[Big read] Planting vegetables in ruins: The residents still living in China’s longest unfinished project

(Photos: Li Kang/SPH Media)

The afternoon heat surged through the overgrown weeds, as a mulberry tree grew unfettered, its branches stretching out towards an abandoned balcony on the second floor. Ma Minzhuang, 91, leaning on her umbrella for support, showed me around her vegetable garden. “The saplings I planted when I first arrived have grown so tall in the blink of an eye,” she shared.

This “blink of an eye” actually took 27 years.

After retiring from Jinan University in 1998, Ma once dreamt of spending her twilight years in this tranquil, picturesque residential area, far from the hustle and bustle of the city. She never expected that just two years later, due to a multitude of reasons such as the developer’s funding drying up and incomplete construction permits, the project would come to a complete halt.

The tranche of residents who moved into the first row of houses at Australia Garden Village, alongside her, left one after another. At the most desolate time, Ma was the sole resident in an entire row of buildings.

Today, the mulberry sapling she planted back then has grown into a towering tree. The Australia Garden Village has become the largest unfinished project in Guangzhou, and one of the longest-standing in China’s real estate history.

In late May, as the early summer heat steamed, about 50 households were scattered among the more than 200 unfinished buildings, with the sounds of frogs and birds accompanying their summers year after year. But this time around, the rumble of construction machinery echoed throughout the community — the people who had lived in these unfinished buildings for nearly three decades finally saw a glimpse of hope when it came to moving into resettlement houses.

The Australia Garden Village is located in Guangzhou’s Huangpu (Whampoa) district, an officially designated sci-tech innovation zone, close to the China-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City, a bilateral cooperation project between the two countries. Yet three decades ago, this was still a remote suburb: sprawling forest parks dotted with natural lakes presented an untouched, pristine appearance.

The developer, Guangzhou Aomei Real Estate, took a liking to this piece of land and officially launched the project in 1995, claiming to create a “project for the ages” by integrating business, residential, leisure, tourism and vacation. The proposed blueprint was quite grand: 7,560 acres with 292 buildings.

Liu Yongguang, who is near retirement, was among the first tranche of nearly 2,000 buyers who signed contracts in 1996. He spent 280,000 RMB (US$39,076) on an 87-square-metre home on the hillside and later paid another 220,000 RMB for the adjacent unit, joining both units so that his aged mother could also live out her golden days here. 

Three years later, when Liu and his mother were preparing to move in, the Australia Garden Village’s crisis reared its ugly head. Over 30 buildings below the hill barely met delivery standards, but as one moved further up, the construction quality worsened. Buildings on the shoulder of the hill had their exterior walls painted, but no doors or windows were installed; at the top, the structures were mere shells, with exposed steel bars.

Fortunately, both units Liu bought were delivered without any issues. However, due to failing fire safety inspections, he and other homeowners who bought the units around the same period did not receive their property deeds, potentially causing rights protection issues. At the time, Liu simply thought that since the buildings were delivered and the utilities were set up, they might as well move in and see how it goes.

But reality proved far worse than imagined. In the first decade of living at Australia Garden Village, Liu endured the toughest times. The developer began defaulting on utility payments, leading to frequent water and power cuts. Liu had to live primitively by candlelight and fetching spring water. As the community’s residents dwindled, thieves grew more brazen, even using vehicles to openly prise open doors and windows from vacant homes and cart away appliances and furniture.

The windows below Liu’s house were not spared either. To prevent burglars, he specially ordered three sets of iron bolts and security shutters from the city in Guangzhou to completely seal off the windows below his unit.

Most challenging was during one summer when water in the area was cut off for three days. Liu, then in his 60s, had to take baths at the spring in the dark of night and carry a bucket of water back for use.

Despite everything, Liu, a retired soldier, never considered moving away, adding, “I have to hold on to this home. If I leave, everything I own will be gone”. In 2012, Liu’s mother, who had just turned a century old, passed away at the residence; he became the sole occupant in an empty building.

In contrast, the first batch of buyers who purchased properties in the upper half of the hill faced an even more absurd situation — the buildings of the units they bought never even broke ground.

This included 77-year-old He Yongnian. He purchased a unit in 1998, but by the time he retired ten years later, wild grass still thrived on the promised building’s foundation. To make up for the delay, the developer offered him a vacant shell house of the same size at the foot of the hill. After making simple renovations to the place, he moved in with his wife in 2009.

