Evergrande may not be China’s “Lehman Brothers moment,” but there are many parallels between the housing crises in China and the United States. Both are due to government control or regulation of land. Both see government planners deflecting attention from their inept policies by blaming someone else. Both have seen resulting remedies fail to do anything about high housing prices.
More than half of China and nearly half the United States are agricultural lands, and in each case only a small portion of the total is actually used for growing crops. Data are not yet available for 2020, but in 2010 about 4 percent of China and 3 percent of the United States were urbanized. Urbanization is no threat to agricultural lands.
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