The changing prevalence of housing overcrowding in post-reform China: The case of Shanghai, 2000–2010

• This paper examines how the prevalence of housing deprivation has evolved in China over the last decade.
• By 2010, a significant fraction of households in Shanghai was still living in excessively overcrowded housing.
• Approximately 70% of the housing overcrowding in Shanghai is experienced by rural migrants.
• There was a persistent and large gap of the prevalence of overcrowding across households with different types of Hukou.
• Over time, the occupation became increasing important in determining the household's chance of living in adequate housing.

Over the last two decades, China has experienced a drastic transformation of the housing system as well as rapid urbanization. By utilizing a pool of household-level micro data from three waves of national population census (2000, 2005 and 2010), this paper traces the evolution of housing overcrowding conditions in Shanghai since the marketization of the housing sector. We find that the overall incidence of housing overcrowding in Shanghai did not improve over the period from 2000 to 2010. The subgroup decomposition analysis shows that rural migrants consistently make up the majority of households living in overcrowded housing in Shanghai. The regression-based decomposition analysis further reveals that, even holding everything else equal, migrants are still much more likely to be subject to the risks of overcrowding than natives. We conclude this paper with discussions of policy implications.