It's not particularly abnormal during rapid real-estate development cycles. The scale is unusual, but then again, China is the first country with more than a billion people.
No tall building (above 3 floors wood frame) would get anywhere close to economic viability if the plan was to only leave it up for 10 years. Think about how many buildings that are within 20 years old that have been demolished in the united states. The number would be insanely low.
Insanely low, but not nonexistent. In a country with a fraction of the population of China.
Say you'd built a skyscraper, and a few years afterwards someone offered you enough money to make out with a hefty profit because real estate is booming and you're occupying a prime location. Would you sell?
Prior to my current role I worked in institutional multifamily brokerage. One of the assets I was selling was 50 years (mid rise) and it still wasn't worth bulldozing since it is less expensive to renovate and rent is highly coorelated to price/sf.
There are no examples of what you are talking about that I can think of. There are cases where short mid-rises are bulldozed for ultra high density, but the math makes it very rare circumstances and none that I know of would be 10 or 20 year old buildings. We are talking 50 year+ buildings.
I do not disagree with that claim, but I also think the economics would change a bit if you could destroy them in a month and build a new one in a week.
I'd understand if they were demolishing decrepit buildings and building new and better buildings. That doesn't seem the case.
It's plausible that none of what we have learnt so far applies very well to extremely large populations. I still find it strange and super inefficient.
When it comes to efficiency in the real-estate market, efficiency is based on the highest and best use of the particular location. Ownership patterns and the regulatory processes for entitlement are the significant impediments to redevelopment of prime locations. These are less of an issue in China.
To some extent, the web is a useful analogy, we don't blink when a web property is redeveloped - a ten year old website is virtually untenable for commercial ventures. Real-estate is subject to similar forces to those which motivate Google to rewrite their search page.
