A Study Of Enhancing The Low-income’s Affordability Toward Public Housing

The right of habitation is an essential element of citizenship. Under the special background of China’s housing market, considerable residents can’t solve the housing problem on their own. Combined with the fast developing urbanization, the task of housing security is even more challenging in the future. At this critical period, establishing and improving the housing security policy system is of profound importance to meet citizen’s housing needs, maintain social stability, as well as boost the sustainable development of economy and society.China’s housing security policy system and the construction of public housing all have some achievement but also problems. There is still a long way to get to a satisfying housing security level. But on the other hand, a wierd phenomenon of large numbers of vacant public houses unexpectedly appears. The security objects’, especially low-income groups’affordability toward public houses is a crucial factor of the analysis of this phenomenon as well as the overall process of providing housing security Meanwhile, as another important content of the housing security policy system, the housing provident fund has a direct and inner connection with the promotion o(?) individuals’paying ability. Based on existing problems, theoretical researches and innovative practice, the fund’s security function has tremendous improvement potential.Therefore, a combined study of the enhancement of affordability toward public houses and the housing provident fund system will become a meaningful exploration. The most important logical structure contains tow parts:the first is to reveal the existence of the problem of inadequate paying ability; the second is to verify the effect of the implementation of housing provident fund-whether it can enhance the low-income groups’affordability and to what extent it can realize. Theoretically, the connation of housing need, characteristics of housing products, reasons which may account for the strange phenomenon of vacant public houses, absence of financial policies for the consumption part, as well as comparison between domestic and foreign rent levels can demonstrate the possibility of insufficient affordability to public houses. Compared with other measures, such as rent controlling and subsidies, the housing provident fund system has unique theoretical advantages of its function. In the case study of Hangzhou’s public rental houses, the inspection of actual rent level and estimation of two other indicators (Rent-to-income Ratio and Residual Income Indicator) reflect the low-income groups’ rent burden, verifying the severity of affordability problem. In the hypothetical situation, the low-income group are assumed to have a certain years’accumulation of the housing fund and be allowed to use the fund account to pay part of rent, through which, result shows some pay requirements can be fully met. In other cases, adjusting the provident fund’s deposit ratio and adding loan support can further enhance the low-income group’s afffordability.Placing the housing provident fund system in the overall framework of the housing security policy system and making improvement from varied aspects to enhance the affordability of public housing can promote the satisfying of citizen’s housing demand and improve personal capacity for sustainable development from micro perspective. And on the macro level, such improvement is also expected to contribute to injecting a new perspective to the providing of housing security optimizing the housing security policy system and unleashing the compound effects different housing security policies.