Spatial Justice of a Chinese Metropolis: A Perspective on Housing Price-to-Income Ratios in Nanjing, China

Weixuan Song,Zhifei Ma,Shanggang Yin,Chunhui Liu

doi:10.3390/su11061808

Abstract

The housing price-to-income ratio is an important index for measuring the health of real estate, as well as detecting residents’ housing affordability and regional spatial justice. This paper considers 1833 residential districts in one main urban area and three secondary urban areas in Nanjing during the period 2009–2017 as research units. It also simulates and estimates the spatial distribution of the housing price-to-income ratio with the kriging interpolation method of geographic information system (GIS) geostatistical analysis and constructs a housing spatial justice model by using housing price, income, and housing price-to-income ratio. The research results prove that in the one main urban area and the three secondary urban areas considered, the housing price-to-income ratio tended on the whole to rise, presenting a core edge model of a progressive decrease from the Main Urban Area to the secondary urban areas spatially, with high-value areas centered around famous school districts and new town centers. The housing spatial justice degree presented a trend opposite to that of the housing price-to-income ratio pattern; it progressively decreased from the secondary urban areas to the Main Urban Area. Furthermore, the spatial justice degree tended to decrease in the new towns, in the periphery of the Main Urban Area, and in the secondary urban areas, and it tended to rise, relatively, in the inner urban areas. The enhancement of the housing price-to-income ratio has caused the urban housing spatial justice degree to become gradually imbalanced, gradually squeezing out the poor and vulnerable groups to urban fringe areas and leading to a phenomenon of middle class stratification. This has thus aroused social problems such as housing differentiation and class solidification, etc., and has caused inequality in social spaces. Tt is therefore urgently necessary to reflect on urban space production with the value and principle of spatial justice, which is also the only way to obtain urban sustainable development, in mind.

Highlights

Since 1998, China has comprehensively ceased the physical distribution of housing and has gradually executed monetized housing distribution, causing China’s urban housing system to slowly change from a planning type system to a market type system, and gradually transforming the housing system into one which has the market as its subject
The one main urban area and three secondary urban areas considered are areas where the real estate market is relatively active and where residential points are most densely distributed in Nanjing, so researching these areas may be able to reflect the spatial differentiation rule of the price-to-income ratio (PIR) and housing justice in Nanjing to the largest degree
This paper carries out descriptive statistics of the PIR of each region in the one main urban area and three secondary urban areas considered, as a result obtaining Table 2

Summary

Introduction

Since 1998, China has comprehensively ceased the physical distribution of housing and has gradually executed monetized housing distribution, causing China’s urban housing system to slowly change from a planning type system to a market type system, and gradually transforming the housing system into one which has the market as its subject. The higher the PIR is, the lower the residents’ affordability, and the higher the degree of speculation demand or the possibility of a real estate bubble in the real estate market [5] For this reason, it has attracted broad attention from many domestic and overseas scholars. In terms of research content, scholars mostly focus on researching the connotations and algorithms of the housing price-to-income ratio [6,7], regional differentiation and influential factors of the housing price-to-income ratio [8,9], and residents’ housing affordability [10,11], as well as real estate bubble measurement [12], etc. In terms of research perspective, authors mostly carry out analysis and research from the perspectives of economics, management science, and sociology, but seldom carry out research from the perspective of geography at present

Methods

Results

Conclusion