One of the biggest gripes that anyone that lives in Da Nang is almost certainly going to have at least once and probably much more frequently than that is the omnipresent construction.
People say "Da Nang is a nice place, it'll be lovely once they are done building it!" but they are probably never going to actually be done.
Often, projects go up with the quickness only to apparently be completely abandoned before they even finish with the build.
Such as this monster that is one of the main reasons why my own building no longer has a view of the sea other than from the top floor where the pool is.
This thing, named "The Golden Swan" before they even finished building the lobby, has always been abandoned ever since I got here in 2019. There has never been any work going on inside of it. Yet, all around it large plots of land are bought up and they make new builds on that.
This is in view of the same abandoned building and it has a crane one top of it 24/7 because it is an absolute monster of a building.
I would imagine one of the biggest fears of any building that has a seaview but isn't on the last row before the beach is someone coming along and building something in the adjacent property. That building in the foreground had an unobstructed view of the beach on the back balconies for years and then someone finally bought up the land behind it and as it turns out, the owner of the building in the foreground was violating the "air rights" of the next property and had to tear down all of the balconies and now the people in those rooms have a wonderful view of a wall immediately outside of all of their windows. The value of those apartments went down like a bomb in that time and from what I hear it is nigh on impossible for them to rent them because the construction noise, which starts at 10 minutes to 7, is right outside their literal windows and it bangs on for the entire day for about 12 hours a day.
That's not really the point of what I am writing here though: What I am talking about is how bizarre I find it that there are already a surplus of buildings here to the point where some builds just walk away from a half-completed building yet other investors think it would be a good idea to make essentially the exact same thing within view of the old build.
Maybe I just don't understand money-laundering well enough to get what is going on here.
We also have a situation with the smaller plots of land that get built up, torn down, built up again, and torn down again.
Two such examples existed on my walk this morning. This plot of land was a 4 story building and I guess people thought that wasn't tall enough and tore it down with a quickness that would impress anyone in demolition around the world. Then, they removed most of the rubble and absolutely nothing happens for months.
This other plot, that is just a stone's throw from the first one, started as a kind of iconic two-story building with residences on the top, and shops on the bottom. The land-owner came by one day and i was informed by the owner of a haircut shop that he was given 48 hours to vacate the premises, which was in violation of his lease but those pieces of paper don't really mean a great deal in Vietnam I suppose because he and the other tenants kind of understood that the building was coming down, regardless of how they felt about it.
Then once again this plot of land sat filled with demolition debris for months before they even built anything on it. When they did finish the build, it was a "girly bar" that I have featured in the past that lasted about 2 months before it too was torn to the ground with a speed that seemed almost military in how quickly it was done. It has once again become just an empty plot of land where the glass and bits of tile and steel are still just lingering around. As far as I can tell there isn't any plan at all to build on it either. It's just an eyesore.
I'm not saying I want the girly bar back but seriously! What the hell is going on here?
Opposite my own building there is a construction site that is gradually making their way up and in the process they kind of destroy everything around them with their noise.
They are apparently in no hurry to finish this build and it is already quite evident that it is going to be a 5-story furnished apartment/hotel just like every other building in the neighborhood, most of which never achieve full occupancy.
I guess I just don't understand how it is that rich people stay rich. These are all, at least from the outside looking in, very bad business decisions yet they are constantly being made all across the city.
Further down the road between here and Hoi An there are massive resorts that are abandoned, right next to new resorts that are being built.
This is a funny little city and I say "little" ironically. There are 1.2 million people here and they seem to be dead set on sprinting towards getting that number up to 2 million.
Maybe I just didn't pay attention enough in the few business classes that I took but I don't remember the part where building the same industry that has already failed many times in an area was ever a good idea.
