ABSTRACT
Since the mid-1990s, one area of remarkable change within China’s market-oriented housing reform has been the advancement of private housing ownership. According to the 2005 national One-percent Population Survey, 75.7 percent of China’s urban residents were nominal homeowners by the end of that year. The same census data shows that even among China’s middle-to-low income urban population, the homeownership rate exceeded 70 percent by 2005. Although this official figure may be inflated due to various reasons (for example, omitting groups such as temporary migrants), it does imply that many of China’s urban underclass became nominal homeowners during the last round of the housing reform. Such a dramatic shift in the urban housing tenure structure is a key step in China’s housing marketization, since it cements the end of the old public housing system and underpins the foundation of the burgeoning private real estate market.
