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Social Indicators Research

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01-07-2023 | Original Research

The Impact of Housing Demolition on Residents’ Happiness: Empirical Evidence from China

Authors: Feng Qiu, Guangyan Chen

Published in: Social Indicators Research | Issue 1/2023

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Abstract

The subjective welfare effect of housing demolition has not received enough attention in existing literature, even though more than 100 million people have participated in housing demolition projects in China in the last decades. This study examined the relationship between housing demolition and residents’ happiness using data from the China Family Panel Studies. Based on the OLS model and the staggered DID model, we found that housing demolition can significantly enhance Chinese residents’ happiness, especially for those residents with non-agricultural livelihood strategies before the demolition. However, this salient positive relationship was not observed for residents dominated by agricultural livelihood strategies. In addition, we also found a time effect in the relationship we are concerned about. That is, if demolition happened in the past four to nine years, then the enhancement effect of housing demolition on happiness may “disappear,” while the effect remains salient in other cases, resulting in an “N-shaped” change in demolition residents’ happiness with the demolition time. The findings of this study provide new empirical evidence for understanding the relationship between residential relocation and individual subjective welfare in developing countries. And it suggests that China’s policymakers should pay more attention to improving the lives of vulnerable groups in housing demolition projects.

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The floating population and the demolition households have a high degree of similarity in the changes in living circumstances, so it’s reasonable to use this model to analyze the social integration difficulties faced by the demolition households.

The CHFS is conducted by Southwest University of Finance and Economics, and its official website is: https://chfs.swufe.edu.cn/.

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Chinese people, especially those living in rural areas, usually with a strong sense of nostalgic provincialism (i.e., being reluctant to move from one’s native district). This kind of hometown complex is even considered to be an important catalytic factor in housing demolition conflicts (Zhang, 2004; Han et al., 2018) because the relocation will dramatically decrease the geographically rooted social ties of the demolition households (Keene & Geronimus, 2011; Hu et al., 2022). Therefore, the unique hometown complex of the Chinese people makes it necessary to analyze the “time effect.”

In China, the whole society is categorized into urban and rural societies by the unique urban and rural household registration systems (Chan, 2009), namely hukou. The rights of adobe, employment and social welfare are associated with hukou registration in a locale where one lives permanently (Guo et al., 2018).

According to the 2017 CHFS, among all the respondents who have transformed their household registration status from rural hukou to non-rural (urban) hukou, more than 20% of them achieved this through housing demolition projects, which is also the primary channel of household registration status transformation in China.

In rural China, housing demolitions are usually accompanied by land expropriation.

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We merged information on housing demolition from the 2016 data into the 2018 data to reduce errors in identifying demolition households as non-demolition households.

This study only focuses on adults (age > = 18) because the theoretical analysis in this study is based on the characteristics of adult behaviour, which is not applicable to minors. In addition, minors’ worldviews and values are not mature, so they should not be analyzed together with adults in research on happiness.

In the 2010 survey, respondents’ happiness scored from 1 to 5. However, it scored from 0 to 10 in the 2014 and 2018 surveys.

This question is asked in the 2010 CFPS. Based on this question and the questions about the demolition experience asked in the later rounds of the CFPS, we sorted out the demolition experience of the respondents in the past decades.

If we did not exclude the respondents who participated in housing demolition projects before 2007, the proportion would rise to 11.023%.

The model has passed the omitted variables test.

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Title: The Impact of Housing Demolition on Residents’ Happiness: Empirical Evidence from China
Authors: Feng Qiu
Guangyan Chen
Publication date: 01-07-2023
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Published in: Social Indicators Research / Issue 1/2023
Print ISSN: 0303-8300
Electronic ISSN: 1573-0921
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-023-03125-6

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