TITLE:
Evaluation of Housing Security Policies in Beijing from the Perspective of Youth Development-Oriented City Construction
AUTHORS:
Yuansuo Zhang, Chenxuan Zhang, Hui Zhou
KEYWORDS:
Youth Development-Oriented City, Housing Security, Affordable Rental Housing, Policy Text Analysis, Beijing
JOURNAL NAME:
Chinese Studies,
Vol.15 No.4,
September
20,
2026
ABSTRACT: Housing affordability has become a strategic constraint on the capacity of large cities to attract, integrate, and retain young people. This study evaluates Beijing’s youth housing-security policies through the lens of youth development-oriented city construction. It combines three bodies of evidence: 659 Chinese-language journal articles retrieved from the China National Knowledge Infrastructure for 2016-2025 and visualized with CiteSpace 6.4.R1; 332 Beijing policy documents collected for 2016-2025 and examined through temporal, spatial, word-frequency, and text-network analysis; and a questionnaire survey of 132 young people living in Beijing. An integrated framework links housing filtering, social exclusion, youth life-course development, and urban competitiveness to policy evolution and supply-demand matching. The policy corpus shows a wave-shaped trajectory from incremental agenda formation to system building and implementation refinement, with 2021 reaching 63 documents, a year-on-year increase of 142.31%. Policy attention is concentrated in employment- and innovation-intensive districts, while affordable rental housing has become the principal instrument connecting housing provision with talent and development objectives. Survey evidence nonetheless reveals substantial gaps in eligibility requirements, spatial‑locational allocation, and the continuity of support, with new‑employment‑form workers and non‑local youth particularly disadvantaged: only 22.0% of respondents reported full coverage and actual benefit; 53.0% identified high entry thresholds as the leading problem; 21.2% spent more than 30% of income on housing; and 25.8% commuted more than one hour each way. Housing cost was important or decisive for more than 70% of respondents’ decisions to remain in Beijing. Accordingly, this study proposes that Beijing’s indemnificatory housing should optimize the supply‑side, implement targeted tiered security, develop long‑term institutions, upgrade residential livable quality, and improve collaborative mechanisms, so as to build a housing‑security system adapted to the full‑life‑cycle development of young people.