Affordable Housing in Guangzhou since 2006

In 1995, the Chinese government first began providing affordable housing following the announcement of the National Housing Project Implementation Plan.

The primary objective of this policy was to tackle the housing shortage for urban, low-income families and to mitigate the rising costs of market housing.

Additionally, the government aimed to improve the minimum living standards of the population by providing better housing access and addressing the failure of the private housing market to supply an adequate amount of affordable housing.

In China, housing deemed affordable is officially termed “indemnification housing”, with the term “affordable housing” specifically used to refer to subsidized housing for ownership. However, in the following, the term “affordable housing” is used in a more general sense in line with common English usage.

Affordable housing categories in China include cheap rental housing, low-cost housing, capped price housing, public rental housing, shared ownership housing, and housing for “talent workers”—for highly educated and skilled professionals in economically important sectors such as STEM disciplines or finance who form part of a new floating population that growing cities are trying to attract—and government-subsidized rental housing.

China’s affordable housing policies have undergone three significant changes. First, in 2007, the target group for affordable housing was expanded from low-income families to include mid-income families and those residing in shantytowns. Second, in 2013, a significant shift occurred as the responsibility for supplying affordable housing was transferred from the central government to local governments. Third, starting in 2019, there has been a noticeable change in housing tenure policies with a move away from an initial focus on affordable homeownership to the current promotion of affordable rental homes.

Affordable housing policies were first introduced by the central government in 1998 with A Notification from the State Council on Further Deepening the Reform of the Urban Housing System and Accelerating Housing Construction in support of securing a basic living standard for the population.

However, a large number of urban migrant workers were excluded from this policy, as they are not officially registered in cities and, therefore, have no administrative status or social welfare rights there.

The policy also largely focused on supply, with greater attention paid to the quantity than the quality and location of housing, resulting in housing being built outside urban centers in areas with poor infrastructure. In a subsequent attempt to rectify these policy shortcomings, the State Council (2003) issued A Notification from the State Council to Promote Sustainable Development of the Real Estate Industry in 2003.

With the Twelfth Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development (2011–2015), a large-scale government-led affordable housing program was launched in 2011 with the aim of providing 36 million affordable housing units in urban areas within five years.

This immediately attracted great interest from researchers, with post-occupation evaluations quickly revealing that the maintenance of residential communities and the supply of public facilities were widespread problems, despite being seen by residents as vital to their satisfaction. Researchers also contended that small-scale residential communities located in urban centers were more suitable than the commonly built large-scale suburban communities, which were perceived as carrying the risk of ghettoizing the poor and giving rise to new social problems. However, when the central government removed affordable housing as a local government target assessment criterion in 2014, the housing supply slowed.

During the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan (2016–2020), the supply of new affordable housing was limited to completing developments that had already started. In addition, variations in affordable housing demand emerged, leading to the recognition of a need for localized housing supply tailored to each city’s specific demands.

The local characteristics of affordable housing in Guangzhou have been extensively studied. For instance, Deng and Guo conducted a series of comparative studies on affordable housing in South China, with a particular focus on Guangzhou, in 2014 and 2017.

In 2015, Li examined affordable housing in the Lingnan region and explored different design approaches. His 2015 research investigated the transferability of the concept of liveability from traditional residential houses to the design of new affordable housing.

Li’s work in the same year explored the potential of façade design for passive energy-savings. Wang’s 2018 study conducted a comparative analysis of urban villages and affordable housing, aiming to develop a design strategy for external public spaces in Guangzhou.

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