Research On Housing Affordability Of New Migrants In The Cities

As a result of the deepened urban-rural reform and the widened open policy, huge tide of migration occurs in China during the recent30years. With the country population’s flooding into the cities, the migrants attracted attention of the society. Authorities involved intensely focused on the migrants’survival and development. On the other side, housing price increased drastically in the last decade since the reform of housing monetization beginning at1998. The high price of house lay high pressure to Chinese citizens, especially those migrants in the cities. In this situation of expensive housing, what’s the condition of the lives of these migrants? Can they afford a house with their income? What’s their expectation to the expenditure of house? What factors influence their housing affordability? This paper discussed these questions in depth.As a start, this paper collects, arranges and summarizes researches in aspects of housing market, non-housing market and migration and factors influence migration housing, both home and a broad. The author find that, firstly, most paper focus on the living condition and willingness of the migrants mainly including the peasant workers, some migrants of higher education level are always neglected. Secondly, very few studies focus on the affordability of migrants specially. Most studies consider all the urban residents and low-income residents as a whole. Lastly, many studies are discussing the real housing affordability, while the willingness of housing payment level is often neglected.Then, this study tries to analysis the housing affordability of new migrants in the cities. Using the data collected in Hangzhou, this study describes the social&economic characters, the consuming condition and housing affordability of new migrants in Hangzhou. Also certain factors of new migrants are carefully examined in terms of objective housing affordability and subjective willingness of housing payment respectively to find those ones that could influence the housing affordability. The study above could be supplied as reference for the drawing-up and modification the housing policy. This article finds that: Firstly, the living condition and affordability of the new migrants in Hangzhou are poor, and they are paying more than that they are willing to pay-Mainly speaking, new migrants in Hangzhou buy or rent house as residents. But the choices of the housing patterns vary among new migrants of different career background. Most of the new migrants live in small high-rise buildings and high-rise buildings, which remain to be improved in terms of structure and equipment, and the ownership rate of living facilities is rather low, too. The consumption on food, water, electricity, gas and house constitute the daily payment of new migrants, which is a huge burden on them, and the housing consumption is the most important part of the daily expenditure. According comparison it is found that percentage that the willing housing payment accounts for salary is lower than the actual percentage.Secondly, the paper takes regress analysis on the objective housing affordability and subjective housing payment willingness, and finds their influence factors respectively.Using OLS model which takes the rate of housing payment per month dividing salary per month and the gap of the two as the explanatory variables, we get the similar conclusion. The career background, salary, gender and the marital conditions have significant effects on the objective housing affordability. Controlling the other variables, housing payment ability of the new migrants work in the state-owned work unit and foreign enterprise are significantly better than those work in private companies. The housing affordability gets better with the increase of the salary; Male has a better capability than female; unmarried new migrants’ability is better than the married; the higher the education level, the better the housing payment capability.Subjective payment ability differs a lot to the objective. The factors that influence the subjective payment willingness are Hukou and education level. Setting the willing rate of housing payment dividing salary as the explanatory variables, we take OLS model and Ologit model respectively and find the following conclusion:the new migrants with a local Hukou are willing to pay larger part to get a house than those without a local Hukou. The proportion of housing payment goes larger with the increase of the education, too. While the career pattern, career level, living time, salary, marital conditions and gender don’t have a significant effect on the explanatory variable.