Another dispatch from one of China’s ghost city developments, but this one with a twist: All the homes were theoretically designed for rich people, but I’m having a hard time figuring out why they would want them.
I know that China is a very different country indeed, but I can’t figure out why the developers thought that these McMasions, all made on the same floorplan and jowl by jowl next to each other on pretty small plots of land, would be appealing to the wealthy in the first place. They houses themselves are big and stylish enough in the 19th century French style they were aping, but the rich want land, space and differentiation, not to live between two houses exactly like their own on a small plot of land.
Yet another example of China’s inexplicable, wasteful policies…
Tags: China, Communism, Ghost Cities, Greenland Group (China), Shenyang City, video
You’re framing this improperly: Those aren’t houses to live in, they’re investment vehicles.
China got this because it didn’t want to develop a real “traditional market-based economy”. They wanted it all, they wanted it now, and they grew up this monstrosity of a hybrid command/market economy that resembles ideal Fascism more than the Fascism of Italy ever did.
Because of this, there was no way for the Chinese people to store up the value they’d earned (which the government couldn’t be trusted with, anyway…) and had to do something to put that money away. So, the real estate market as we see it in China today. The sad fact that the lower-level Chinese government bodies were entirely and utterly complicit in all of this…? Yeah. The whole thing is a mess, one that is likely to take down China for generations to come.
The distortion in the markets was so great that China used more concrete and iron in the peak years of “development” than the rest of the world did during the Industrial Revolution. Think about that, for a minute, then look at the tofu-dreg buildings they got out of it, and wonder about where the hell all that value went, and what’s going to happen when people go to get their savings out of it all… What’s China going to do, sell apartments to Third-Worlders who’re just as screwed as they are, economically? Precisely none of that crap is fungible, and it’s predicated on a huge Chinese population that’s also not happening because of poor CCP policies…
Honestly don’t see how China pulls out of this death-spiral. It’ll be amazing if they do, but… Man, do they have a lot going against them. All it would take would be a couple of “Black Swan” events, and the entire shoddy edifice comes down. Imagine the impact of Three Gorges collapsing… Or, if the Taiwanese take them at their word about all those reservoirs and such that China is threatening; care to postulate the effect of a single nuke on Three Gorges, and everything downstream…?
And, if Taiwan doesn’t have nukes, I’d be amazed. I’m pretty sure that they were co-conspiring with Israel and South Africa, back in the day. Lots of electronics reputedly went from Taiwan to South Africa for that purpose…
As I understand these things, the Chinese like to invest in property as more reliable than investing in companies whose CEOs can run off with all your money at any time. In this environment, housing can serve as a place where a person lives, but it can also serve as a place to park your money. In the second case, it’s not necessary that anybody ever actually live there.
I’m not sure the houses need to be sold to be profitable. If the developer borrows to build them, turns around and pays that money to the builder, and then walks away, the builder has certainly made money. And if the developer gets a kickback from the builder, or owns even part of the builder, the developer makes money. Whoever loaned the money takes the loss.
R C Dean,
What you’re missing is that the money lender in the Chinese case would be all the people who invested in the buildings, making down payments and then mortgages on projects that were not built to standard, never occupied, and in some cases, never built at all. They got scammed by the local government, the developers, and the contractors.
There’s a huge amount of money that properly ought to have been in the hands of the Chinese people, saved for retirement/old age because those same people didn’t have the kids who would have supported them during that part of their lives due to the “One Child” policy… It’s all these interacting features that should terrify the CCP, because if the entire house of cards caves in…? Who is going to be standing there to take the blame?
Whoever it was that decided to shortcut developing a modern healthy economy in China has a lot to answer for. I’ve done a fair amount of reading on it, and it’s like they just did it, without understanding what they were doing. Nobody sat down and said “OK, if we’re to do this, we need to have safe, reliable investments for the people to be able to make, that will stabilize things once the crazy growth is over…” Instead, they opted for all these short-term high-return ideas, and we’re at about the point where the contradictions are about to unwind the whole thing.
In the end, you can’t overcome the fact that they bought all these resources and expended them for things that aren’t lasting. Sure, they’ve got all these empty cities and this infrastructure, but what ‘effing good does that do if the population is actually dropping and all that stored value is misallocated and useless to the mass of the people who will need it in their old age? What good does it do China to have those things, if having them and paying the bills for them place such a huge burden on the new generations that they aren’t able to form families or have kids…?
