Skilled migrants and the city: An analysis of housing careers in Nanjing

With the deepening of economic restructuring and the expansion of higher education, skilled migrants comprise an increasingly significant part of the internal migrant population. With the aim to settle down permanently in the city, skilled migrants need to be considered “prospective citizens”, who compete with locals to achieve homeownership in the urban housing market. An individual’s housing career is an outcome of the interactions between the resources and restrictions at the micro level and the complex institutional circumstances at the macro level. A better understanding of the housing career of skilled migrants has important implications for the establishment of a well-functioning housing market, the optimization of labour mobility, the efficient allocation of resources and the reshaping of urban social space (Li & Siu, 2001; Sánchez & Andrews, 2011). This research demonstrates the ambiguous position of skilled migrants in the urban housing market. Skilled migrants are better off than unskilled migrants when it comes to access to the formal city, since they are less constrained by institutional barriers and have access to good quality housing. However, an evident gap is observed in this research between skilled migrants and their local counterparts. Skilled migrants experience a high level of residential mobility, and take more time and steps to enter homeownership. This delay can be attributed foremost to the limited intergenerational transmission of wealth, while restricted knowledge about the local housing market and later partnership also play a role. Furthermore, this dissertation contributes to the debate on the influence of market versus institutional factors on housing consumption in China. Using the dataset obtained in Nanjing in 2012, when commodity housing has emerged as a major pathway to homeownership in urban China, Chapters 4 and 5 show an up-to-date picture that market factors that are closely related to life course trajectories play a more decisive role than institutional factors in shaping individuals’ housing behaviour.