Study On The Location Characteristics Of Commodity Housing In Relation To The Impacts Of Planning In Beijing

One major challenge faced by China during the rapid urbanization process is how to deal with the enormous housing demand;for over-crowded megacities such as Beijing,housing policy is also viewed as a tool of depopulation.Location has become the keycharacteristics of urban housing in Chinanowadays.Spatial planning could affectcommodity housing locationthroughaltering spatial patterns of working places,public facilities and transportation and more directly through constraints on scale and intensity of land use.Taking Beijing as an example,the paper uses both quantitative and qualititative analysisto describe the spatial location of commodity housing(quantity,unit size and price)and to analyze how planning policies could affect housing location.The paper finds that:Firstly,the main factorsthat affectthe aggregation of urban population in Beijing areaccess to job and living condition.With administrative intervention,the local authority could limit the increase in registered population with Beijing hukou much easier than the increase in migrants without hukou.Many migrants who have informal jobs are less sensive to poor housing conditions.Thus the upsurge in housing price and lack of housing benefit for non-native residents have a relatively small impact on the housing demand of these migrants.Secondly,the spatial distribution of and the planning impacts on housing prices in Beijing nowadays are both consistent with the neoclassical economic theory.However,as a result of the special living style and culture preference of Beijing residents,the spatial distributions of housing sizes and income groups in Beijing contradict the western theory.Thirdly,the change in the location of Beijing residential development is characterized by “passive suburbanization”.The city’s employment has been further centralized.However,at the same time,as thelandshortage,planning restrictions and high-quality facilities in the central area all contribute to higherhousing price,new residential development has also been pushed out to the suburbs.Rail transit construction could attract new housing projects to be built in the suburbs,but majority are small-sized units whose buyers place a relatively low value on commuting time.Forthly,the planning restrictions in Beijing could help relieve the population congestion and the burden on infrastructure.However,during the “passive suburbanization”,the benefits of property premium mainly fall on the real estate developers and homeowners in the central area,while renters and first home buyers(especially small-sized home buyers and middle-to low-income newcomers who have high-skilled formal jobs)would have to pay more for commuting because of prominent jobs-housing mismatch.