Placing public housing provision in Chinese cities: land-centered development, cadre review mechanism, and residential land supply

Since 2007, China has launched several rounds of national low-income housing campaigns to alleviate housing affordability issues. However, little academic attention has been devoted to the actual practices of public housing provisions in Chinese cities of different fiscal, political and economic situations, as well as heterogeneities in their municipal responses. Based on a prefecture-level panel dataset (including 290 Chinese cities) from 2009 to 2017, the empirical analysis reveals an uneven landscape of public housing provision significantly associated with the local government-driven land-based development and the time horizon of the city leaders’ current tenure. The empirical results suggest that the level of public housing provision is not only negatively impacted by the degree of land finance but also influenced by the industrial-sector-biased land supply strategies. However, the local governments’ motivation in supplying public housing land is found to be stronger for cities in which the lengths of the city party secretaries’ tenures are longer.