Abstract
Integrating China’s 200 million rural-to-urban migrants into urban society is a critical challenge that, if unsuccessful, could undermine the entire urbanization project. To this end, understanding and responding to migrants’ housing needs, goals, and difficulties is an important aspect of ‘successful’ urbanization. Doing so is difficult, however, because of the complex legacy of housing reform and the transitional state of the housing market, and because so little is known about migrants’ housing preferences and behavior.
This paper fills some of the gaps regarding migrant housing choice, demand, and quality using data from a purpose-designed survey of 800 low-status migrants in Tianjin. Results show that in many cases these individuals do not to exercise housing ‘choice’ as much as they undergo housing ‘sorting’ that follows from occupational choices. That is, less than half of our respondents got their housing through the private rental market and only a slightly higher share pay any rent. Employment variables (industry sector, employer type) are consistently and strongly significant across our housing choice models and significantly affect housing quality as well. Nonetheless, a low-cost rental sector does exist, serving about two-fifths of migrants in our sample. Within this subset, housing demand is more consistent with theory in the sense that income and life cycle factors are important and the role of employment characteristics is diminished.
In all models individual migration characteristics, such as duration of residence, future migration plans, and sending remittances home, are significant, though which particular characteristics matter varies. We take this as an indication that migration status affects housing outcomes in multiple and subtle ways. This perspective differs, somewhat from the literature on housing choice in urban China, which emphasizes the role of institutional factors in determining cross-group housing outcomes. Although our results do not directly contradict these claims, our findings of (1) substantial variation in the determinants of housing choice/demand within the migrant pool, combined with (2) the ‘sorting’ of migrants into housing based on employment choices, suggests that at least some of the differential in housing outcomes between migrants and other urban groups is a result of individual migration characteristics and employment choices rather than institutional factors in the housing market.
Ultimately, we read the empirical results of our study as indicating that the primary policy prescription of the urban China housing choice literature – to eliminate residual barriers that prevent migrants from accessing low-cost public-sector rentals is insufficient and may not respond to the concerns of migrants themselves. Of course, removing such barriers would not be an unwelcome step but, for instance, it is unlikely to have any impact on the housing situations of the half of all migrants that obtain housing through their employer. In short, a range of policies will be necessary to support the housing goals of migrants who have different housing needs and face different constraints in meeting them.
