What African-Americans Can Learn from China Ghost Cities to Create Smarter Economic Strategies
Since the beginning of the century, China has been building dozen of mega cities that can accommodate up to a million people. However many of them are sitting empty with no residences and businesses despite the lavish and state of the art urban infrastructure. There is a very interesting takeaway we brothas and sistas should learn from what is going on and that is what this article aims to do.
The Funny Part Is, Your Tax Dollars Probably Paid For This..
As you see in the video above, the city of Ordos has been built but no one is moving in. There is a town nearby and the people are still over there, still doing their thing. You heard the people – the homes are too expensive to move and they staying put. Shopkeepers are too scared to move to the new city and end up being the only one with no customers.
But what’s interesting is the report that these empty homes were purchases as investment vehicles. People bought these homes and waiting on someone to buy it so that means, these homes are bought and paid for, unlike the United States where there were a lot of bank-owned homes and developers who went under not selling any homes. But the local people cannot afford these homes, but they are bought and paid for? Doesn’t that make you wonder?
Does this reminds you of the residential and commercial real estate boom in America where investment firms did all this crap with homes and got so many Americans caught up and basically financially destroyed as a result? Well, what wasn’t told in the US media is many of these homes in China are owned by Western banks, not the government of China as investment vehicles while the US economy and European economy was crumbling. You heard it damn right – while the US and Europe was crumbling, the US and European banks was investing in these homes in China and still holding on to them instead of investing in you back home.
China had no problem subsidizing because look at what they had to gain – a bigger GDP to take over Japan and be the second largest economy. It has been described in the video that the way you spur economic development and GDP is to spend money and China been employing their people to build these mega cities and people had jobs while Western bankers poured bailout money Obama gave the banks with taxpayer dollars and China buying US debts and gold at the same damn time.
What is the City Missing?
The important part here has nothing to do with the actual cities being empty. What is important is that to grow an economy, China has to spend money to build and that means create infrastructure projects to build the roads, construction firms to build the homes and other services such as electricity, plumbing, telecommunication and so on. In the USA, the only way we are going to improve our economic situation is when we can build and the government willing to reinvest in America the right way.
Think about how America really boomed – they had modest little ranch homes and cottages in places like Detroit and Chicago or manufactured homes and many American small towns back in the day. The working family could actually afford to own a modest home and they built a small community. Then you had shopkeepers with five and dime shops from Woolworth to Sears that became large empires but what you saw mostly was organic economic growth.
What is missing in these cities was they were not built organically. There were no individuals like Marshall Field who build retail chains or the Sam Walton who built as inspired and risk-taking entrepreneurs. You do not see the same people who quit their steelworks job to start their own car company like the prime of America. What you saw was the same thing we saw in Portland, Oregon, an artificial building trying to mimic the cookie-cutter suburban model. White flight drove the demand for suburbs and their subdivisions and Wal-Mart and Home Depot, but in the urban case, there are no such demands for people to flock to an urban center.
Is there a place where someone in China can start their own business organically or do they have to lease from one of these cookie cutter mall retail spaces? What is missing is the organic entrepreneurship leadership where me and you would take our own initiative and start a business from the ground. These cities were built to basically warehouse people just like the suburbs in America are designed.
The Takeaway
Now what we brothas and sistas can take away from this are teachable moments and lesson learned about urban economic development. First, you cannot build cookie cutter commercial retail space like these strip malls or town center shopping and call that bullsh*t economic development – it ain’t going to work and it sucks and it’s lame and bland.
Second, we should understand that it will take building infrastructure to create local jobs and spur the economy but I don’t think we can build a new hood or community, but it would be best to rebuild our inner cities and create local jobs in that fashion and at the same time, local business can sprout up and create a class of Black entrepreneurship like Atlanta with the housing boom and airport expansion. However, it is going to take the government or private equity to fund this kind of infrastructure development but it ain’t going to happen here in America – they are going overseas and the banks already said f*ck America for the past 7-8 years, if you haven’t figure that ish out by now.
Third and this is the most important where China spent all this money building and investment firms and rich people buying these houses and holding on to them, knowing they are going to be purchased one day. President Obama can do all of the infrastructure projects in the hood all day in night and give a trillion dollars to urban development to increase the GDP but there is a catch. If none of us is going to step up to the plate and be ready as true entrepreneurs to make use of the new infrastructure, then our urban areas is going to end up just like those Chinese ghost towns.
What we brothas and sistas need to understand and learn is it falls back on us Black people no matter how you cut it. Ain’t nobody going to do nothing for us Black folks and even if they did something for us, we got to step up and deliver for us on the platform that was built for us. A lot of African-Americans are sitting around talking too damn much about what Obama need to do for Black America but if Obama go ahead and do something for Black America, how many of you brothas and sistas really got what it takes to make something happen?
