Every Sunday I get up early to sit and enjoy the silence of no construction going on around me. I live on the edge of the gaybourhood and construction sounds have been so continuously present (except Sunday mornings) that I don't even notice workers cutting steel with grinding wheels anymore. And that is an annoying sound. WEEEEEEEE-EEEEEEE-EEEEEEEEEEEE-EEEEEEEEEEEW.
I used to know exactly how many condo projects were underway in Toronto and how many tower cranes there were and a lot of other relevant statistics. But then I got a job where knowing those things wasn't important (not that it was important for any previous job I had). If you care you can check the UrbanToronto website. It was a lot of condos and a lot of cranes and a lot of other numbers that were counter-intuitive or just plain excessive. And if you talk to anyone about the condo market for more than half a minute they will tell you most of the units are bought by Chinese investors. How would anyone know that? If you are the best condo salesperson in Toronto and you sell 90% of all the condos by yourself - ok you would know. Maybe. You would know the name on the mortgage (or the name of the person who handed you a sack of cash / big cheque / other method of payment). Plus it's against the law (or so I've read) to release information like that or possibly just to keep track of it. I'm not a lawyer. It makes sense that you can't just tell the newspapers who owns what and when they bought it. At the very least it would be bad business. So unless this whole China buys condos thing started by someone drinking too much and telling tales out of school I don't see it.
This seemed to me like a simple urban myth. The condo market doesn't make sense. People like things that make sense more than things that don't make sense. Someone says it's overseas Chinese and people start telling each other that because it makes them seem smart or knowledgable or whatever and people believe it because it's easier to believe than the other prevailing theory (ie. that in two years the population of Toronto will be 175% larger than the population of the whole world or is it that everyone in the world will own 175 condos in Toronto?). Simple. Who else could be buying all those condos? Maybe George Soros is buying them all as part of his plan to take over the world through the UN. Or maybe I've been watching too much Alex jones on Youtube.
I don't know how I feel about this theory. I don't believe it. Sure some of the condos are being bought by actual Chinese people from China. Some are probably being bought by actual Paraguayans from Paraguay. China is bigger than Paraguay therefore...
At its root this theory feels a little racist. Because of that whole inscrutable thing people like to believe. I have never found Chinese people to be less scrutable than anyone else (except those I have dated). But that's part of our mythology so it's going to interact with other myths (semi-myths, pseudo, or part myths). More importantly it says something about the construction of the fake world we wander around with in our heads.
40 years ago strange, improbable, and maybe threatening things were either the US acronym agencies or the Soviets. 20 years ago it was the Japanese (although mostly in fiction and / or gameshows). Now it's China - the land of boundless weird. Anything that is too complex to understand but doesn't involve heavyweight physics, the answer is going to be China. Maybe not in so many words but still, China. 1.2 billion people of disputed scrutability, crap news agencies, a vague and menacing government, a whole lot of mystery and a whole lot of money.
Read apocalyptic fiction - the Chinese are doing fine after the End of the World. Or at least they haven't been reduced to eating each other. Or know one knows because China.
And while I feel bad about the racist part, the whole crazy maybe myth - maybe truth of this makes me feel vaguely hopeful. We are like a small town on a planetary scale; China is that weird house on the end of the street that sometimes seems deserted and sometimes seems like a giant party and G*d only knows what they are doing in there...
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