Research On Housing Right Of Contemporary Chinese Citizens

Housing is a basic need, also is an indispensable material condition to humansurvival. At the same time, it is not only a place to human meeting materialrequirement, but a right of living in peace, security and dignity. Therefore,"the rightto adequate housing" is a basic human right, which is a performance of humandignity and value. According to “CESCR General comment4: The right to adequatehousing”, Housing Rights includes:(a) Legal security of tenure.(b) Availability ofservices, materials, facilities and infrastructure.(c) Affordability.(d) Habitability.(e)Accessibility.(f) Location.(g) Cultural adequacy.According to “General comment4”, the author deeply analyzes the connotationof Housing Right. Our country experienced several big housing reforms, whichreflects the development from policy to law, and welfare to right. In the plannedeconomy era, our country didn’t encourage private home ownership, and throughbuying private house to make it nationalized. Houses as a kind of welfare, wereassigned to workers by work units. After The Third Plenary Session, under theguidance of "one center, and two basic points", China began to reform housingsystem to the commercialization. Since1980, the State Council intensively issued aseries of policies to make public housing privatization and real estate market activelydeveloped. These policies severely promoted the development of the housing market,but there was also a lot of problems, such as market disorder, investment scale out ofcontrol, etc. So the state began to pay attention to cultivating housing market. In1995, the state used legal means to regulate real estate market, so some laws andregulations were published, for” People’s Republic of China Real EstateManagement Law”,showing that China’s housing system into the course of ruling.Chinese citizens’ rights of housing property and housing no infringement wereprotected in succession. But because of the utilitarian position, China lay to muchstress on the economic functions of housing, and ignored its safeguard function,which leading to the dislocation of housing structure. So housing has become asocial problem, and low-income vulnerable people become the victims of the housing bubble. In order to solve this problem, the low-rent housing was born.On the basis of above，the article introduces the low-rent housing system in thenext part. Low-rent housing, in the western developed countries is also known aspublic housing. Because of facing housing shortage after the war, the westerncapitalist countries used the public housing to solve housing problem in the earlyyears, so that we have a lot of reference. At present, the state has built a basicallycomplete system of low-rent housing from central to place. Government provideslow-income groups housing with rent subsidies, housing lease and rent reduction.But because of the lack of law and policy, the low-rent housing appeared a lot ofproblems in the process of implementing. It becomes a barrier instead of a guaranteefor citizens’ Housing Rights.Next, the paper analyzes how and why the low-rent housing becomes barrier.First of all, residents can’t choose living address. They can only choose to accept ornot accept, which infringe citizens’ choosing rights. Second, the low-rent housingbuilt on a focus site, leading to a “slum” with homogeneous people. Third, singlestandard, that only contains house area but not situations， basic facilities，leads theright into dark. Finally, the existing scope of safeguard is too narrow， which makesa lot of “sandwich groups”. The reasons for these problems are that Chinese low-renthousing system is based on the logic of "existence" but not "life"; the governmentlacks of public awareness, which make them an “economic man”; the system oflow-rent housing is expressed by the words of charity welfare but not right welfare,that means the housing rights are seen as humanity and tolerance, rather than ademand being ought to meet; In addition, there are some people vested interest whoare not willing to give up interest, seeking ways for "power abusing ".Above all, to improve low-rent housing system, we must emphasize the humanright as the system’s core, and further improve the construction of laws. Besides,strengthen the public awareness of the government, to adhere to the dominantposition of public housing.