China’s Housing Provision System: Evolution, Purchase–Rental Gap Measurement, and Optimization Strategy

Continuously high housing prices in large and medium-sized cities in China indicate that the urban housing provision system (HPS) has some drawbacks. One reason is that the housing rental market has long been ignored by authorities. In this paper, we divided the development process of HPSs into five stages from the view of housing purchases and rentals. Then, we analyzed the possible housing demand change of citizens based on changed migration distribution, demographic trends, and housing affordability. Subsequently, we established a distance coordination model to determine the coordination level between the housing purchase market and the housing rental market and found that the western region in China has the highest degree of coordinated development, followed by the eastern region, and the central region has the lowest. Finally, we proposed six preliminary strategies to optimize the HPS in the new era, and they can be summarized as (i) realizing virtuous interactions between the policies of the central government and the local government on two housing markets, (ii) reducing the development gap between the housing purchase market and the housing rental market, and (iii) establishing a Housing with Joint Property Rights system.