Ghost Neighborhoods - Edit

[busker]

The discussion on what is really happening in China vs what Fox News or the Daily Mail (or even CNN and the NYT, with its homosexual greenie lefties surprisingly in agreement with the cynically manipulative twats of the Murdoch press on this issue) perhaps belongs to another forum
But setting the poem's argument aside (which is what we do anyway when reading Kipling or Billy the Kid), as a poem, it contains far too few poetic elements.
Some observations below:

Ghost Neighborhoods


villages of empty houses  ....a flat opening. 
urban swaths ....'swaths' cliched
of apartment buildings
without tenants ....at this point, the reader might wonder where this line is going. So far, no payoff for the time invested
lightly but meticulously built ..."meticulously" is telling, not showing. Prosaic.
not worth tearing down ...again, telling, not showing
souls departed ... this is as cliched as it can get! :-)
vanished with
children unconceived: ...vanished / unconceived is a good pair, this is the only line that stands out 
Japan


glaring skyscrapers ... cliched
blocks of residential houses
eight-lane highways
empty, empty, empty ... 
up close shoddy-made decayed ...better than what the Yanks build these days, but again, too much of a lecturing narrator here
built near nowhere to 
defraud a people of
their savings with vain hopes
of ownership denied: ... again, too much of a lecturing narrator here
China

This should probably go in Miscellaneous, being political-economic-cultural-current events, but what do our critics suggest?