Social Capital and Migrant Housing Experiences in Urban China: A Structural Equation Modeling Analysis

Rural–urban migration and housing for the urban poor have attracted worldwide attention from both scholars and policy makers. In China, empirical studies have revealed tremendous discrimination experienced by temporary migrants in the urban housing system, but most have emphasized constraints by formal institutions such as the hukou system. This paper adopts a sociological theory of social capital and employs structural equation modeling to investigate, simultaneously, the impacts of social capital on migrants' housing experiences in Chinese cities, as well as the causal relationships between a migrant's socioeconomic status and his/her social capital profile. Based on data from a twelve-city migrant survey conducted in 2009, statistical analysis revealed that, although migrant workers in general possess a small and truncated network of social ties in the city, those migrants who are connected to individuals with local hukou, rather than connected to more people, have higher access to formal housing and tend to enjoy better housing conditions.