He was a diver for the Beijing team in his youth, and after retiring as a competitor, he became a coach and even had a stint in Malaysia in the 1990s. Having lived in tropical climates for years, it was hard for He to endure Beijing’s harsh winters, hence he chose to retire in Guangzhou. For him and his wife, the Australia Garden Village was their only retirement haven in Guangzhou.

Speaking in a distinct Beijing accent, He told Lianhe Zaobao, “An unfinished project does not really affect retirement living.”

Nowadays, he has carved out a vegetable patch amid the ruins, planting cowpeas in the summer and harvesting radishes in the autumn. “Diving is about minimising splash; in life, we must also learn to dissipate impact,” he mused.

After moving into the unfinished buildings, Australia Garden Village homeowners have been fighting for their rights for over two decades.

Their first step was to demand answers from the developer. Guangzhou Aomei Real Estate explained that the project’s funding collapsed after the finance director embezzled over 100 million RMB. Whether this claim is true or just an act of shirking responsibility remains uncertain.

With no other options, the homeowners can only pin their hopes on the legal system, but they were soon slapped in the face by reality. Lacking property deeds, most were deemed ineligible to sue by the courts, making even filing a lawsuit impossible.

He then took a different approach by suing the developer on the grounds of claiming “refund of housing payments”. Just when he thought victory was secured, the verdict surprised him. The court ruled that the project’s halt was due to “force majeure events”, so the property still belonged to the homeowner. Subsequently, He stopped paying his mortgage repayments, deciding to “resume payments only when the house was delivered”.

Homeowners like He who lost their cases are not in the minority, although some did win. However, since the developer was already insolvent, court rulings became meaningless, and the fight for rights returned to square one.

After 2010, realising that individual efforts were ineffective, the homeowners formed a committee to pursue collective action. They reached out to the media to increase public pressure, while also organising joint petitions, eventually suing the Huangpu district land resources bureau in 2020.

Liu, a core member of the rights group, pointed out astutely that frequent administrative boundary changes of the Australia Garden Village — where new authorities ignore old issues — were a reason the unfinished project remained unresolved. The estate originally belonged to Zengcheng city (the predecessor of Guangzhou’s Zengcheng district), then reassigned to Luogang district, and later merged into Huangpu district after 2014.

But the tougher challenge was the complex land ownership issue. Public records show that since 2013, Guangzhou officials held meetings to find solutions to revitalise the estate, reviewed planning details in 2015, and in 2016 initiated development of new plots to resettle over 1,000 homeowners.

However, the land use rights for the new plot had already changed hands — it no longer belonged to Guangzhou Aomei Real Estate, but to another developer. As land prices soared, the unfinished project turned into a dispute over land rights between developers. Neither side backed down, and the issue was eventually left unresolved.

After years of waiting and numerous empty promises, a turning point finally came for the Australia Garden Village under China’s official “guaranteed housing delivery” policy.

Last August, Guangzhou auctioned off a nearby residential plot designated for resettlement housing, expected to accommodate 1,342 households. The plot was ultimately acquired by Knowledge City (Guangzhou) Investment Group at the reserve price of 890 million RMB. With a total floor area of 179,000 square metres, the floor price worked out to about 5,000 RMB per square metre.

Huang Tao, project general manager of Centaline Property in Guangzhou, told Lianhe Zaobao that due to the complex historical issues surrounding the Australia Garden Village, homeowners cannot resolve them on their own — government intervention is essential for coordination and decision-making.

Huang pointed out that Australia Garden Village was able to finally see a turning point largely because land prices had increased more than tenfold, making it profitable for the investment company even if they wanted to demolish and rebuild the estate. “If land prices were unchanged from over 20 years ago, the company wouldn’t even be able to recover basic development costs,” he noted.

Just adjacent to the estate, a luxury residential complex launched in 2015 now sells for over 20,000 RMB per square metre, with prices exceeding 30,000 RMB during market peaks a few years ago. Meanwhile, Guangshan Road right at the entrance of the Australia Garden Village has been upgraded to a national highway, while the opening of Jinkeng metro station in 2019 also significantly improved the area’s accessibility.

