This type of ghost town is locally known as “rotten-tail” homes.
AFP via Getty Images
This luxury complex was meant for multimillionaires — but is now a ghost town.
In China’s northeast, in the hills surrounding the city of Shenyang, a project called the State Guest Mansions still sits half-finished, although its developer long ago threw in the towel on the venture.
Now, more than a decade since 2012 when, just two years after breaking ground, the Chinese real estate behemoth Greenland Group abandoned the 260 villas it once planned to build on the plot, nature, cows and farmers are taking back the land, according to the Hong Kong Free Press.
“These [homes] would have sold for millions — but the rich haven’t even bought one of them …They weren’t built for ordinary people,” a 45-year-old farmer named Guo told the outlet while searching for sustenance beneath a large fence shielding the unfinished paradise from a highway.
Elsewhere on the site, feral dogs and cattle roamed between the European-style chateaus and fellow farmers plowed property once intended to be lush lawns.
Urban explorers and graffiti artists, too, have taken to the compound, many of them tagging walls and posting pictures of the dusty, derelict furnishings online.
“It feels quite creepy,” a drone-flying individual who declined to give his name told the publication, while lounging beneath a corroded chandelier in one of the buildings.
Guo blames “official corruption” for the State Guest Mansion’s failure, telling HKFP, “They cut off the funding and cracked down on uncontrolled developments, so it was left half-finished.”
The situation is not unique to the State Guest Mansions — in fact, it is so common there’s a Chinese phrase for similar would-be luxe residences which have instead become eyesores: “Rotten-tail” homes.
Indeed, according to one officially affiliated Shanghai research group, under 4% of housing projects across China, or the equivalent of 2.5 billion square feet or real estate, have been left half-built as of this past June, HKFP reported.
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2023-07-26 21:37:00