The urban-rural discrepancy of generational housing pathways: A new source of intergenerational inequality in urban China?

Abstract In China's past decades of marketization reforms, original urban dwellers and early settlers in the home ownership sector enjoyed a drastic improvement in living conditions and family wealth stored in properties. Despite their significant contribution to the urban economy, rural migrants benefited far less from the housing market growth. Institutional discrimination, such as duality in welfare state provisions due to hukou segregation is often seen as main the mechanism behind this urban-rural discrepancy. With three elaborated case studies of generational housing pathways from Chongqing, this paper contributes to the debate of urban-rural housing inequality from a longitudinal perspective, focusing on the role of intergenerational transfers of wealth. We find that the original hukou, the original place of living and the housing positions of the parents all have great influence on the younger generation's housing experiences. The gaps between the urban locals and the migrants in housing resulted from generational accumulations of unbalanced opportunities in accessing housing.