Housing, Housing Stratification, and Chinese Urban Residents’ Social Satisfaction: Evidence from a National Household Survey

In 20 years, housing reform in China has transformed its urban housing system from housing welfare into a housing market, which has led to a unique housing stratification. Traditionally, housing status is considered an important indicator of social stratification while studies of residents’ social satisfaction also consider housing status and stratification as important factors. Using national data from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences–National Institute of Social Development, this paper investigates the status of urban household housing and its impact on individuals’ social satisfaction. Latent Class Analysis method was used to identify four housing strata from multiple dimensions and analyze the social satisfaction among these strata. The results show that variables such as the type of residential community, housing status, housing assets, and household income have significant impact on urban households’ social satisfaction. In particular, family income and number of housing units show a clear U-shaped characteristic curve. Latent Class Analysis shows that the housing strata of urban households can be divided into top, middle, sandwiched, and poor classes. Analyses of variance show that different housing strata have different attitudes about those social dimensions, and the sandwiched housing class’s social satisfaction is relatively low compared with other housing strata.