Smog be damned, people are still buying homes in Beijing
Smog be damned, people are still buying homes in Beijing
The post-apocalyptic air quality surely has not suffocated enthusiasm
Weeks of pent-up winter pollution, coupled with smog, have not dragged down the number of villas sold in Beijing. If anything, they soared 119 percent year-on-year in 2016, the South China Morning Post reported.
Around 8,050 villas were sold in the Chinese capital last year, a sign of confidence in a city whose air quality has literally gone up in smoke. The average value of Beijing villas hovered, in fact, at CNY37,783 (USD5,500) per square metre in 2016, a 10 percent rise from the previous year.
These findings come as air health alerts in the city shoot to their highest levels. The air monitor index at the US embassy in Beijing, which tracks the amount of the particulate matter PM2.5 in the air, scored 600 in December — the index was never designed to track air quality worse than 500.
In the same month, the city saw sales of 871 luxury villas, a 23 percent increase from November.
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“The worries over air problem have helped villa sales because Beijing people are now looking for properties either away from the densest urban areas or those they have good indoor air cleaning systems,” Zhang Dawei, chief analyst at real estate consultancy Centaline Property, told the Post.
The deterioration of air quality in Beijing flies in the face of sterner environmental measures from the central and local governments. “The main reason was transfer of pollution from the surrounding provinces, where steel and other heavy industry clusters have seen a resurgence in activity due to retrograde stimulus policies,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, who tracks Chinese air pollution for Greenpeace.
In 2015, the Beijing government shuttered and limited production activity in more than 10,000 factories, plants and mills in the city and its environs.
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Source: Property Report