As a real estate veteran with nearly 30 years in the industry, Huang has a special connection to the project as he had represented it before early in his career in the 1990s. Every time he drives past the jarring plot of unfinished buildings along Guangshan Road, it always stirs something in him: “The estate is left to decay just like that — it’s like a scar.”

Huang believes that there should have been stronger, more resolute intervention ten years ago, rather than letting the homeowners wait in vain. “It’s a painful case, and one we should learn from. The silver lining is that, at least now, there’s still hope for a resolution.”

In recent years, unfinished projects have mushroomed across the country amid China’s property slump. Although the crisis at the Australia Garden Village predates the current housing downturn, its trajectory clearly illustrates many of the marketing and development patterns seen in projects that had also collapsed later on.

The project adopted the pre-sale model, which at the time had only recently been introduced from Hong Kong to mainland China, and promoted itself with the slogan “the country’s first 20-year interest-free installment plan”, targeting the working class. The pitch was simple: “Down payment of 38,000 RMB, monthly payment of 480 RMB” — and you could own a house to retire in.

To attract buyers, the developer ran massive ads at Wangfujing Department Store in downtown Guangzhou, offered free shuttle buses for retirees to tour the property, and even included complimentary meals at a restaurant at the foot of the hill. This marketing approach later became a widely used sales template in China’s real estate industry.

What proved even more fatal was Guangzhou Aomei Real Estate’s rash development strategy. Originally planned to be built in six phases, the project was instead advanced simultaneously. The rapid expansion strained its funding, sowing the seeds for its eventual abandonment.

All this happened amid the real estate frenzy that swept China after Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour in 1992. At the time, southern provinces were the first to accelerate housing reforms, drawing hundreds of billions of RMB into the real estate sector. This sparked the first real estate boom in post-reform China and also gave rise to the country’s first wave of unfinished projects.

Besides the Australia Garden Village in Guangzhou, the scale of unfinished projects in Hainan was even more staggering. While Hainan accounted for only 0.6% of the national population at the time, it held 10% of the country’s unsold commercial housing stock, with over 600 unfinished buildings.

The most recent large-scale wave of unfinished developments occurred in 2022. While pandemic-related construction delays and an overall economic slowdown were contributing factors, the crisis also exposed deep-rooted systemic flaws in the real estate industry. In a longstanding environment of lax oversight, developers were able to pursue aggressive expansion through a “high leverage, high turnover” model, ultimately creating systemic risks.

According to a Bloomberg Intelligence report released in August last year, at least 48 million homes in China were sold before construction was completed. Chinese media estimate that Evergrande alone left behind 1.62 million unfinished units, affecting 6 million homeowners.

Over the past two years, with the push from the Chinese government’s “guaranteed housing delivery” (保交楼) policy, the issue of unfinished buildings has been somewhat alleviated. Official data show that by the end of 2023, more than 3 million units out of 3.5 million targeted for delivery were completed, with a delivery rate of over 86%.

At the resettlement housing site for Australia Garden Village, Lianhe Zaobao observed that construction was in full swing even on the Dragon Boat Festival public holiday. Several buildings had foundation work completed, and some structures had risen several floors above ground. Six tower cranes were operating simultaneously, with construction vehicles moving in and out. A construction worker said that the developer had instructed them to “complete the structural framework within three months”.

As the resettlement housing nears completion, He Yongnian is filled with anticipation. He shared, “Life is good, but moving into a new home would be a step up. If I get to live in a new home by the time I turn 80, I’ll be satisfied.”

Ma Minzhuang, on the other hand, feels that moving again would be too exhausting. When the time comes and she truly has to move, she plans to relocate to Jinan University in the city centre.

Retired teacher Li Yi, 87, is also reluctant to leave. In 2016, he was relocated to the foot of the hill due to quality issues with his original home and spent over 100,000 RMB renovating the new place. “I’ve spent so much effort and money to make it nice. Should I just stop living here?”

Since construction began on the resettlement housing, Liu Yongguang often drives up to the hilltop to check on the progress. After 27 long years of waiting and repeated efforts to defend his rights, this is the closest he has ever been to finally moving into a new home.

Standing on high ground, overlooking the construction site, his eyes reflect a sense of bittersweetness. He shared, “At last, the day has come. It’s just a little too late — many of the older residents of the estate didn’t live to see it.”

This article was first published in Lianhe Zaobao as “有人熬到白头有人遗憾离世 烂尾楼30年后拨开杂草终见转机”.

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