The Impact Of Housing On Urban Residents’ Class Identity

Economic transition and institutional transformation have had a profound impact on the social structure and caused the differentiation of social classes.This differentiation is both an objective social phenomenon and a subjective psychological presentation.But the two do not always show consistency,so it is necessary to re-examine the indicators of class status.Compared with the ―presupposed‖ objective class,class identity based on―subjective construction‖ has a stronger predictive power,and it can ―dynamically‖ show the order of social stratification through the individual’s perception and understanding of the social structure.At the same time,housing as a spatial entity has a special symbolic meaning for individuals,which is moving away from objective social stratification indicators such as occupation and income to the study of class identity and is receiving attention.Previous studies on housing and class identity have the following shortcomings: On the one hand,the research of class identity is based on the theoretical framework of Western society and ignores the peculiarities of Chinese society,and few researchers pay attention to the future expectations of housing for individual class identity.On the other hand,little attention has been paid to the internal differences of property owners.Therefore,the main purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of the number of housing and housing area per capita on current and future class identity from a "subjectively constructed" class structure,and to explore the moderating effect of housing price growth rate on the effect of housing on class identity.The survey data of this study comes from the "China Statistical Yearbook" issued by CGSS2017 and the National Bureau of Statistics.18-70-year-old urban residents as the sample of this study,The final 6714 valid samples were obtained after excluding the missing values,including 3132 males and 3582 females.The average age of the respondents is 46 years old.Those with party membership and those working in institutional units accounted for 12.9% and 18.4% respectively.2048 people in the surveyed group have a university degree or higher,accounting for 31.5% of the total number.The study found that:(1)The class identity of urban residents is positively influenced by the number of housing and the size of their housing per capita.(2)Housing has a positive effect on the class identity of China’s urban residents ten years later,but this effect tends to be weaker compared to the current class identity.(3)The growth rate of house prices positively moderates the effect of number of housing and housing area per capita on class identity.In particular,there are differences in the internal characteristics of class identity for different property groups: as the house price growth rate increases,the effect of housing on class identity is positive for households with two or more housing,and negative for households with no housing and only one housing.The results of this study show that housing is a significant influencing factor of class identity.This reveals that we should accelerate the social distribution reform based on housing security system reform to regulate the social wealth distribution based on housing inequality.At the same time,we should adhere to the policy orientation of "housing is for living in,not for speculation" and form a group consciousness of fair opportunities in the whole society,so as to effectively enhance the class identity of urban residents and promote the benign development of society.