Prof. Siqi Zheng attends U. Penn conference

Professor Siqi Zheng attended the "Real Estate in Xi-Era China" conference, organized by the Center for the Study of Contemporary China and Penn Institute for Urban Research at U. Penn.

She presented her paper, "China's Informal Housing Sector: Economic Rationale and Its Transformation in an Era of Urban Renewal". The four major types of informal housing in China, including urban villages, subdivided group rental apartments, basement dwellings and factory dormitories, all together have housed hundreds of millions of migrant workers. Informal housing provides an essential urbanization-cost subsidy that absorbs migration shocks, moderates wages, and shifts the cost of housing the workforce off firms’ and cities’ budgets. For the past three decades this logic was self-reinforcing, and local governments financed by land sales had little incentive to change a sector that housed low-income workers at little public cost.