Commodity Housing Research Articles

Community attachment among residents living in public and commodity housing in China

Since China’s housing reform, increasing attention has been paid to public housing. While the quantity of public housing units is increasing, residents’ attachment to the community remains underexplored. This study evaluates the social dimension of public housing from the perspective of community attachment in Guangzhou, China. We use a mixed methods approach to examine what factors influence community attachment in both public and commodity housing communities. We first analyse quantitative data (N = 344) collected from four public housing and commodity housing communities in Guangzhou using confirmatory factor analysis, hierarchical regression, and moderation analysis. Results show that housing type has no significant effect on community attachment. Housing type moderates the relationship between community ties, perceived public services, and community attachment, whereas community ties and perceived public services are positively associated with community attachment only for commodity housing residents. Qualitative data from 21 semi-structured interviews are then used to explain the quantitative results. Our findings support the rationality of the public housing strategy in China from the perspective of community attachment. We also argue that community attachment must be analysed in a contextualized approach.

Built Environment and Physical Activity in Suburban Guangzhou Residences: A People–Environment Transaction Perspective

The connection between the built environment and the physical activity of people is increasingly emphasized in China, given its unique suburbanization and dramatic changes in lifestyle. This paper aims to provide more evidence on equivocal findings on specific built environments and physical activities by examining the roles of the built environment on people's physical activity within suburban residences in Guangzhou (China). Multinomial logistic and ordinal regression analyses were used to identify the factors associated with physical activity that indicated the unique features of urban-type suburban residences: residential density, street connectivity, pedestrian infrastructure, design features, safety, destination accessibility, and pedestrian infrastructure. The confounding effects of individual sociodemographic characteristics are ascertained in interpretive, evaluative, and responsive transactions between the built environment and physical activity, highlighting the determinative nature of perceived environmental opportunities and barriers to physical activity. With the absence of operative transactions, key stakeholders of commodity housing developments should be motivated, and residents need to be educated and empowered to help realize a better, physically active living environment.

Occupancy, usage and spatial location of second homes in urban China

Since the late 1980s, homeownership in China has rapidly increased, and along with it the phenomenon of second homes. While research on multiple homes in China has examined second homes' ownership and tenure choice, little is known about the usage and spatial location of second homes. Using the nationally representative data from the 2015 China Household Finance Survey, this paper aims at documenting and analyzing the occupancy, usage and location of second homes of urban households in China. About 20% of urban households in China own second homes. Their leading usages are vacancy, renting and helping relatives, with only small percentages used for weekday commuting and leisure. Second homes' usage is influenced by the household's life cycle, socioeconomic status, the homes' and regional characteristics, and it differs among commodity housing and policy-related housing. Second homes are more common in large cities and in heavily urbanized areas, and they tend to be in relative proximity to primary homes. Unlike mature housing markets in Western countries where second homes are used primarily for leisure and income-generation, multiple homeownership in urban China reflects both family life cycle and institutional constraints more so than leisure pursuit.

Children's education or parents' employment: How do people choose their place of residence in Beijing

Residential mobility has become an increasingly important issue in China, where urban families participate frenetically in the commodity housing market leading to soaring property prices. Applying place dependence approach and logistic regression models, this paper examines the association between residential mobility intentions and place dependence for employment and education in Beijing. The results reveal that people's intentions to move homes are driven by place dependence on the access to high-quality schools for their children, while the dependence for employment is rather weak. The findings indicate children's education has emerged as a new driving force that shapes urban space in contemporary China and therefore should be a focal point for planners and policy makers in urban resource distribution. This paper provides evidences to further our understanding of the high premium of properties that enable access to good schools. The needs for other spatial utilities and sentimental attachment to a place also encourage residential mobility intentions, which deserves further research.

The variegated role of the state in different gated neighbourhoods in China

Housing commodification has led to the development of gated neighbourhoods in China. However, the types of gated neighbourhoods are very different from each other, and include ‘commodity housing’, affordable housing and resettlement housing. They might not be the same as the commonly known ‘gated communities’, which are characterised by both gating and private governance. Using three cases in the city of Wenzhou, we analyse the motivations for development, service provision and property management, and neighbourhood control. In commodity housing, the state is still visible and self-governance is limited, while the real estate developer leads land development and property management. In affordable housing, the state regulates the standards and the prices of services, while the developer is the provider of these services. In resettlement housing, the state uses a state-owned enterprise to relocate households, while the homeowners’ association and the service charges are ineffective. All these cases demonstrate the important and variegated role of the state and provide a more nuanced understanding of these gated neighbourhoods.

Unravelling residential satisfaction and relocation intention in three urban neighborhood types in Guangzhou, China

With the deepening of housing reform, housing mobility and residential differentiation in urban China are on the rise. Extant studies on residential satisfaction and relocation intention tend to focus on rural to urban relocation, while little is known about their interactions in the context of urban China. This study attempts to fill this void by offering an updated and detailed account of intra-urban relocation, and by unravelling the complex mechanism and interactions between residential satisfaction and relocation against a general background of residential differentiation. Based on a questionnaire survey in three types of neighborhoods representative of the dominant residential patterns in contemporary Chinese cities, namely traditional inner city neighborhoods, urban villages and commodity housing estates, this paper examines determinants of residential satisfaction and relocation intention in each residential segment. The results from linear regression and multivariate logistic regression models show that residential satisfaction is influenced by different factors in the three types of residential neighborhoods, but is generally shaped by community attachment and the housing facilities. Relocation intention is generated by a combination of various factors that differ from neighborhood to neighborhood. In traditional inner city neighborhoods, residents are less likely to develop relocation intentions, and satisfaction levels tend to go down with the age of the housing estates. The situation is slightly different in urban villages, where residents with a weak sense of community prefer to relocate. The diversified determinants of relocation intention in the three types of neighborhoods are by no means incidental, being closely related, in fact, to the demographic composition, built environment and development history of the neighborhood. This study offers a multilayer explanation of intra-urban relocation and its interactions with residential satisfaction in post-reform urban China.

关于海南省商品住宅价格模型的分析与预测

关于海南省商品住宅价格模型的分析与预测

限购政策与自贸区成立对海南省商品住宅价格影响分析

限购政策与自贸区成立对海南省商品住宅价格影响分析

How does Commodity Houses Advance Sale Permit Affect the Validity of Commodity Houses Advance Sale Contract (Chinese Law)

How does Commodity Houses Advance Sale Permit Affect the Validity of Commodity Houses Advance Sale Contract (Chinese Law)

A framework & dynamic model for reform of residential land supply policy in urban China

Urban residential land supply is both driven by and significantly influences urbanisation processes, the optimisation of which are necessary to address housing issues. At present, China's urban housing system has three major problems, namely a shortage of affordable housing, rapidly increasing prices for regular commodity housing, and an under-supply, relative to market demands, of high-end commodity housing, calling into question the effectiveness of existing land supply policies. This paper first reviews policies governing residential land supply and then considers these policies in light of findings from semi-structured interviews conducted with key actors and a survey of households in Hangzhou, a city of more than nine million in eastern China. These analyses show that although the Chinese government has undertaken steps to reform land use allocation and increase housing affordability in its cities, significant opportunities for reform remain in both affordable and commodity housing sectors.Results from this study aid in formulation of a framework for residential land supply and a dynamic model for reform for Chinese governments to undertake to integrate housing provision across a range of household income and housing type classifications. The model demonstrates how reformation of the residential land supply system through improvements to the elasticity of residential land supply, optimisation of land supply for affordable housing, deregulation of land supply for and taxation of high-end commodity housing will significantly ease housing stress within Chinese cities. Finally, international experience indicates that the Chinese government can leverage revenues to acquire or otherwise support construction of additional affordable housing, with the increased volume of activity helping to arrest housing price inflation while achieving socialist ideals.

Homeownership, family composition and subjective wellbeing

While a central insight of existing literature is that homeownership contributes to subjective wellbeing, little attention has been paid to the influence of family composition on this relationship. Using a large scale cross-sectional survey in metropolitan Beijing, our results clarify the important roles of family composition such as the presence of children, marital status in moderating the effects of homeownership on subjective wellbeing. We find that the relationship between homeownership and subjective wellbeing is varied across commodity housing, affordable housing and other housing types. Findings of this study indicate that socio-spatial contextualized nature of subjective wellbeing is dependent upon not just family composition but also other individuals' socioeconomic characteristics and neighborhood built environment.

