to build the project, then sell the remaining units once done. Use the money from selling the finished units to pay for the next project. Since demand for homes was super high, they started planning the next project before the first one was finished. Same as anywhere else in the world. The issue started that finished projects didn’t sell the remaining empty units at the expected rate. Eventually the capital of the development company was mostly used up and the cashflow from finished projects dried up. So they had a lot of half built projects and the only money available was that from projects even further in the future. And that’s not sustainable and here we are now.

There are three big factors why the finished units didn’t sell.

• Pre-selling is cheaper. So homeowners opted for that. You usually are given a decent discount and have much easier payment terms. You often have a few years of monthly payments before the lump-sum is due. So by the time you need that mortage you already have 10-30% equity in the unit. Making the mortage lower and easier to get. And if your financial situation changed, you can even sell the unit before the lump-sum is due.

• China has rather restrictive rules on owning land. In many muncipialities, and especially in big cities, people are only allowed to own 1 or 2 residential homes (there are ways around it). Foreign entities aren’t allowed to own residential properties for investment purposes in general. So unlike in the west where you have a conglomerate of investors buying up all the homes with the plan of making their money back by renting them out, Chinese investors have to rely on people buying their own home for personal use. Which means there is no real option of selling empty units on mass for a lower price.

• The rate of rural to urban migration slowed down. In the past few decades China experienced some of the fastest growth of urbanization ever. Tons of people coming from the countryside to live in the city. This created the illusion of near limitless demand for homes. But now it’s very likely that the Chinese government lied about their population. So the demand for homes can’t be as high as expected but on top of that, migration to urban areas has slowed down.

Now a lot of these things have been known for years. And nobody really did anything. So I personally think calling all of this a scam is fair at this point. But the Chinese government could step in and help out their population. If these developers really go bankrupt, the government could just seize all of the empty unsold units and redistribute them to people who got fucked over. It isn’t perfect but it’s better than not having a house. The big question is just, how many of these units are actually habitable. China has questionable building methods to begin with and on top of that many of the buildings were so empty that there was no money to pay for maintainance. So alot of these homes are death traps. And I suppose no home is better than a death trap.

It sounds good because it sounds like the developers are the ones getting fucked over. But that’s not really the case. They already made bank.

Chinas real estate development sector is mostly funded by pre-selling future projects. So the people who bought a unit that now never will be built are the ones truly getting fucked over. And while some of these people are other rich people planning on renting out these units, a big part are just regular people. Only about 25% of the population in China are renting. In some cities the percentage is higher but even in Shanghai and Beijing it’s only around 35%.

So a lot of the people who are getting fucked over by this are people who bought their own home that now will never be finished. On the bright side they probably haven’t paid the full amount yet but for many their entire lifesaving are still gone and saving up enough money to buy a new home will take a long time.

Sure the developers may lose a lot of net worth because their company isn’t worth anything anymore. But they still have way more assets in their possession then they need.

I don’t think how you interact with a tool matters. Typing what you want, drawing it yourself, or clicking through options is all the same. There are even other programs that allow you to draw by typing. They are way more difficult but again, I don’t think the difficulty matters.

There are other tools that allow you to recreate copyrighted material fairly easily. Character creators being on the top of the list. Games like Sims are well known for having tons of Sims that are characters from copyrighted IP. Everyone can recreate Barbie or any Disney Princess in the Sims. Heck, you can even download pre made characters on the official mod site. Yet we aren’t calling out the Sims for selling these characters. Because it doesn’t make sense.

The comparision doesn’t work. Because the AI is replacing the pencil or other drawing tool. And we aren’t saying pencil companies are selling you Mario pics because you can draw a Mario picture with a pencil either. Just because the process of how the drawing is made differs, doesn’t change the concept behind it.

An AI tool that advertises Mario pcitures would break copyright/trademark laws and hear from Nintendo quickly.