An evaluation system for suitability of urban public rental housing construction in Chongqing

A social problem that low-income people are unable to purchase houses in urban areas has been focused in recent years and the housing security system has also become an important part of the social security system. In recent years, public rental houses appeared as a new type of affordable houses. The national government took the construction of public rental houses to the national strategic level. Currently, there are many problems in the public rental house construction. For example, policy mechanisms are inadequate, the use of funding is not in an efficient way, the location of public rental houses is far away from the downtown, the plot ratio is too high, and facilities are incomplete. There are no appropriate indicators to comprehensively evaluate the public rental house construction. Based on the livable evaluation system in Chongqing, we selected four aspects of relevant indicators as the economic suitability, environmental suitability, social suitability, and life suitability to establish the public rental house construction suitability evaluation system.

The Consumption-Stimulating Effect of Public Rental Housing in China

China's public rental policy creates opportunities for poor households to rent apartments at low rental prices.In addition to such an impact,we argue that public rental housing increases the purchasing power of the poor and therefore enhances the income elasticity of consumption,i.e.,the percentage of consumption increment due to a 1 percent increase in income.Based on a nationwide dataset from China,the Chinese Household Income Project 2018,we find that public rental housing significantly increases the marginal impact of household disposable income on consumption.Specifically,our analysis suggests that public rental apartments could increase the income elasticity of consumption demand by 18 percent among all rental households and by 24 percent among rental households with below-average income.We also find that the effect of public rental housing on income elasticity of consumption is stronger for service consumption than for nonservice consumption.These results suggest that a well designed public rental policy could not only promote consumption in favor of the service industry but also alleviate the undesirable consequences of the unbalanced consumption structure caused by income inequality.

Poverty Decentralization or Reconcentration: An Empirical Study of the Effects of Collected Public Rental Housing in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province

Based on the supply-side reform objective, it is a great transformation of housing welfare measures in China to collect private unoccupied houses as public rental housing instead of building new ones. Through an empirical study of the Collecting Houses as Public Rental Housing Program in Changzhou, this paper finds that the collected houses is relatively scattered in the city, which is beneficial to avoiding over-centralization and marginalization of the poor families. However, it has resulted in poverty reconcentration in some old communities, probably further leading to spatial solidification of the poor as well as a further decline of old communities. Therefore it may not effectively solve the housing problems of the poor population by providing this alternative public rental housing, which is collected according to economic efficiency. Accordingly, the paper argues that it is necessary to reinforce community development and to renovate the declined communities in time, as an important supplement to housing welfare improvement.