Urban housing challenges in mainland China

After the implementation of a series of step-by-step reform actions during 1988–1998, China completed a transition of urban housing supply from a welfare provision system to a predominantly market-based system (Wang, 2011; Yang and Chen, 2014). Since then, China has experienced extraordinarily rapid growth in urban housing stock. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, gross housing floor area per capita in urban areas nearly doubled during 1998–2015, from 18.7 square meters in 1998 to 37 square meters in 2017. This level is higher than the average for middle-income countries (20 square meters) and close to the average of 28 European Union countries (42.6 square meters in 2011). 1 Today, 90 percent of the Chinese urban households who have an urban hukou (rural household registration) own one or more housing units. The quality of public infrastructure services in most urban residential neighborhoods can be considered adequate to high, according to the international standards.