Tag：Housing Marketing；Housing Price
Author：Hui Wang Fubing Su Lanlan Wang Ran Tao
Keywords：Land Regulation; Rural Housing
Date：2011-01-07
Summary：
Safe and affordable housing is generally accepted as a basic right in the modern world and states shoulder some responsibility for providing their citizens with a decent living space. After decades of governmental provision, China embraced the market and promoted housing ownership to overcome the incentive problem prevalent in a socialist ―shortage‖ economy. Series of housing reforms launched in the late 1980s harnessed self-interest and created a real estate boom in the urban areas. Millions of urban residents became home owners through either privatization of existing public housing stocks or purchases on the commercial housing market (Wang and Murie, 1996). According to a senior official in the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Construction (MHURC), by 2007, private housing already constituted 83% of the total urban housing stock (10.4 billion square meters). These rapidly changing urban physical and social landscapes have been subject to scholarly investigations. Studies such as tenure choice (Huang and Clark, 2002), residential mobility (Li, 2003; Huang and Deng, 2006), migrant housing (Wu 2002; Zhang et al. 2003), stratification (Logan et al, 1999; Wang, 2000; Li and Wu, 2006), and neighborhood redevelopment (Zhang and Fang, 2003; Fang, 2006) have greatly expanded our knowledge about the dynamics in urban housing transformation.
Compared to this large body of research, however, rural housing is significantly understudied in the literature. The difficulty in collecting data from less developed and sparsely populated countryside may be partly to blame. But more than half of the Chinese population resides in the rural area and their housing situation needs to be understood. Moreover, rural settlement occupies about 63.7% of all construction land (i.e. non-agricultural land) in the country; therefore rural housing development has direct bearings on the potential for urban expansion, including more urban housing space.1 In many places, the interconnection between urban and rural housing becomes more visible with the presence of the so called ―small‖ property ownership houses in the urban fringes.2 Efficient use of rural housing land is also crucial for protecting the country‘s precious farmland. Finally, from a theoretical perspective, urban housing and rural housing are segregated. Therefore there are somewhat different dynamics. The communal aspect in particular remains still strong.
Using a large sample survey of 2,000 rural households in six provinces, this paper aims to understand the distribution of housing resources in Chinese countryside. The empirical analysis shows that the current land regime has largely achieved its goals. Communal allocation of residential land was largely observed and households with large families dwelled on bigger housing lots. Power holders, such as village cadres and party members did not play strong favoritism to their friends and relatives, which is actually close to findings in urban surveys. Houses are private therefore floor space exhibited stronger tendency for stratification. Villagers with more income, better education, and experience in businesses and migration, occupied larger houses to meet their elevated needs or simply show off their success. Not surprisingly, houses have been used as investment instruments as well and villagers close to towns and cities constructed larger floor areas to capture rental opportunities.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The next section provides a brief review of the literature and highlights the interplay of market forces and public authority in housing consumption. After introducing the key elements of the current housing regulatory regime, some testable hypotheses are discussed in the following section. After data and measurements, regression results are presented and some main results are analyzed. We conclude with a discussion of the efficiency problem in the current regime and propose some policy instruments if rural housing reform is indeed pursued.
