// the take
This is a crowd-sourced data repository tracking mortgage-suspension notices from Chinese homebuyers on stalled real estate developments, structured as Markdown tables converted into JSON (properties-flat.json, properties-tree.json) plus a map-visualization pipeline. It's useful to developers interested in turning messy community-submitted Markdown into validated structured data via CI, or in lightweight map-rendering without a GIS stack, rather than as a conventional software library.
The core pattern is clever: a GitHub Actions workflow (auto-generator.yml) regenerates and validates structured JSON from Markdown on every PR, so hundreds of community contributors can add entries through plain pull requests instead of touching a database. The map pipeline (visualization/google-map) encodes city data into polylines and renders static PNG overlays with a custom bitmap-font renderer (bmf.ts), a low-dependency way to produce map images. Real engineering went into making mass contribution tractable at scale — a shell validator (run-validate.sh), a TypeScript tree validator (itree/validate.ts), and even a dedicated dotnet GitHub proxy built specifically to work around API rate limits for contributors submitting hundreds of PRs.
The main branch hasn't been touched since mid-2024 despite 20k+ stars, and the README itself says the project's founder has been banned — this reads as functionally abandoned even though the referenced issues are still unresolved in the real world. Data integrity depends entirely on hand-formatted Markdown tables with inconsistent conventions (some entries link to evidence images, some don't; dates are embedded as parenthetical month names), and there's no test coverage at all for the actively-used Node/TypeScript parsing pipeline that turns that Markdown into the canonical JSON. The project also carries three parallel, unfinished frontend implementations (React, Leaflet, a raw single HTML file) and three backend attempts (Node, Python, a C# proxy) with no indication of which is current, so anyone trying to actually run or extend it inherits a lot of dead weight.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →