Home in the big city: does place of origin affect homeownership among the post-80s generation in Shanghai

Abstract

Existing literature has uncovered housing divergence between migrants and locals in urban China, but has neglected the increasing diversity of migrants’ places of origin and its association with their housing opportunities. Based on a survey on the post-80s generation in Shanghai, this paper investigates the impact of residents’ place of origin on their housing outcomes. The results suggest that access to homeownership is a function of the position of an individual’s place of origin in the urban hierarchy. Shanghai locals are the most advantaged, followed by migrants from other centrally administered municipalities, provincial capitals and other cities at a higher position in the urban hierarchy. Migrants from market towns and rural areas, especially in underdeveloped regions, have inferior housing tenures and are shunned from homeownership. It implies that regional inequality is not fixed geographically but accompanies people’s mobility. Similar to the concept of social origin, this paper elaborates on geographical origin and its role in the reproduction of social inequality.

Keywords:

• Housing differentiation
• homeownership
• place of origin
• migrants
• geographical disparities
• China

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Hukou refers to the household registration system in mainland China, which identifies an individual as a resident of an area and records certain information such as name, parents, spouse, and date of birth. It is not only a basic social management system in China, but also a system closely related to resource allocation and benefit distribution.

2 There are several types of owner-occupied public housing provided in the past as well as nowadays, such as economic housing (jingji shiyong fang) and price-capped housing (xianjiafang). These housing usually are sold below market prices, and the purchasers only have partial property rights, which means they could live in as owners but cannot make transaction of the housing freely on the market before they obtain the full property rights by paying for the market prices.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41701176) and the joint funding by the Dutch Research Council (482.19.607) and Natural Science Foundation of China (72061137072).

Notes on contributors

Junru Cui

Junru Cui has graduated from East China Normal University, and now she is pursuing Ph.D. Degree in University of Amsterdam.

Can Cui

Can Cui is a professor researcher working in the department of Urban Geography at East China Normal University.

Xueying Mu

Xueying Mu is a Ph.D. Candidate in the department of Urban Geography at East China Normal University.

Pu Hao

Pu Haois an assistant professor working in the department of Geography at Hong Kong Baptist University.