The Spatial Pattern of Residential Mobility in Guangzhou, China

AbstractIn urban China, residential mobility behaviors have changed fundamentally in recent decades. While research has been undertaken on the trends and causes of residential relocation for different population groups, less attention has been paid to micro‐level processes of residential change, yet the latter underscore urban dynamics. This study addresses this through a survey conducted in Guangzhou in late 2012, which analyzes the spatial flows of residential shifts within and between three distance zones—inner core, inner suburbs and outer suburbs—to reveal complex mobility trends. In particular, hukou or household registration status, socio‐economic status, the nature and rank of employment, and tenure were found to have varied effects on the probability of inward and outward shifts. More specifically, while outward shifts in recent years mainly involved local hukou holders, families with higher education levels, a higher socio‐economic status or those working for government departments and public institutions were found to be more likely to settle in high‐rise commodity housing in the inner core. The majority of non‐hukou migrants, by contrast, moved within the same street or between adjacent streets within the same suburban area, while age, socio‐economic status and homeownership were found to increase an individual's chance of an inward shift.

Channeling Xining: Tibetan Place-Making in Western China during the Era of Commodity Housing

Through an analysis of Tibetan place-making in China's Xining City, I argue that a focus on channeling in place-making provides a way to move beyond typical accounts of resistance and domination in urban spaces. In China's frontier cities, an ethno-territorial institutional framework has resulted in the curtailment of how and where Tibetans and other ethnic minority groups may construct places. Furthermore, a nationwide urbanization project centered around the privatization of commodity housing and resulting in the hanification of the urban environment is producing a hegemonic urbanism that appears to be reducing urban difference. Yet Tibetans in Xining are channeling their place-making efforts to not simply fit in with or fight against urbanization but to assert their own meanings and rhythms and satisfy their own place-making desires. In doing so, they are learning how to navigate urban regulations and sensibilities while creating a rhizomatic network of urban places. The result is a piecemeal approach that has allowed a minority ethnic identity to thrive in the city through the creation of a diffuse but connected urbanism. Channeling highlights the careful path that marginal place-makers must tread as they find their way through territorial regulations and commercialism in the city. This research is based on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with forty-five Xining urbanites.

The effect of residential housing policy on car ownership and trip chaining behaviour in Hangzhou, China

China has recently initialised affordable housing policies to provide low rent housings for medium and low income households aiming to satisfy the growing demand in the housing market. The travel behaviour of residents in these two different types of housing is likely to differ, since public housing tenants have a limited choice of residential location, as the location of low-rent housing is fixed, while residents in commodity housing are able to take their travel patterns into account in choosing their housing location. Therefore, this paper investigates the differences in car ownership and trip chaining behaviour arising from living in different types of residential housing. The self-selection bias caused by the differences in the observed individual and household characteristics is partially controlled by a propensity score matching approach. The study further considers the endogenous effect of car ownership on travel chaining behaviour, thus controlling for the self-selection bias at car ownership level. The results show that residents in private commodity housing are more likely to own a car than those in low-rent housing with similar individual and household characteristics. Different life cycle stages play a vital role in car ownership after self-selection in residential housing has been taken into account. Living in private commodity housing has a direct negative effect on trip chaining complexity, after controlling for endogenous car ownership, although this effect is offset by the tendency for private commodity housing owners to do complex trip chaining because they have one or more cars.

중국 도시 주택시장 매매수익률 영향요인 분석: 5대 도시 및 70대 도시 상품방을 중심으로

중국 도시 주택시장 매매수익률 영향요인 분석: 5대 도시 및 70대 도시 상품방을 중심으로

Multi-model Combination Housing Price Forecasting Based on Web Search Data

In the background of large data, taking the housing price in Xi'an as an example, this paper extracts the relevant search words data from Baidu Index and builds the neural network, support vector machine and random forests model, according to the purchase information inquired by the consumers in Baidu. The gradient boosting decision tree model is established by forecast results of the three single model to achieve a combination of housing prices forecast to determine the final residential sales price index forecast. The result shows that the fitting degree of the combined model is 0.995, and the prediction accuracy is 10.4% higher than the optimal single forecasting model. This method can calculate the new commodity housing price index two weeks in advance than the National Bureau of Statistics. In future studies, this approach will be applied to many types of market forecasts to help companies and consumers make the best decisions.

Some Thoughts on Massive Affordable Housing Schemes under the Pressure of Commodity Housing Inventory in China’s Cities

The scale of China’s affordable housing construction is unprecedented in 12th Five-Year Plan, whether from the planning objectives, or the actual completion of present situation. However, under the increasing pressure of urban commercial housing inventory, it is urgently needed to carry out a reasonable coordination with urban housing supply side. Based on the review of the construction and development of affordable housing and commercial housing in 12th Five-Year Plan, this paper analyzes the relationship between them from the perspective of housing supply front in China’s cities, and further tries to discuss about the implementation path of improvement and upgrade of affordable housing in the period of 13th Five-Year Plan.

Welcome to the club! An exploratory study of service accessibility in commodity housing estates in Guangzhou, China

In post-reform China, gated commodity housing estates play a crucial role in the provision of urban services. Such collective service provision is criticized in the urban studies literature, because ‘club goods’ are thought to exclude people that do not live in gated communities. This paper reflects on the global relevance of that argument with an exploratory study in Guangzhou, China. We argue that access to collective services is structured in local social practices, involving diverse actors and specific rules and resources. Discussions on the exclusionary effects of service provision through gated communities should therefore focus on the characteristics of these practices of access in specific cities. Employing this perspective, the paper shows that in Guangzhou at least two mechanisms partly ease the exclusion of non-residents from club goods. On the one hand, municipal government maintains a considerable role in service management, mediating exclusion from services for people who do not live in commodity housing estates. On the other hand, generally the management of services is separated from housing estate management, and service providers try to increase profits through service provision to non-residents. We discuss the consequences of such mediations for an adjusted research agenda on service provision by gated communities.

The Detection and Empirical Study of Variance Change Points on Housing Prices <br/>—Taking Wuhan City Commodity Prices as an Example

Economic system mathematical model often contains multiple variance change points about structure model. In the same mean, we combine the Bayesian method with the maximum likelihood method on the detection of the variance multiple change points. With Bayesian method, we can eliminate extra parameters first, and then use maximum likelihood method to find the change position. So we both can eliminate extra parameters and can avoid the change point on the prior distribution unknown problem. In addition, the benefit of the maximum likelihood method is just needed to find out likelihood density function of the maximal solution in the solution space, thus the variance of multiple change point detection problem is resolved. By making substantial analysis with an example from commodity house prices in Wuhan, three changes of variance are found in all. They correspond to the major structure changes of contemporary property market in Wuhan city. The method is practical and effective as the final results shown. It also has a certain practical significance.

Space–time fixity and flexibility of daily activities and the built environment: A case study of different types of communities in Beijing suburbs

Space–time fixity constraint is an important concept in transport geography, but the influence of the built environment around both people’s residence and activity locations is not clear. Due to the housing reform and rapid suburbanization in China, various types of residential communities and diverse built environments coexist in the suburbs. Comparing how people’s space–time fixity/flexibility varies among different community types and built environments can thus enhance our understanding of the transition process in Chinese cities. This study investigates how space–time fixity/flexibility and their relationships with the built environment vary among different types of residential communities in Beijing suburbs. Activity-travel diary and 7-day GPS tracking data of 709 respondents in Shangdi-Qinghe area of Beijing collected in 2012 were used. We investigate how variations in space–time flexibility are associated with built environment factors and four different community types: danwei communities, commodity housing communities, affordable housing communities and relocated housing communities, controlling for personal, household and activity attributes. The results suggest the influences of the built environments at residential place and activity place are different, and the relationships between space–time fixity and the built environments of different community types are different. Space–time fixity is not so sensitive to the built environment for residents in danwei communities and affordable housing communities. Gender and age differences in space–time fixity are not consistent with what was observed in Western countries. This seems to reflect the influence of unique social, cultural and family norms in China.