Research On The Application And Purchase Barriers Of Public Rental Housing And Corresponding Strategies In Chongqing

Public Rental Housing(PRH) has been regarded by the government as one of the most significant methods to guarantee and optimize the affordable housing system of China. It bears the burden of solving housing problems of the median- and low-income groups. However, PRH suffered indifference of the market when it was introduced to the vulnerable groups.Chongqing is considered as the explorer of PRH construction in China. It first put PRH into the market in March, 2011, and had unsatisfactory PRH application situation. In order to improve the application ratio, the Chongqing municipal government relaxed the application criteria. Despite that, the cold condition of PRH has not been obviously improved. The Chongqing Municipal Government has invested 140 billion RMB in the construction and decoration of PRH. If many PRH projects are vacant, a lot of public resources will be wasted, the image and position of PRH in the society will be negatively influenced, and the effectiveness of PRH institution and housing security strategy will be questioned by the public. Why are PRH not popular to the disadvantaged groups? This study aims to analyze the application and purchase barriers of PRH, and propose corresponding strategies to mitigate the barriers.This paper adopts combined methods of literature review and questionnaire survey to identify and test the application and purchase barriers of PRH. Both the barriers are then qualitatively analyzed to explore their internal mechanism. The Analytic Hierarchy Process is used to evaluate the application barriers. The Minxin Garden is selected for empirical research. The research findings indicate that the application barriers are made up of product barriers and psychological barriers. The product barriers include commuting distance, commuting time, insufficient public facilities, quality of the apartments, high rent, insufficient furniture, long distance to primary schools. The psychology barriers include high crime rate, negative influence to personal image, difficulty of integrating into the mainstream, difficulty of obtaining good neighbor interaction.The purchase barriers are also composed of product barriers and psychology barriers. The product barriers include price-income ratio, commuting time, commuting distance, long distance to primary schools, insufficient public facilities, quality of the apartments, property management services, housing appreciation potential.The results indicate that commuting distance, commuting time, and insufficient public facilities are the major factors that inhibit the application and purchase of PRH. This paper then proposes some policy suggestions to reduce the barriers, namely, adjusting the PRH rents and prices reasonably, planning the PRH communities regularly, promoting the public facilities, distributing the house types reasonably, strengthening the housing quality management and maintenance, advocating the image of PRH.