Illustration: Jordan Speer
China’s Property Crisis Is Upending Tens of Thousands of Lives
Default is all but official at one of China’s largest developers. That’s intensifying the pain for struggling homebuyers, workers and investors, just when the economy most needs a boost.
In August, shortly after the news broke that Country Garden Holdings Co. had hit a full-blown funding crisis, 38-year-old Huailan crept into the Shandong construction site where her new family home should have been all but finished. She ducked under the wire fence, climbed 18 flights of stairs to a nearby rooftop and took in a view that made her heart plummet. Idle cranes. Slabs of cement dotting ankle-high grass. A mud pit.
Civil servant Tom Chen had only one thought when he learned that the developer, formerly China’s largest, was halting work on his apartment building in Zhejiang: “Am I going to become homeless?”