China has been pouring money into residential construction for years: the excess stock of housing is far larger than we previously thought. In addition to the stock of housing ‘under construction’, it seems that there is a rapidly growing stock of housing whose construction has been ‘paused’ and not restarted. Some of this stock will have been demolished, though it is unclear how much. The opacity of the data means that we also do not know and cannot estimate the starting level of the ‘paused’ stock of housing, but we do know how much it has contributed to the overall housing excess in recent years. Consequently, it seems likely that the combined stock of housing under construction and housing paused but not restarted is in the order of 9 billion square metres, enough to house over 200 million people (roughly the population of Brazil) in comfort. Someone, somewhere, thought that was an investment: they will be disappointed or bailed out — the Evergrande crisis so far suggests the latter for homebuyers at least
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