Word: overbuilt
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...developed world's did. It has thrown buckets of practically free money at state-owned banks, which in turn loaned it out to mostly state-owned companies in a wide range of industries. Banks also loaned money to real estate developers, who have added inventory to what were already overbuilt residential and commercial markets in several major Chinese cities. And now the government has turned around and acknowledged that the mind-bending surge in bank lending - by June of this year, total lending exceeded the amount for all of 2008 - has done nothing to rebalance China's economy between consumer...
...there is still pain - particularly among developers, and the big banks that financed them - because of just how overbuilt urban China has become. Ren Zhiqiang, the Chairman of the Beijing Huayuan Group, a large developer, estimates that it may take to two to three years to work off the existing inventory in residential property across the country. Analysts estimate that there are now about 200 million sq m of constructed but unsold apartments and houses in China, and Ren worries that figure will continue to rise without "tangible, positive incentives" for new buyers. (See pictures of China's demographic patterns...
...touch of sadness hung by the Ohio River across from Louisville. The occasion marked the waning of the era of riverboat building, if not its end. Jeffboat, Inc., once launched up to 15 barges a week. This barge, a grain vessel, was the last. The inland waterway fleet is overbuilt and underused, and Jeffboat, its work force reduced to 70 from a 1981 peak of 2,300, will retreat into the repair business. Jeffboat folds up what Manager John Briley of the Ohio River Museum in Marietta calls ''the last major shipyard'' on a river that once boasted...
...office on Shanghai's famous Bund, and I half-jokingly told him I was a little nervous about my investment. Analysts' reports these days are full of tales about China's real estate bubble. Was it possible that the skeptics might be right - that Shanghai itself is already overbuilt, and the suburbs Guo is helping create are a bridge way too far? He looked at me as if I were from another planet, then smiled politely. "There is only one Shanghai in China," he said. "People want to come here from all over the country. People need good quality housing...
...Hearst people chose Foster, they knew they were getting an international star. Still, they might not have suspected he would give them the best building to appear in New York City in years. (It may also be a first sign of new hope for the city's beleaguered skyline, overbuilt with middling boxes. Major additions are now promised or under way from a long list of architects of Foster's caliber, including Frank Gehry, Fumihiko Maki, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers.) What Foster has created is a 46-story notched glass tower covered with a webwork of triangles, called...