This is the ratchet effect of socialism on steroids: Europe is undergoing the same sort of pressures, because the younger generations are hollowed out due to the same trends occurring there. Look into how many young adults live at home and don’t leave until well into their thirties in nations like Italy; that’s the real reason for the “birth dearth”: Forming families and having kids is just too damn expensive and hard to accomplish, not when there are all these distractions.
The real story of the 21st Century is going to be the slow realization that we’re undergoing a population crash, and how we are going to cope with it. The more reactionary regimes are going to be doing some very ugly things, by the end of the century.
[…] China’s Abandoned Levittown McMansions. “Another dispatch from one of China’s ghost city developments, but this one with a twist: […]
It can and does happen here. “Inland Empire” in California, anyone?
What I don’t get is why supposedly intelligent people would buy property in the middle of freakin nowhere, only because other people people were buying there. No shopping, no scenery, no attractions. Just other buildings.
You really have to have a ‘hive’ mentality to play.
Kirk, I had forgotten about all the mortgages that Chinese buyers are having to pay without having a livable house. So you’re right – the banks aren’t the ones holding the bag, or at least not the only ones.
The developers/builders still made their money, though, which was my point. Our host asked “what were the developers thinking?”. I believe they didn’t care how marketable these houses would be, as they were going to make money on them regardless.
The Chinese economy as measured by the GDP is propped up by these utterly fabricated real estate properties. The debt is 5 times the GDP when you add the Chinese States, the Developers (State controlled if not owned), the Banks (State controllad and mostly owned). The Chinese GDP is clearly faked not just by phoney reporting but because the properties have NO actual value. They cannot even be finished and they represent a substantial amount of what has been considered Chinese GDP.
It is a massive fraud and calling it a house of cards is not fair to houses of cards, this is so obviously fake that it would require an economic illiterate person not to realize and understand this.
Kirk, what’s generally believed among those in the know is that the Taiwanese don’t have any actual nukes, but have been maintaining infrastructure such that when they think they need them they can sprint to having them within a couple of months.
Someone call Letitia James.
Regarding the houses being built jowl by jowl next to each other. Right before the Hong Kong transfer a lot of wealthy Chinese found their way into the SF Bay Area. They bought up homes in the wealthy area of Hillsborough and in a number of cases leveled the existing mansion and built a larger one on the property, a larger one that came far closer to the property lines than any American would feel comfortable with. Apparently they hand’t thought of making a legal minimum at that time and there were a lot of pissed off people.
I guess I’m saying yards aren’t a big concern for some people compared to interior space.
@Eric S. Raymond,
It’d be my guess that they’ve done that sprint, already. A nuke in the hand is worth a hell of a lot more than a nuke three months from now. What they haven’t done is acknowledged any of that, or told the world. China comes calling with the PLA and PLAN? They’ll likely let all of us know, then.
First thing to go will likely be Three Gorges, after a suitable provocation.
Based on research i’ve seen from multiple researchers focused on finance/economics/population…starting a few years ago China is at the start of a massive collapse in population (could lose 400 million over the next 30-50 years) and a massive rise in the average age of the population.
Those two factors are an economic disaster for them.
Less people = less ability to grow the economy and very likely a large contraction in the economy
Older People = fewer people working, fewer people giving birth, more young productive people needed for elderly care, etc.
The transition from hyper growth to massive contraction will be ugly financially and politically.
When I saw the first images of the cheek-by-jowl McMansions, they looked like some bizarre CGI creation for a weird dystopian movie. Which suggest that some Hollywood sharpie could buy the whole lot for 5 cents on the dollar for one gigantic film set. Hell, they could blow up high rises or entire blocks of buildings for real filming and come out money ahead.
If too many people end up with no personal savings and no prospects of recouping them while the elite get/stay rich, then the ruling clique may – in the words that have been used in China for millenia – lose the mandate of Heaven. Which has historically not worked out well for the ruling elite. Yes, they’ll turn the guns on their own people. That only goes so far, though. Especially if parents and grandparents instead of students are involved.
But then you would have to be in China to film…
@Kirk:
“China comes calling with the PLA and PLAN?”
