Toward Human-Centered Urbanization? Housing Ownership and Access to Social Insurance Among Migrant Households in China

Christine Wen,Jeremy L Wallace

doi:10.3390/su11133567

Abstract

For the past few years, China’s urbanization policy has focused on expanding welfare and affordable housing for rural migrants so as to encourage them to put down roots in the city. The international literature disagrees on the relationship between homeownership and welfare—whether the former is a substitute for or a consequence of the latter. Using multilevel logistic regression on a 2015 nationally representative survey, this paper explores the determinants of housing ownership among China’s rural migrant households in their city of residence, focusing particularly on access to urban social insurance. The results show that institutional ties to the city such as enrollment in local pensions and health insurance are associated with higher likelihood of homeownership. This paper argues that policy interventions should target the social security system, as rural migrants are likely unwilling or unable to invest in urban housing due to the increased risk and precarity they typically experience. The findings also suggest that to make urbanization more sustainable, the government should aim at making cities more family-friendly, expanding alternatives to employment-based social insurance schemes, and targeting efforts on interior cities in migrant-sourcing provinces that pose fewer barriers to permanent settlement.

Highlights

Rural migrants in China, numbering approximately 286 million, have been and remain on the whole institutionally and economically disadvantaged
The model has been replaced by a social security system more befitting the market economy—one that is based on a combination of individual payment, employer contribution, and state provision [5]
The present study takes advantage of a nationally representative survey conducted recently during a time marked by large strides forward in the area of social security

Summary

Introduction

Rural migrants in China, numbering approximately 286 million, have been and remain on the whole institutionally and economically disadvantaged. The hukou system was a socialist planning instrument that moored people to their places of official registration—agricultural or non-agricultural, local or non-local —for the purpose of resource allocation and job assignment, acting as a key component of a system characterized by a sharp urban–rural divide in terms of economic production and welfare arrangements [3]. It has survived through four decades of marketization to continue defining citizenship [4]. Even though the commodification of housing has rendered hukou status less critical to acquiring urban housing, scholars generally agree that the system’s legacy contribution to inequality and continued hukou-based discrimination in access to subsidized housing are major factors behind low homeownership rate among rural migrants

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Results

Conclusion