Urban housing reform in China

This paper examines urban housing reform in China. It begins with a review of target housing problems and their historical causes. There follows an analysis of reform initiatives, experiments, implementation, theoretical foundations and institutional constraints. The last part explores possible reform choices and outcomes in relation to development, the present housing system, socialist heritage and work units. One likely outcome is that the state, work units and residents share housing responsibility, where private housing is confined to self-occupancy and housing rentals are monopolized by public housing. However, as experiences from other countries show that housing problems reproduce themselves along with industrialization and urbanization and that solving housing problems calls for continuous policy changes, the Chinese housing reform is likely to continue as an open-ended process. It will also provide a valuable reference for new housing policy initiatives in other developing countries.