Taiwan’s coasts turn out to be very forbidding to make amphibious landings on. The few spots and usable ports are readily defensible. And the PLAN will not be in any shape to attempt such for some time. Yes, they’re building a lot of ships. Filling those ships with trained crews is an entirely different proposition.
ruprecht says: I guess I’m saying yards aren’t a big concern for some people compared to interior space.
My city (Toronto) has a lot of wealthy Chinese. And that’s the story here–they build what we call “monster houses”–houses that are as big as will fit on the lot, coming as close to the property line as they can get away with, because they want lots of indoor living space and don’t care at all about the yard.
With the ongoing collapse of fertility in China, I can only imagine the Chinese real estate market in 10-20 years. Who will buy the existing housing stock, much less pay for new construction.
With the ongoing collapse of fertility in China, I can only imagine the Chinese real estate market in 10-20 years. Who will buy the existing housing stock, much less pay for new construction.
The death spiral for demographic collapse ain’t going to be pretty, anywhere. The US has an advantage, in that everyone wants to live here, but that’s only going to last so long as we can keep our heads above water economically. I think that may be one reason everyone is going so easy on immigration, but… The error they’re making is that people are not interchangeable parts, and if you flood the US with sub-par Third World types, there’s nothing to say that the US will continue to thrive.
I remain ambivalent about the idea that industrial civilization the way we’re currently doing it is at all sustainable… If you can’t provide the economic opportunities for the kids to form families and have their own children, what makes you think we can sustain this sort of civilization for any real length of time?
I remember all the BS about “Japan, Inc.” back in the day… I suspect that inside the next ten-twenty years, all the “China gonna conquer world” BS will go the same way, and we’ll be laughing at the idea.
The reality is that China’s leadership in the CCP has imperial pretensions and ambitions, but stands on demographic quicksand. It would be hideously ugly if they and the Indians got into it with each other, say about the time that China’s downturn in demography strips them of military-age males.
A whole lot of experts believe that China most likely loses that fight. It’s thought that China would need, at a minimum, 1 million troops, which means they’d have to launch an amphibious invasion more than six times the size of D-Day across 80-100 miles of open water in an era of constant satellite surveillance and cheap drones.
It’s a very, very tall order.
My guess is that they’re more likely to try for a “soft conquest”, but that may change as the Taiwanese natives get more and more power.
End state for Taiwan under the CCP would look an awful lot like the Uyghur situation, and I think that most of Taiwan knows that. So… I doubt that there’s going to be a peaceful reunification.
Where this ends, I’ve no idea. We’re dealing with fundamentally irrational decison-makers, and there’s no telling what they’re going to do. Xi or his successors may just decide “F*ck it, we’re about to pay the piper for all this other BS, let’s go out in a Gotterdammerung of stupidity…” It’s like forecasting what Saddam was going to do; all you could really predict was “Something stupid…”
China could pull themselves out of the death-spiral that they’re in, but… That’d mean they’d have to start not being Chinese Communists. It’s like trying to figure out how Hitler and the Nazis could have won WWII… You first have to predicate the whole thing on them not acting like Nazis, which sort of erases the whole point of the idea. As they were constituted, they weren’t going to win, no matter what. Too much ranged against them, too much in the way of really poor decisions being made. That’s China, right now: They’re utterly unequipped for the situation they find themselves in.
A huge part of the problem is their ideological lock; they bought into the whole Communist thing a bit too hard, waited too long to liberalize their economy, and when they did, they created a circus funhouse version of a traditional market-based economy. Further, they kept right on doubling-down on the stupid with all the other legacy decisions; the disastrous “One Child” policy should have been ended back in the 1980s, by which time they should have figured out that a policy predicated on someone’s preeminence as a literal rocket scientist probably had little to do with their abilities as a demographer…
The other major thing they need to do, and won’t, is break the attitude that they’ve got all this endless mass of people to exploit and use. They don’t; the mindset is still there, just like Putin is delusional in his belief that he’s got all these millions of people to turn into soldiers. One of the key things that’s going to do in both Russia and China is that they fundamentally do not care for or want to worry about nurturing their people effectively. They don’t do the things they need to; Putin had a chance to pull Russia out of its demographic death spiral, and didn’t… Outside the major metro areas of Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia is an undeveloped primitive nightmare. No plumbing, shitty health care, and the infrastructure out in the smaller cities and towns is horrible. The life expectancies keep dropping, and he’s done nothing to stop that. You go look at the industries, particularly the military ones, and the work force is horrible–The majority of the really skilled guys are about to age out of the labor force, and that’s the same thing happening to China.
