Research On The Housing Supply Structure Based On Housing Affordability By Income Group

Food, clothing, shelter and transportation are the basic conditions for survival, thus housing price is a rather hot topic that all people are concerned about.Since the late1990s, we have thoroughly terminated the old welfare housing distribution system and implemented the housing monetary reform, then our urban housing system has gradually entered an era of marketization and commercialization. During this process, the overall trend of the housing price is rising, especially after the reform of land bidding and auction, which has been beyond our control. The continuous raise in housing price let more and more families do nothing but to sigh. In effect, the problem of housing affordability among urban families becomes highlighted.Are urban residents in our country facing severe challenge, especially those from low and medium income level? Whether housing consumption has a "crowding-out effect" on the non-housing consumption? Whether the widening gap between rich and poor worsen their housing affordability, who come from low and medium income level? Should our existing housing safeguard scope be enlarged? If we want to clarify all those questions, we must take the present stage into consideration, and measure urban residents’housing affordability.This thesis first makes a qualitative analysis of Residual Income Approach, and then applies it to Wuhan’s situation, in which case, income of urban residents, housing consumption, housing price etc al. are based on Wuhan’s statistics yearbook from1998to2011. At the same time, all the houses are divided into three categories, for example, newly-built ordinary commodity housing, affordable housing, luxury apartment and villas etc al. By this analysis, a maximum of "reasonable" and affordable housing consumption of different families from all the income groups can be calculated. Through the analysis of residual income model, this paper is aimed to grasp the actual status of housing affordability from all the income groups from a more microscopic perspective. This is greatly helpful for our government to define those who are really having shelter difficulty, and take relevant measures to provide with corresponding housing types and supply structure matched with each class’housing affordability. Only hope to provide some reference for the government to develop multi-level housing supply system.From the basic theory to empirical analysis, combing qualitative and quantitative analysis, it turned out that, between1998and2011, the overall level of the housing affordability of urban residents in Wuhan is too low. Though the overall situation has been improving, the gap among different income levels also expands unceasingly. Only those from upper, high income and highest income group have the ability to purchase commodity housing independently, lowest income and low income residents are unable to pay, the others in the middle classes can only be able to consume the government subsidized housing or barely afford the cost of the small-sized commodity housing.