Housing Reform, Life Course and Urban Housing Acquisition (1980-2010)

Kaize Wu

doi:10.1186/s40711-019-0101-5

Abstract

Based on data from the Guangzhou Household Survey in 2010 and event history model, this paper analyzes how the interactions between the housing marketization reform and individual life course affect Chinese citizens’ acquisition of property rights of their first house. Research shows that the differential mode of association in housing marketization reform and diverse reform strategies have created clear period effect and cohort effect on housing acquisition. The dual housing market system, consisted of welfare housing propertization and housing commercialization, has reduced housing inequality between people within and out of the establishment, but aggravated housing inequality between the elite and non-elite, and extended the administrative elites’ advantage in acquiring welfare housing. During the course of the housing reform, institutional segmentation and market differentiation have led to overlapping and mutually reinforcing types of housing inequality, exacerbating housing differentiation for the younger cohort through the intergenerational transmission.

Highlights

In the late 1970s, China carried out market-oriented reforms of the welfare housing system so that the main supplier of housing supply gradually changed from the state to the market (Zhu, 2007:16-17), housing is commercialized, and housing distribution is monetized (Wang and Murie 1996; Huang and Clark 2002)
Market mechanisms were introduced to push for the commercialization of housing; on the other, housing reform sales were implemented to push for the propertization of welfare housing
Different periods of the housing marketization reform entail different contents and processes, and studies that use cross-sectional data obtained at certain time point could not effectively reflect the evolutional path and effect mechanism of housing inequality, leading to inadequate conclusions

Summary

Introduction

In the late 1970s, China carried out market-oriented reforms of the welfare housing system so that the main supplier of housing supply gradually changed from the state to the market (Zhu, 2007:16-17), housing is commercialized, and housing distribution is monetized (Wang and Murie 1996; Huang and Clark 2002). Housing reform and related social inequality have been the focal points in the academic debate about the theory of market transformation (Walder 1995; Song (2019) 6:15 and Xie 2014). To account for the differentiation of housing property rights in the process of marketization, scholars have put forward the theory of power persistence (Bian et al, 1996; Bian and Liu, 2005), the theory of power generation, and the theory of power advantage (Liu, 2005; Logan et al 2010; Hu, 2012; Walder and He 2014; Wei, 2015; Fu 2016), as well as the theory of market capacity and market transformation, and many other viewpoints (Li, 2004; Song and Xie 2014). Research that neglects the type of housing property rights reduces the explanation power of the empirical research to the dual-track housing reform

Methods

Results

Conclusion