Public Housing Development and Provision Structure in China

Abstract

Public housing development has been a critical part of the social welfare system in China since the economic reform in 1978. This paper examines China’s contemporary public housing development and attempts to understand the critical factors that affect its provision structure, which has made the current implementation of public housing programs contentious. More specifically, it examines China’s political and fiscal structures as well as its land system in relation to its public housing implementation and seeks to uncover why the land parcels allocated to public housing projects are mostly located along the urban fringe. This research has identified three major factors that have led local governments to locate public housing projects mostly in the suburbs: the intergovernmental system, fiscal burdens in the local implementation process, and political risks that local governments would face in the provision of land. Local governments have taken advantage of the decentralized authority of policy implementation by locating public housing projects in less-developed suburban areas in order to minimize their fiscal burdens and political risks.