Not, of course, that anyone else in the rest of the world is doing any better at taking care of their people. The elites are going to learn the hard way that their insouciant approach to doing their damn jobs eventually catches up to you, and it catches up rather damn quickly when your population levels are imploding.
Malthus and Ehrlich were idiots of the highest order. What’s so bad is that they were glib and convincing, swaying policy decisions for generations. We will see what we will see, however… I don’t think we’ll be very happy at what eventuates. Wolves will be howling in abandoned villages around the Eurasian continent before this century is out. They already are, in a lot of places…
Let’s all remember that a large number of Chinese living in Taiwan have relatives in Red China. Talk of “nukes” and flood deaths of millions of people due to an intentional breaching of the Three Gorges Dam is unlikely to go anywhere past the idle talk stage.
I don’t agree. I worked in Shenzhen from 2010-2023, and so far as I could see, almost no one in China, except for rural farmers and the like, lives in single family homes except for extremely rich people. The single family homes I saw were all on what we would consider very small plots of land and were either owned by very rich people, or by the Party and used as weekend getaways for Party members. China is so crowded that this is not surprising. Most rich Chinese live in apartments, although they might have a country home out in the provinces somewhere. I never saw or heard of any estates like you see in Greenwich or Beverly Hills.
@Lawrence Person
Cell networks down, pharmacies down … new PSYOP incoming, eh?
@Eric S Raymond
Where do you write these days? Subscribestar?
“You’re framing this improperly: Those aren’t houses to live in, they’re investment vehicles.”
All production is for the sake of consumption. Housing that will never be utilized cannot be an investment. If these units were rented out, and the revenue stream exceeded the utilization cost, then they would qualify as investments.
Resource misallocation on a scale this large can only come about under conditions of rapid credit expansion. At one point in Weimar’s hyperinflationary crack-up boom, it would have been a good idea to buy a large quantity of bedpans, if no better opportunity presented itself. But even at that, bedpans have use value, unlike empty houses.
It could as easily be argued that buying up depressed Detroit real estate, without regard to its use value, is an investment. These homes are empty because no one is willing to live there. If no one can be found to live there, how can they be investment assets. Would *you* buy Detroit real estate and if you did how long would it take for your asset to be recognized as a liability?
Aaaand… You prove yourself as intelligent as your namesake.
The Chinese people made rational choices, but their government channeled things such that those rational choices were inoperable. The real estate market was the only thing they could invest in, and which they felt confident in. Sad reality? They were wrong.
The Chinese government made a huge error in what they did; if they’d have followed something like Chile’s path, where the people could invest their money in real, working assets? They’d have been better off. Because that idea was anathema? They did this deal where the local low-level governments colluded with the developers to offer these “opportunities” that also happened to enrich the CCP nomenklatura and the government entity. Now that the wheels are coming off? LOL… About all you can do is try to stay out of the way; this is going to be a huge issue, in the coming years.
It was never that these real estate schemes were a good idea, but it was the only thing on offer. That was where the Chinese oligarchy screwed up, and their mistake will cost the world immense resources.
It’s not the reality of things as they were; it’s what they perceived at the time. With perfect foresight, they’d have known better, but they didn’t have that, did they?
Taiwanese don’t have a lot of relatives left in China. The Chinese that fled to Taiwan with the victory of the CCP have been disconnected from the mainland for almost 75 years. Many of their mainland relatives didn’t survive Mao’s “tender mercies” for having Nationalist family members or such policies as the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution. Add in the One Child Policy to the basic fact that Taiwan has always been rather loosely connected to the mainland geographically and almost never connected politically, and you get two very disconnected peoples who just happen to share a language.
Taiwan wouldn’t waste a nuke on the Three Gorges Dam. Regular warheads on a cruise missile would suffice to break it’s rather vulnerable design. Using a nuke would waste energy vaporizing flood water better used to destroy downstream. Nukes would be better used on Beijing (take out the elite), key port facilities (i.e. Shanghai), the space launch and command facilities, and where ever Xi is located.
Malthus, that is the POINT.
