Recent rapid housing market expansion in China is presenting new challenges for policy makers, planners, business people, and citizens. Now that housing in middle-income China is driven by consumer choices and is no longer dominated by state policy decisions, housing policy issues in Chinese cities are becoming increasingly similar to those encountered in other global housing markets. With soaring prices and imbalances in housing supply favoring high income groups and housing demand driven by rising inequality in household incomes, many middle and lower-income households face worsening choices in terms of the quality and location of their housing as well as greater financial difficulties, which together can have negative implications for standards of public health.
This book examines the impact of these changes on the general population, as well as on aspiring homeowners and developers. The contributors look at the effect on the widening of wealth gaps, slower economic growth, and threats to political and social stability.
Though focusing on China, the editors also present discussions of specific policy design challenges encountered in Australia, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, the Nordic countries, Singapore, Taiwan, the UK, and the US. This book would be of interest to housing policy makers, as well as academics who are studying the social and political effects of the Chinese housing market.
Author Biography:
Rebecca L. H. Chiu is a Professor and Head of the Department of Urban Planning and Design, and Director of the Centre of Urban Studies and Urban Planning and One Belt One Road Urban Observatory at the University of Hong Kong. She is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in the UK. Her current research interests include housing and urban sustainability in high-density Asian cities, housing in Hong Kong and China, comparative housing and planning studies, liveability in high-density cities and in ageing communities, and urban governance and urban management in China and the Belt and Road Region. She is the Founder Chairman of the Asia Pacific Network for Housing Research. She has been appointed to government boards and committees on housing, urban planning, land, urban renewal, and natural and heritage conservation in Hong Kong and elsewhere. She is co-author of Politics, Planning and Housing Supply in Australia, England and Hong Kong and chief editor of Housing Policy and Social Development in Asia, both published by Routledge.
Zhi Liu is a Senior Fellow and Director of the China Program at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and Director of Peking University-Lincoln Institute Center for Urban Development and Land Policy in Beijing. Previously, he was a lead infrastructure specialist at the World Bank, where he gained many years of operational experience in the infrastructure and urban sectors. His research interests are infrastructure finance, municipal finance, land policy, and housing policy. He serves on several expert committees or advisory groups to the central and local governments in China on national social and economic planning, affordable housing policy, and fiscal policy reform.
Bertrand Renaud is an international consultant on urban development and financial markets development. Formerly, he was Adviser in the Financial Development Department of the World Bank, an institution where he has held various positions in finance and in urban affairs. He was the first Head of the Urban Affairs Division of the OECD in Paris. Previously, he was Professor of Economics at the University of Hawaii, where he specialized in Asian urban development. He has taught and done research in US and Asian universities, including MIT, Seoul National University, the University of Hong Kong, and the KDI School of Public Policy in Seoul, Korea. He has published extensively. His latest book, The Dynamics of Housing in East Asia, was co-authored with Kyung-hwan Kim and Man Cho, and published by Wiley-Blackwell of Oxford in 2016. He holds MS and PhD degrees from the University of California at Berkeley, and an engineering degree from the Paris Institute of Technology for Life Sciences and the Environment, France. He is a Fellow of the Weimer School of the Homer Hoyt Advanced Studies Institute.
