Can Housing Property Necessarily Lead to Job Satisfaction? Based on the Observation of Urban Housing and Job Satisfaction

Abstract

In the context of the current social stratification of housing wealth, a large number of researches have confirmed the positive impact of housing property rights on happiness. However, as a special commodity with both consumption and investment attributes, the impact of housing on modern urban families may not be limited to life feelings. Most of the current researches focus on the observation of overall well-being or life satisfaction, and pay little attention to workers’ working attitude.For urban families who rely on their occupational income to obtain class status and use housing investment to resist social risks, housing and employment issues are the core content of the middle class anxiety. This paper uses CLDS data to explore the impact of housing stratification on workers’ job satisfaction from many dimensions. This study shows the realistic mentality of families in various housing classes in terms of job satisfaction: For families with more than one housing property right, their “housing freedom” increases their freedom in working choices, so they maintain a high degree of satisfaction with their jobs; for families with single housing property right, the pressure of repaying the mortgage and the relative sense of deprivation that the rise of housing prices cannot be realized makes the real estate class show obvious anxiety and dissatisfaction in employment, especially in work income. The conclusion of this paper reveals a worrying fact: Although most urban workers have already achieved “Live in Peace”, high housing prices and high mortgages have restricted their ability to “Work in Contentment”, and housing differentiation has restrained and replaced the spirit of “work hard and work happy” of urban workers to a certain extent.Different from the existing research, this paper reveals the negative effect of housing property rights on the job satisfaction of people with single housing property right. There are two possible marginal contributions: First, most of the current researches focus on the overall subjective satisfaction or life satisfaction, while the research on the subjective employment attitude such as housing to workers’ job satisfaction is rarely involved. This study, from the perspectives of housing stratification and job satisfaction, depicts the anxiety problems of urban families, especially those with housing property rights, and reveals the employment anxiety that the single housing property right brings to the property families. This finding enriches the academic research on the impact of housing on subjective satisfaction and the job market from a micro perspective. Second, this paper not only conducts empirical exploration on the three psychological mechanisms of housing property rights affecting job satisfaction, but also uses subjective and objective index estimation results to compare work income, working hours and working environment to reveal the reasons for the employment anxiety of families with single housing property right. The reason is largely due to the dissatisfaction with work income. This idea is expected to enrich the related research based on purely subjective variables. The findings also help to broaden the academic community’s understanding of the anxiety of middle class, and have enlightening significance for the government to formulate housing and employment policies.