They are not “real” investment, but they are “perceived as” investment. It’s not as if America is immune to this sort of thing. See Housing Bubble.
When you have no choice about where to put your money, you put it where you can. In America, our choices are limited (try investing 401(k) money in commodities), but VAST by comparison to the Chinese. They have one and only one choice: Real-estate.
Between that and various perverse incentives – free credit and the land under the buildings being leased from the local government being the two big ones – they got the real-estate bubble to top all real-estate bubbles.
It’s not exactly “irrational”. It is more a bunch of mostly rational actors working at cross purposes due to misaligned incentives.
It’s far too late to do anything “helpful”. We’re now at the damage control phase (how to do that is not obvious and there is no consensus). Denial and doubling down seem to be the approach China has taken. That’s not “damage control”. The whole thing is probably going to implode very messily – as in riots and massive bloodshed messily.
BTW: Evergrande’s “bankruptcy” is a very important signal for what’s next. Hong Kong said “it’s garbage; liquidate it”. If that actually happens, the mark-to-market that it creates will destroy an immense amount of paper value. The side-effects of that will be massive. If that doesn’t happen because the CCP ignores Hong Kong, that has its own fallout, much like our “too big to fail” situation has, but x100 on steroids.
“Aaaand… You prove yourself as intelligent as your namesake.”
The nom de guerre is ironic, Kirk. I could as readily mistake you for a pious churchman.
“The Chinese people made rational choices.”
Building out your housing stock while the population is in decline is a good example of irrationalism.
“The real estate market was the only thing they could invest in.”
Were there no tulip bulbs to be had for speculative purposes, then? Too bad, because they would have had greater use value. It is my own understanding that the Hong Kong stock market offers various financial instruments which has been accessible to Chinese investors since 2014. But why such obvious let facts stand in the way of unsubstantiated bluster?
Every economic exchange, or sacrifice, implies a choice. In this case the choice was between purchasing a consumer good—the house—or retaining its purchase price as capital. The rational choice would have been to do nothing rather than to voluntarily become owner of an irredeemable asset.
@ markedup2 “They have one and only one choice: Real-estate.”
They had a multitude of choices but they seem to have preferred financial suicide.
“When you have no choice about where to put your money, you put it where you can.”
No, you leave it in the bank.
I agree with your mark-to-market assessment, though. Real estate is the primary asset allocation for the Chinese. The resultant credit contraction will be epic.
“The real estate market was the only thing they could invest in, and which they felt confident in.”
You are welcome to your own opinions but not your own facts. Stocks have been a Chinese option for at least twenty years. In short, they had “other things” and were sufficiently “confident” to own them. Nor does this one example begin to exhaust the many other avenues available to the Chinese for the purpose of financial speculation.
“With the continuous improvement in China’s stock market performance, an increasing number of individual investors are playing (sic) the Chinese stock market. In 2002, there were 68 million individual stock trading accounts in China, accounting for 5.36% of China’s 1.28 billion people. By the end of 2003, the number had jumped to 70 million. In February 2007, the number exceeded 80 million. Due to the rapid growth of stock market participants, the investment portfolios of Chinese individuals are drawing more attention from Chinese scholars.”
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/why-some-chinese-invest-in-the-stock-market-and-others-dont/
Don’t forget that the people purchasing these empty properties do not actually own them. The CCP owns them and the purchasers are given a 70 year leasehold on the property.
The theory is that at the end of the 70 years of ownership, the leasehold would automatically renew for another 70 years, but that transition has not yet occurred.
Would you trust the CCP to let you keep “their” property?
Malthus: My understanding is that the Chinese stock market is not considered a viable option for most people. For starters, there’s a whole lot of fly-by-night stuff going on that tends to rip people off–reinforcing a long-standing cultural perception that real estate is the only “hard” asset. The way that Chinese construction companies have been behaving the last few decades is every bit as fly-by-night as some of their stock offerings, however.
Meanwhile, the CCP has generally kept people from investing in international markets, where investors might find some more reputable options for investment. Every time they’ve opened a loophole in their laws, cash has fled, generally leading to the loophole being closed again. This is how we got stuff like the Canadian real estate market being broken almost beyond repair; Chinese investors are looking for a way to get their money *out* of China, and are often willing to take negative returns in exchange for the relative safety of foreign real estate (which says something about the value of legal protections regarding the individual ownership of property).
So, yes, Chinese workers who save up a little money do have some options, but unless they have the right connections, very few of them can be trusted as safe investments. Given the limited information that they are allowed to work with, and historic cultural biases towards real estate (which is not all that different from the successes of landed nobility throughout pre-Industrial history), it’s not surprising that they would generally en masse make the poor decision to sink their savings into promises of skyscrapers and suburbs in the hopes that someday, somebody will pay them good money for those buildings. It’s all a lie, of course; the construction was mostly the equivalent of Heinlein’s old maxim of a poor chef taking a basket of apples and making a mess, thus *reducing* their value, and given the imminent demographic implosion, there wouldn’t be enough buyers to balance out with sellers even *if* the sellers had something worth buying.
Kirk: I wouldn’t be too hard on the original Malthus; what he described actually fit history pretty well… until the Industrial Revolution changed everything. He simply didn’t have the data or the foresight to realize that everything was actually different. How many people have made exactly the opposite mistake at the peak of every business cycle since then? Knowing when to project the past into the future–and when *not* to–is not a skill that people generally have.
“Would you trust the CCP to let you keep ‘their’ property?”
To the degree that ownership/tenancy rights are impaired by “restrictive covenants” the economic rationale for purchasing such property reduces to status jostling.
If your covenant restricts ownership by race—e.g., No Negros—you have established a fortress against entry by those judged to be of lower social status.
Similarly, if restricted by political party affiliation-No non-Party members—you identify yourself as belonging to a favored political class.
These covenants act as gateways to social advancement, much like a degree from an Ivy League college. If upward mobility is denied to you because you do not have Communist Party membership, all is not lost. Your inclusion as a holder of status properties like the aforementioned McMansions gives you an ersatz ticket to the top of the social/political pyramid where you will rub shoulders with China’s elite.
What would better explain the eager demand for luxury living quarters by Chinese of ordinary means?
Why buy a Chinese McMansion when just yesterday your father walked behind his oxen as he worked the rice paddy?
And I saw that all toil and all achievement spring from one person’s envy of another. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. Ecclesiastes 4.4 NIV
“So, yes, Chinese workers who save up a little money do have some options, but unless they have the right connections, very few of them can be trusted as safe investments.”
There are dozens, possible hundreds, of high-end jewelry stores in China where gold necklaces adorned with precious jewels may be freely purchased. If necessary, the Family Jewels can be pawned if a financial reversal were ever to occur.
As for the less affluent, the Hong Kong stock exchange is as reputable as you will find anywhere else. It attracts multitudes of foreign investors. HKEX offers securities and derivatives that have the same regulatory oversight as may be found in Tokyo, Paris, or London.
Nice theory, but there are tons of regulations on Chinese national buying and selling gold. Here’s one:
They want the buying and selling records on both sides of the transaction, which radically reduces precious metals as a hedge against government tyranny.
“They want the buying and selling records on both sides of the transaction,..”
How would you be able to keep track of links in a gold bracelet? Will you count each one? Do you imagine there can be yearly audits of the outstanding gold stock? A 24 kt link could easily be replaced with one of 10 kts and who would be wiser? You give entirely too much credit to the oversight capabilities of government bureaucrats. 100 government regulations provide 1,000 opportunities for subterfuge.
Just look at the shoddy workmanship featured on numerous domestic construction projects and ask yourself if the Chinese are dutiful and conscientious in their work habits. To the contrary, they are famous for taking short cuts and adulterating construction materials. Todu-dreg construction projects abound.
Cheating is endemic to command societies. “They steal from us, which justifies stealing our fair share in response.” Under such circumstances, gold is a powerful prophylactic. When all men are predisposed to robbing their neighbor, the unpretentious honesty of gold, assayed by weight and measure, provides a needed measure of security in an uncertain world.
Not all the enforcers in China can subvert such an asset.
I think the commies can certainly try, and will be especially eager to count each link if you don’t pay the customary bribe…
Think of it as a cost of doing business and you will be better able to determine the comparative value of holding gold.
Gold rings have historically been used to bribe petty officials in order to allow border crossings in time of war. Among the personal belongings that facilitate freedom of movement, gold seems to have primacy.
Those aren’t houses, they’re tulips. CCP mixed economy tulips.