9月2日从瑞典回国途中在北京机场转机时，应约接受丹麦国家广播台记者Peter Harsmen录音专访，谈中国现阶段住宅房地产中的两极分化现象及其对中国社会阶层分化的影响等问题，housing inequality and social inequality in China。10多分钟录音。

主要要点：1。住宅的不平等在改革前就存在。官员相对群众，干部相对工人，国有相对非国有；2。房地产改革没有纠正反而认可旧体制下的不平等。出售公房，原来占有越大补贴越大；3。新的住宅不平等，取决于个人社会经济资源，但与旧的不平等相关很大；4。住宅上的两极分化，既是贫富分化的结果，又是贫富分化的成因：租房收入对富人收入的贡献越来越大；住房占有的差别是财富分配差距的主要成因；住房选择会影响到工作收入。where you live influences what job you get.

所以，住房保障政策的两难：一方面，让穷人来买房不现实，廉租房似乎是唯一出路；另一方面，如果穷人不买房，收入和财富上与富人的差距会越拉越大。政府决策必须不仅考虑到今天，也要考虑到明天。

Housing Affordability and Housing Inequality

There is a close association between housing affordability and housing inequality but they are far from equivalent. Under welfare housing system, there was no issue called housing affordability. Households did not need to pay any rents or at most nominal rents. But they had to wait and hence they paid time cost. Although the vast majority of urban workers occupied almost same size and same quality of dwellings, there was still large inequality in the consumption of housing services. Those high-ranked government officials and managers of SOE occupied much larger and better accommodations than others. Meanwhile, the residents outside of the public sectors and SOE were totally excluded from the welfare housing system. From one perspective, the inequality in housing consumption was one of the largest elements in the social inequality under the socialist economy. However, the housing reform since 1980s did not attempt to correct such inequality but instead recognized it. During the large-scale sale of public housings, the larger housing you had occupied, the more you got subsided. Therefore the old inequality in housing occupation becomes a root for inequality in the new market era. Those winners under the old welfare regime are often the winners under the new market regime.

Under the market-oriented housing system, housing affordability issue rises. This time it comes hand-in-hand with a new type of housing inequality, which both are inevitable results of the expanding income inequality. No market economy can prevent the emergence of income inequality since people are borne with unequal capability in the labor market. But the inequality in the housing market can feed back the socio-economic inequalities across different classes. The data from Shanghai suggests that, for the richest households, the income from leasing their excess housings have become a significant proportion of their gross income (more than 10% in 2004 for the top 20% income group). Considering the continued trend of house price growth at pace higher than income growth, the contribution from rental incomes for the rich households is expected to rise in the future. More importantly, in a market economy, housing is the major wealth asset that common households could own. The widening gap in the wealth accumulation between the poor and rich is mainly caused by their different purchasing power in the housing market and different abilities to amass home asset. Further, the inequality in the housing occupation will not only play a role to enlarge the income and wealth inequality through the channel of home asset accumulation directly but also may contribute to widening socio-economic inequalities through the channel of labor market. Many researchers have suggested, unequal positions in the housing market can be an important attribute in explaining the inequality of labor market outcomes. As the spatial mismatch hypothesis literature tries hard to convince us, whether a dwelling is associated with good spatial access to labor market opportunity matters a lot. In summary, today’s housing inequality is not only the outcome of yesterday’s income and wealth gap but also one of major reasons for tomorrow’s socioeconomic inequality.

Therefore, we are facing a dilemma. On the one hand, since it is infeasible for the poor to have a home of own today, the cheap rent housings seem the only viable solution that one can recommend for the government for the low-income group. But on the other hand, if the low-income groups are discouraged from actively participating in the housing market and miss the opportunity to own a home asset today, they will find them increasing lagged behind the high-income groups in terms of both wealth assets and socio-economic positions. 

This dilemma highlights a very important lesson in designing affordable housing policy. We could not solve the housing affordability issue for the poor only today. We need to look into the future and be well cautious with the likely consequences of today’s polices.

A sound housing policy should be working jointly with other policies to not only assist the low-income group today but also avoid trapping them in the poverty in the future.