Urban Housing Assistance Policy Evaluation And Simulation Experiments

Chinese urban housing reform has been achieved the objective of high home-ownership rate and per capita housing area. However, the high housing prices has become an obvious exclusion to additional population and vulnerable groups, that is the major challenges to fulfill the goals of "all the people can get affordable housing" in2020. Chinese government is constructing copious amounts of affordable housing and trying to relieve the low-income urban households’social problems such as difficult to buying house, renting suitable house and improving housing conditions. However, at the city level, ongoing need of land and capital are difficult to implement, which lead to a big gap between policy objectives and actual performance. Even though the affordable housing and public rental housing policy has been revised for many times, there is still a considerable controversy on property structure design, housing allowance approaches and other key housing policies, it is looking forward to summarizing and innovating in theory and also in policy.Based on the stratification and interactive principle of the real estate market, the study argue that the aim of housing policy is to help low and middle-income people to obtain affordable and suitable housing, so basic housing security(in Chinese) is house-oriented housing policy, which offer housing assistance for lowest-income households. Housing assistance is people oriented, the objectives of housing assistance is superior to basic housing security. In the second chapter, based on comparison of housing assistance between the China and other countries, the paper sum up the suitable experience of Chinese housing assistances which are based on the questionnaire and literature in classification (including5categories, that is policy, project, financial, technical and non-government assistance), and found that existing policies and programs in favor of the home ownership assistance, ignoring rental assistance. Paper suggest that senior regulations should be strengthened, the transfer method of public housing would take rental and ownership assistance into account, employers would be encouraged to offer housing assistance and marketization and socialization of public housing would be speed up.By making an analysis of hoarding-house phenomenon, the thesis develops the real estate economics discussion of housing characterizes and their derivative effects, studies the necessity and appropriateness of housing assistance, demonstrates housing assistance policy should remain neutral in order to avoid income and housing gap between rich and poor household of society widening. This thesis discusses the project design of housing assistance and develops a reasonable performance evaluation standard of housing assistance policy which is based on literature research and questionnaire survey. The viewpoint of reform that affordable housing should be cancelled or be replaced by public rental housing is pre-evaluated. The results indicate that it is inadvisable to do so under the same financial expenditure. Due to the characteristics of housing and housing market, there is both advantages and disadvantage on the aspect of selling and renting affordable housing, the different assistance project should be coexisted and applied flexibly.In view of the fairness problem of public housing policy, the thesis argues the micro-market-intervene can be implemented by using house vouchers. The research investigates the housing assistance reform in pilot city, Wuhan and Huangshi City, which arranged by MOHURD, and offers the solution on property right distribution of affordable housing and discusses the key parameters of formulas. It is demonstrated by a similar case that transferable permits (or quotas) is a public management tool which is suitable for the market economy system, and implement of permits trading system will improve performance of housing assistance policy.Based on survey of housing behavior, the housing and urban households agents are divided into subclass and database of housing rules have been constructed. The micro-simulation model (programmed on Netlogo simulation platform) is built based on ABM (agent-based-modeling) method. The model includes three sub-market, which are commercial housing, affordable housing and public rental housing market, households can get into and do housing business among three sub-markets. The model integrates the factors of housing location and (rental) price, simulates the actual behavior patterns of families who considering the house prices (or rent) and transport costs at the same time. Based on the statistical data of Wuhan City from year2000to2010, model is setup and its validity has been checked on2010.By using this simulation model, the paper detects the effect of long-term housing assistance policy which has been carried out or not done yet. paper find that when new-constructed public housing area less than10%of total housing construction, the impact of commodity housing market is relatively small, the sales volume did not change significantly. The proportion of public housing built with the construction of commercial housing is going up, the greater vibration amplitude of sales volume would be, if the proportion is declining, the vibration amplitude is also decreasing. As for modeling city, under10%construction-ratio planning policy (public rental housing and affordable housing are fifty-fifty), vacancy rate of public rental housing would be greater than15%in the2015, therefore, this policy would to be adjusted or canceled gradually. If the policy which public housing access standards is less than60%of the average housing area have to be keeping to year2015, the vacancy rate of public rental housing project would be rising significantly after2015. If access standards less than the city’s average housing area, the vacancy rate is always less than10%. If the10%construction-ratio have to maintained, Wuhan city should be reformed the planning policy to increase the access standards, it is recommended to use "9070" standard (i.e., household income standard less than90%of average income, per capita housing area less than70%of the average standard) to replace the "8060" standard, so maintain an appropriate waiting time and avoid the situation that no enough application or purchase would be possible. By repeating the policy simulation test for many times, this paper also find that with higher construction ratio of affordable housing, the average total net assets of high-income people coming to reduce, on the contrary, low income households going up, and to middle-income people, the effects is not obvious, which can conclude affordable housing can be applied to adjust the gap between the rich and the poor. The property tax is an inclusive tenant based assistance tools, but offer little improvement to renters. The increase in personal income tax can increase average housing area of rigid-Ⅱ type households (no any house), but have no significant effects on the rigid-Ⅰ type households (with house in poor condition). An optimized combination of policy is explored by through several simulations, which provides a reference to housing policy-maker.In the conclusion, according to the basic principles and policy objectives of housing assistance policy, there is a brief review of the history and performance of the housing system reform in China. Analytical substance and actual meaning of housing assistance to the achievement of "all the people enjoy the right to the housing" has been proposed considering Chinese current change trend in the social structure. The paper proposes a reform path, which would be from the surplus model to the market balanced benefit model, is designed. Some policy recommendations are put forward also on the paper.