“Seattle was a better opportunity for me than China right now,” Mr. Wang said. “A lot of Chinese families are planning to move here.” — NYT
Robert Frank reports in from Seattle, where wealthy Chinese seeking to relocate and/or invest are driving up the real estate market in eastern suburbs.
11 Comments
The wealthy expat Chinese have been totally successful in driving up home prices in California with their all-cash offers (so much so that people who actually live and work here cant afford much these days), and they will continue to do the same across the country. Add to it the "Chinafication" of once-charming suburbs around LA, with huge porticos and fountains, all tastelessly done, and you got the makings of a disaster. Thanks, but not thanks.
much better title than what i posted it under originally! kind of thought mine (pulled from NYT) was sort of semi-racist sounding anyways...
Serious question: why would a wealthy native of China want to come to the US?
Without wanting to sound glib, Donna, maybe because it's nicer here... especially if one is wealthy.
'Cause you're nobody if you don't have a place in LA.
From The Hamptons Dictionary
Feng Shui (fung’ shway) n. 1. The ancient
Chinese art or practice of positioning graves. 2.
A marketing technique commonly used to sell
high-profit and otherwise unsaleable objects to
socially insecure people who are not Chinese.
See inferior decoration.
@Donna the lack of CPC, predictable business environment, rule of law...?
Similar story in Boston...
Donna, there are a few reasons, let me see if I can enumerate some (actually the article has some too):
- The air is cleaner. We bitch about the air being bad in LA, but its a million times better than shanghai or beijing
- Relative freedom: You can actually say stuff without being accosted. For the wealthy in China, you are always under the "eye" of the CPC
- More opportunities for kids. The competition to get into good schools, colleges etc in China is crazy. No so much in the US
- The trappings of luxury are cheaper here. I heard of the son of a wealthy chinese businessperson buy a lamborghini here in Socal for $130,000, only to retun it a few weeks later for halfprice. The reason - it would have cost double in china
The list goes on....
Quartz had a series of articles on the issue of Chinese emigration - the main takeaway being that of wealthy Chinese willing to discuss the matter (which may not be a majority) the rate looking to move abroad is similar to wealthy Latin Americans and Qataris. But there are a lot of wealthy Chinese, so it doesn't take a large proportion to become a flood.
Donna: My impressions from a few years working here (no one in my social circle is wealthy BTW, but a few have enough to buy a house abroad if they get the chance)
1 - Childcare / education. Chinese people revere their children to an extant uncommon in the US - family is the end-all-be-all of life for many people here, above career or personal satisfaction. Anything that benefits one's child is an unquestionable necessity. Chinese schools have a reputation as destructively competitive and test-oriented, but most parents would prefer to send their children somewhere that pampers them. People will spend a lot of money ($500,000+) for an empty apartment to get an address in the right school district. Moving abroad is even a step better.
2- Children. Anyone who wants more than their quota of children needs to go abroad to do it (this is big, especially for those with money)
3 - Health. Air pollution is bigger than you'd realize reading the news, which gives the impression it only happens in big cities like Beijing. Imagine an opaque cloud that stretched from Boston to Minneapolis to Dallas to Atlanta. That's about the scale of it for 4-6 months during winter each year.
That said, I'm not sure most Chinese want to leave. But 1% of China is still 15 million people. A small fraction of that can move markets.
This has been going on for a long time in California. It is interesting that it has taken so long to hit Seattle.
The high school in my town has doubled in size in the last year with mostly Chinese children.
My next door neighbor put his apartment up for sale a few weeks ago. It had been appraised at $500,000. After pre-showing the apartment to Chinese real estate agents, the apartment sold for $1.2 million ( for less than 1,000 sf. in Palo Alto) the first day on the market.
What is interesting ( or scary) is that everyone is saying this is just the beginning. It is going to get much worse.
"It is interesting that it has taken so long to hit Seattle" indeed.
after moving from Shanghai to Seattle, I was baffled by the lack of good, authentic Chinese restaurants, even in the International District. Surprising, given what I thought I knew about the demographics and immigration patterns on the west coast....
reading up on Seattle's history, I learned about the 1886 riots that were the culmination of decades of rising anti-Chinese sentiment in the city, as laborers moved in and were willing to work for relatively low wages... anyway, too much history to get into here, but the result was that even in a country that would pass a law explicitly barring Chinese from entry Seattle's populous was especially enraged and racist, and very few Chinese remained in the city after the 1880s, at least until recent decades times. This goes a long way towards explaining why there's no real Chinatown in Seattle, compared to San Francisco or even LA.
this is probably totally off topic.
As for "Chinafication" I wouldn't be so worried. Seattle's income disparity issue isn't going to change much if the people driving it are Chinese real estate investors or overpaid software developers. The city still has absurd limits (on density, height, etc) that keep the downtown and central district rents soaring (and lead to the proliferation of ugly Sketchup condos, perhaps a topic for another thread). And while LA may have (always had) 'fountains and porticoes' - I'd look to Vancouver as the north american 'city of the future' -- for better or worse. Looking at the skyline, you might mistake it for Hong Kong.... surely a better model for density than the typical sprawl....
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