摘 要

自2004年起，我国房价整体呈快速上升趋势，对于大城市中的中低收入者来说，房价的急剧上涨以及波动造成的后果之一便是买房对于他们来说几乎成为一件遥不可及的事情，“买房难”已经成为我国较突出的社会问题之一。然而在美国，虽然普通民众也同样面临高房价问题，他们却并没有像中国人这样感受到巨大的压力。本文通过对比中美两国住房消费观念、住房条件、房价以及住房交易的差异，并从历史地理、政府政策以及信贷体系等方面分析其背后的原因，以期从住房这一角度深入挖掘和探讨中美两国之间存在的社会差异。

关键词：房价；中美；差异；原因

Contents

1. Introduction.............................................................................................................1
2. Demonstration.........................................................................................................3

2.1. Differences in housing consumption between China and the US.........................3

2.1.1 Housing consumption view.................................................................................3

2.1.2 Housing conditions..............................................................................................4

2.1.3 Housing price......................................................................................................5

2.1.4 Housing transaction.............................................................................................6

2.2. Reasons for the differences...................................................................................7

2.2.1 Historical and geographical reasons....................................................................7

2.2.2 Government policy..............................................................................................8

2.2.3 Housing credit system.......................................................................................10

2.3. Implications.........................................................................................................12

3. Conclusion..............................................................................................................13

Works Cited………………………………………………………………………....15

Bibliography………………………………………………………………………...16

An Analysis of Differences in Housing Consumption Between China and the US

1. Introduction

Since the outbreak of financial crisis in 2008, the world economy has been struck tremendously. The changes of China's real estate market in 2009 were totally unpredictable. In the first half year, affected by the global financial storm, it appeared a serious downturn, which forced the government to introduce several policies to rescue the market. While in the next half year, the situation suddenly reversed and the housing prices rose by more than 30% from a year earlier. In some cities, due to the soaring housing prices, people flocked to buy houses in panic, which made the housing rental ratio came to 1:500 or even more. In 2009, China's total consumption amount was 12 trillion yuan, of which 600 million yuan was spent on housing transaction. Due to the sharp rise in housing prices, speculative buying emerged on trading market which resulting in more than 70% of the buyers are no longer buying for living but for selling. This phenomena first began in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen and soon spread to middle-sized and small cities. In recent decades, China's real estate industry is growing at the speed of 50% or even more than 100% on average, which attracts a great number of commercial enterprises which speculate in real estate, including state-owned enterprises, forming the unique scene of universal property speculation (Liu, 2009). So China's real estate market ranked second in the well-known financial magazine Forbes’ list of the seven largest financial bubbles. Even one academician of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said the real estate market has become a super casino. In 2008, 85% of residents can't afford to buy a house in the big cities since the housing price has rose to more than twenty thousand per square meter.

After 2008, although the real estate market in China existed a small decline temporarily, the general trend was still steadily rising. To some extent, “House purchase restriction” forbade part of the speculative purchasing, but it didn't gave much help to the high housing prices. On the other hand, if the speculators pay more to get their second or third houses, they definitely would charge much more when they rent or sell the houses to others unless the government increase the purchasing power of low and middle income families.