A Study Of Chinese Legal Low-rent Housing System

Clothing, food, shelter and transportation have been necessary elements forpeople’s normal production and life from ancient times. The right to adequatehousing has been acknowledged as basic human right all over the world, which isguaranteed by legislations in most countries. At present, China is engaged inconstantly improving its social security systems and housing security systempossesses an important position. Low-rent housing system, established for extensivelow-income families with housing difficulties, is an important part of housingsecurity system. Low-income housing system has been established and developed formore than a decade since it was defined in1998. Although certain achievements havebeen made in low-rent housing system this decade and housing problems have beensolved for some low-income families with housing difficulties all over China, thereare still many problems in practices and legal systems.Currently, the research on low-rent housing system mainly covers sociology,administration science and economics, etc. From the perspective of laws, there havebeen no legal rules or regulations about low-rent housing construction, while theentire construction and management of low-rent housing system are merelysupported by the rules of several departments. Thus, complete legal systems andrelated supporting measures haven’t been developed for low-rent housing system. Inview of this, legal problems that may be encountered during practical construction oflow-rent houses are analyzed, based on which “Housing Security Law” is classified,integrated and formulated, which is of far-reaching theoretical and practicalimplications for China’s construction of legal low-rent housing system.This paper is divided into five parts in total. Part1, introduction, introduces thebackground and significance of the research on legal low-rent housing system anddemonstrates foreign&domestic research progress, putting forward the researchmethodologies and innovations of this paper. Part2summarizes basic theories onlow-rent housing system and jurisprudential bases, elaborating some basic issuessuch as the concept, dialectical analysis, characteristics, origin, development andjurisprudential bases of low-rent housing system. Part3makes a comparison oflow-rent housing system in developed countries (or areas), introducing the successesof America, Singapore and Hong Kong in establishing and developing low-incomehousing system. Part4deeply analyzes existing problems of Chinese legal low-renthousing system, including low-level legislation, narrow range of recipients, shortage of construction funds, limited supply of houses, government’s insufficient supply oflands, entry and exit mechanism on low-rent housing and incomplete systems onsupervision management and legal punishment, etc. Part5is the focus of this paper,in which the author proposes concrete ideas for establishing Chinese legal low-renthousing system, namely to improve the legislative level of legal low-rent housingsystem, build a multi-level ladder-type structure among recipients, guarantee thesources of funds and allowances for low-rent housing construction, clarify the rightsand obligations of low-rent housing applicants and leasees, establish related scientificsupporting mechanism about legal low-rent housing system (including establishingscientific entry standards, complete exit system and multi-level legal punishmentsystem, etc).