Empty
Houses: Real and Imagined Consequences of Emotional and Economic Investment in
China’s Real Estate Market
Abstract
While other scholars have used the growing number of empty houses in the People’s Republic of China to argue that the real estate market either is or is not a bubble, in this paper I focus instead on how people envision their future through the figure of the empty house. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in an expanding city in Henan Province, I analyze three different types of empty houses and the potential outcomes people project onto them: hunfang or marriage houses purchased for young sons, chaiqianfang or compensation houses distributed after forced demolitions, and touzifangzi or investment houses. I argue that keeping a new house empty is one tactic wealthy and middle-class people use to invest in their own ability to create and preserve a future. In contrast, as development increases to both meet people’s demands and satisfy the Party-State’s new urbanization initiatives, the demolition of urban villages leaves many poorer residents unable to find houses unoccupied by the investments of others. By refusing to rent to migrants to the city, who are seen as potentially polluting, homeowners’ desire to preserve their imagined, immaculate futures creates a housing shortage in the present. Finally, I examine how homeowners and city residents fantasize about what might happen to them and their empty houses if or when the PRC has its own housing crisis.
Bio
Megan Steffen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her dissertation is tentatively titled “Unpredictability and Intimacy in the People’s Republic of China.” In it, she examines how social forms and customs in the PRC have changed as people adjust to the increased unpredictability that accompanies their new mobility and economic prosperity. She does fieldwork in a large city in Henan Province and on trains throughout the PRC. In addition to her dissertation research, she also began work on a documentary about urban villages, which she’ll finish eventually if it’s ever politically appropriate.
While other scholars have used the growing number of empty houses in the People’s Republic of China to argue that the real estate market either is or is not a bubble, in this paper I focus instead on how people envision their future through the figure of the empty house. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in an expanding city in Henan Province, I analyze three different types of empty houses and the potential outcomes people project onto them: hunfang or marriage houses purchased for young sons, chaiqianfang or compensation houses distributed after forced demolitions, and touzifangzi or investment houses. I argue that keeping a new house empty is one tactic wealthy and middle-class people use to invest in their own ability to create and preserve a future. In contrast, as development increases to both meet people’s demands and satisfy the Party-State’s new urbanization initiatives, the demolition of urban villages leaves many poorer residents unable to find houses unoccupied by the investments of others. By refusing to rent to migrants to the city, who are seen as potentially polluting, homeowners’ desire to preserve their imagined, immaculate futures creates a housing shortage in the present. Finally, I examine how homeowners and city residents fantasize about what might happen to them and their empty houses if or when the PRC has its own housing crisis.
Bio
Megan Steffen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her dissertation is tentatively titled “Unpredictability and Intimacy in the People’s Republic of China.” In it, she examines how social forms and customs in the PRC have changed as people adjust to the increased unpredictability that accompanies their new mobility and economic prosperity. She does fieldwork in a large city in Henan Province and on trains throughout the PRC. In addition to her dissertation research, she also began work on a documentary about urban villages, which she’ll finish eventually if it’s ever politically appropriate.