Hell, most of yall can’t even create a damn simple QR Shopping poster business..
http://dreamandhustle.com/2012/09/what-african-americans-can-learn-from-china-ghost-cities-to-create-smarter-economic-strategies/
Since the beginning of the century, China has been building dozen of mega cities that can accommodate up to a million people. However many of them are sitting empty with no residences and businesses despite the lavish and state of the art urban infrastructure. There is a very interesting takeaway we brothas and sistas should learn from what is going on and that is what this article aims to do.
The Funny Part Is, Your Tax Dollars Probably Paid For This..
As you see in the video above, the city of Ordos has been built but no one is moving in. There is a town nearby and the people are still over there, still doing their thing. You heard the people – the homes are too expensive to move and they staying put. Shopkeepers are too scared to move to the new city and end up being the only one with no customers.
But what’s interesting is the report that these empty homes were purchases as investment vehicles. People bought these homes and waiting on someone to buy it so that means, these homes are bought and paid for, unlike the United States where there were a lot of bank-owned homes and developers who went under not selling any homes. But the local people cannot afford these homes, but they are bought and paid for? Doesn’t that make you wonder?
Does this reminds you of the residential and commercial real estate boom in America where investment firms did all this crap with homes and got so many Americans caught up and basically financially destroyed as a result? Well, what wasn’t told in the US media is many of these homes in China are owned by Western banks, not the government of China as investment vehicles while the US economy and European economy was crumbling. You heard it damn right – while the US and Europe was crumbling, the US and European banks was investing in these homes in China and still holding on to them instead of investing in you back home.
China had no problem subsidizing because look at what they had to gain – a bigger GDP to take over Japan and be the second largest economy. It has been described in the video that the way you spur economic development and GDP is to spend money and China been employing their people to build these mega cities and people had jobs while Western bankers poured bailout money Obama gave the banks with taxpayer dollars and China buying US debts and gold at the same damn time.
What is the City Missing?
The important part here has nothing to do with the actual cities being empty. What is important is that to grow an economy, China has to spend money to build and that means create infrastructure projects to build the roads, construction firms to build the homes and other services such as electricity, plumbing, telecommunication and so on. In the USA, the only way we are going to improve our economic situation is when we can build and the government willing to reinvest in America the right way.
Think about how America really boomed – they had modest little ranch homes and cottages in places like Detroit and Chicago or manufactured homes and many American small towns back in the day. The working family could actually afford to own a modest home and they built a small community. Then you had shopkeepers with five and dime shops from Woolworth to Sears that became large empires but what you saw mostly was organic economic growth.
What is missing in these cities was they were not built organically. There were no individuals like Marshall Field who build retail chains or the Sam Walton who built as inspired and risk-taking entrepreneurs. You do not see the same people who quit their steelworks job to start their own car company like the prime of America. What you saw was the same thing we saw in Portland, Oregon, an artificial building trying to mimic the cookie-cutter suburban model. White flight drove the demand for suburbs and their subdivisions and Wal-Mart and Home Depot, but in the urban case, there are no such demands for people to flock to an urban center.
Is there a place where someone in China can start their own business organically or do they have to lease from one of these cookie cutter mall retail spaces? What is missing is the organic entrepreneurship leadership where me and you would take our own initiative and start a business from the ground. These cities were built to basically warehouse people just like the suburbs in America are designed.
The Takeaway
Now what we brothas and sistas can take away from this are teachable moments and lesson learned about urban economic development. First, you cannot build cookie cutter commercial retail space like these strip malls or town center shopping and call that bullsh*t economic development – it ain’t going to work and it sucks and it’s lame and bland.
Second, we should understand that it will take building infrastructure to create local jobs and spur the economy but I don’t think we can build a new hood or community, but it would be best to rebuild our inner cities and create local jobs in that fashion and at the same time, local business can sprout up and create a class of Black entrepreneurship like Atlanta with the housing boom and airport expansion. However, it is going to take the government or private equity to fund this kind of infrastructure development but it ain’t going to happen here in America – they are going overseas and the banks already said f*ck America for the past 7-8 years, if you haven’t figure that ish out by now.
Third and this is the most important where China spent all this money building and investment firms and rich people buying these houses and holding on to them, knowing they are going to be purchased one day. President Obama can do all of the infrastructure projects in the hood all day in night and give a trillion dollars to urban development to increase the GDP but there is a catch. If none of us is going to step up to the plate and be ready as true entrepreneurs to make use of the new infrastructure, then our urban areas is going to end up just like those Chinese ghost towns.
What we brothas and sistas need to understand and learn is it falls back on us Black people no matter how you cut it. Ain’t nobody going to do nothing for us Black folks and even if they did something for us, we got to step up and deliver for us on the platform that was built for us. A lot of African-Americans are sitting around talking too damn much about what Obama need to do for Black America but if Obama go ahead and do something for Black America, how many of you brothas and sistas really got what it takes to make something happen?
Hell, most of yall can’t even create a damn simple QR Shopping poster business..
http://dreamandhustle.com/2012/09/what-african-americans-can-learn-from-china-ghost-cities-to-create-smarter-economic-strategies/
