Spatial Inequality in China’s Housing Market and the Driving Mechanism

Abstract

Housing inequality is a widespread phenomenon around the world, and it varies widely across countries and regions. The housing market is naturally spatial in its attributes, and with the transformation of China’s urbanization, industrialization, and globalization, the spatial inequality in the housing market is increasingly severe. According to the geospatial differences in the housing market supply, demand, and price, and by integrating the influencing factors of economic, social, innovation, facility environment, and structural adjustment, this paper constructs a “spatial–supply–demand–price” integrated housing market inequality research framework based on the methods of CV, GI, and Geodetector, and it empirically studies the spatial inequality of provincial housing markets in China. The findings show that the spatial inequality in China’s housing market is significant and becomes increasingly serious. According to the study, we have confirmed the following. (1) Different factors vary greatly in influence, and they can be classified into three types, that is, “Key factors”, “Important factors”, and “Auxiliary factors”. (2) The spatial inequalities in housing supply, demand, and price vary widely in their driving mechanisms, but factors such as the added value of the tertiary industry, number of patents granted, and revenue affect all these three at the same time and have a comprehensive influence on the development and evolution of spatial inequalities in the housing market. (3) All the factors are bifactor-enhanced or non-linearly enhanced in relationships between every pair, and they are classified into three categories of high, medium, and low according to the mean of interacting forces; in particular, the factors of GDP, expenditure, permanent resident population, number of medical beds, and full-time equivalent of R&D personnel are in a stronger interaction with other factors. (4) Based on housing supply, demand, price, and their coordination, 31 provinces are classified into four types of policy zones, and the driving mechanisms of spatial inequalities in the housing market are further applied to put forward suggestions on policy design, which provides useful references for China and other countries to deal with housing spatial inequality.