A woman and child stop by a canal in front of apartment buildings at China Evergrande Group's Life in Venice real estate and tourism development in Qidong, Jiangsu province, China. (Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg)
(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Sunny Peninsula, a seaside development in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, was supposed to house 5,000 families in dozens of towers spread across an area the size of 30 soccer fields. Many of the buyers were white-collar workers benefiting from the fastest urbanization in human history.