Housing differentiation and subjective social status of Chinese urban homeowners: evidence from CLDS

Abstract

Chinese urbanites’ housing differentiation is a subject that attracts increasing scholarly attention. Previously, housing differentiation was measured by access to homeownership and housing tenure. Given high Chinese homeownership rates, however, heterogeneity among urban Chinese homeowners should be further decomposed. Many studies identified links between housing differentiation and social stratification, but few have examined residents’ responses to their homes. Based on the China Labour-force Dynamics Survey (CLDS), this study decomposes homeowners’ housing differentiation along three dimensions: housing conditions, housing wealth, and neighbourhood environment. We also examine the impacts of these dimensions on homeowners’ subjective social status (SSS). Significant differentiation is found among homeowners in housing conditions, neighbourhood environment, and housing loans. Furthermore, housing wealth and neighbourhood environment affect homeowners’ perceived social status. These findings advance housing differentiation studies and have important implications for policies aimed at reducing social inequality and housing poverty.

Keywords:

• Housing differentiation
• housing wealth
• housing condition
• neighborhood environment
• homeowner
• subjective social status

Acknowledgements

We thank Prof. Ray Forrest, Prof. Ngai Ming Yip, Prof. Jie Chen and other commentators in the symposium on ‘The role of housing in China’s urban transformation’ and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions.

Notes on contributors

Fenglong Wang is a professor of geography at South China Normal University and an adjunct researcher at Research Center for China Administrative Division and the Center for Modern Chinese City Studies. His work has focused on geography of subjective well-being (including residential satisfaction), housing differentiation, outcomes of residential relocation and theories in political geography (mainly related to politics of scale, territory and governmentality).

Chuanyong Zhang is an associate professor of economics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, his research interests are urban economics, real estate economics, and housing policies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_ownership_rate.

2 For the details, refer to: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/home-ownership-rate.

3 The scope of the neighbourhood in this study was defined by two standards: the first was within a 15-minute walking distance and the other was within the boundary of the community. The former was more ‘individualized’ and precise (since this measure is centred on the respondent's housing site), yet it only incorporated three facilities.

4 To avoid difficulty in calculating Theil's T based on negative values generated after factor analysis, ratings of neighbourhood cohesion are normalized to the range of 0 to 1 using the ‘min-max normalization’ method.

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71774057, 41601144), ‘Chenguang Program’ (18CG28) supported by the Shanghai Education Development Foundation and Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities funded by East China Normal University.