Rural Informal Rental Housing In Dongguan

The challenge of housing in contemporary China is unprecedentedly huge duringthe rapid urbanization. As a result, the rural informal rental housing has come into being,controversial in a way, plays a significant part in housing hundreds of millions ofmigrant workers. In order to understand such an unexpected and unique housing sectorfurther, this dissertation conducts a case study on Dongguan, a new industrial city inSouth China that emerged in less than three decades, known as “the world’s factory”with a population over eight million, where the rural informal rental housing hasdeveloped almost at its own will until recently.The rural rental housing seems to be an inevitable result due to the serious shortageof cheap rental housing in urban housing system and the failure of rural land regulation,which could be attributed to the lack of consideration of rental housing needs during theHousing Reform and the ignorance of the peasant’s interest in the land law legislation.In the case of Dongguan, millions of migrant workers flooded into the industrializinglocal villages, whose housing needs could never be fully met by dormitories built byfactory owners. The rural rental housing came into being since then, not only has iteased the housing pressure, but also generated income for the local villagers who losttheir farmland in industrialization. This temporary solution soon became a permanentarrangement, with the village collective as land owner and planner, the villagers asdevelopers, some migrant as rental agent and the local government on sufferancelevying tax from it. As the research reveals, the rural informal rental housing hasmanaged to meet the migrant workers’ needs and meanwhile substantially improved itsquality. However, the growth of migrant population generally slowed down and becamemore unpredictable from2004, bringing in the trouble of excessive supply as the localvillagers were still building flats at full stretch. Although the rent level and security oftenancy favor the tenants further more, the sustainability of rural informal rentalhousing is in question.The case study suggests that the rural informal rental housing could becharacterized in two aspects: first, once the local government can vaguely recognizeinformal property rights and establish necessary administration (which Dongguan did), it has the capability of self-upgrading because of its highly competitive nature,as there are always a large number of petty villager-turn-landlords everywhere in therapid urbanizing area; second, it could suffer serious oversupply problem as thesevillager-turn-landlords who lost their farmland rely heavily on their current business tomake a living, while the migrant workers are reluctant to consume more in orderto save as much money as they can. In the end, the relatively secured “villageland tenure” of the rural informal rental housing in China ensured much betterliving condition for migrants than those squatter settlements in the Third World,meanwhile the petty-peasantry economy could accept much lower interest thanprivate speculators, making the rural informal rental housing much moreaffordable. For the migrant workers, the rural informal rental housing seems to suittheir current needs well, even arguably better than public housing. However, theserious oversupply problem has to be dealt with. This paper recommends thatthe urban and rural planning regulation introduced, the collective-dormitoryregime removed and migrant workers fully treated as citizens.