Housing Single Women

Abstract

Problem, research strategy, and findings

Globally, house sharing among unrelated individuals is on the rise. In this study I use a rare data opportunity to uncover the role of gender in an extreme form of shared housing, the case of bed space rentals in Shanghai (China). Combining web-scraped online data with fieldwork, I find that women face gendered hindrances as they trade personal space for spatial access to opportunities. In particular, barriers to entry restrict women’s choices in this housing submarket. In addition, they pay a premium of almost 10% to rent in better, less crowded conditions. This rent premium is driven by distinctively gendered housing needs, including concerns for personal safety. My findings are somewhat constrained by the geographical scope. Although contemporary urban China is facing many of the pressures that have been documented in growing cities globally, Chinese cities are uniquely shaped by the country’s socioeconomic and cultural context, including culturally specific gender norms, economic transition, and the hukou household registration system. Still, the findings provide important impetus for gender-conscious planning approaches to shared housing beyond the Chinese context.

Takeaway for practice

The absence of planning solutions for young adults who increasingly navigate prolonged housing transitions has led to a diversity of informal affordable housing strategies, including sharing of accommodation. Because house sharing ostensibly disadvantages women and potentially puts them at risk, planners need to engage gender in approaching the emergent shared housing trend.

Keywords:

• gender
• migrants
• rental housing
• shared housing
• urban China

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to the field research assistants Li Xiangyu 李翔宇, Liang Yuqi 梁雨琦, Liu Yuan 刘源, Wang Le 王乐, and Zhang Ruiqi 张芮琪, as well as to J. Cressica Brazier for fruitful collaboration on developing the data collection methodology. This work is particularly indebted to Annette M. Kim, whose advice and guidance was invaluable in shaping this project. Finally, I thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments.

RESEARCH SUPPORT

This research was funded by the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy and the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

Supplemental data for this article can be found on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1 The hukou system ties access to citizenship rights to the place of registration, typically the place of birth. Distinguishing between rural and urban status, it functions like an internal passport system (Chan, 2013; Solinger, 1999).

2 For women, age and marriage shorten their sojourn (Bernard et al., 2014). Typecast as nurturers and homemakers, female migrants’ transgression into gainful employment outside the home is typically brief (Gaetano, 2008; Jacka, 2014). The name “working girls” (打工妹, dagongmei), by which young rural migrant women are often called, epitomizes their liminality as workers in the city.

3 Data were collected before “bed space for rent” was censored. In July 2016, the category was removed. Searching for “床位出租” now redirects to http://sh.58.com/sou/?badword=床位出租.

4 This included not taking pictures of people and keeping conversations within the scope of a typical landlord–tenant exchange.

5 Advertisers paint rosier pictures online, but mean values are by and large comparable. Harten et al. (2020) further discusses discrepancies. This study relies mostly on field data.

6 In 2016, the average monthly income of migrant workers in Shanghai was 5,328 RMB (A. P. Chen, 2017).

7 Occupancies far exceed what is allowed (Shanghai Municipal Government, 2011).

8 All names are pseudonyms to protect interviewees’ anonymity.

9 See the Technical Appendix for a larger set of specifications and estimates.

10 The number of female beds in this market might be overestimated because more female researchers could have caused oversampling of female advertisements and sites.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Julia Gabriele Harten

JULIA GABRIELE HARTEN ([email protected]) is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy.