Housing Reform

In the beginning, Worker Housing was a welfare allocation housing from the Jilin Grocery company.In 1998, according to the reform policy, according to the reform policy, each of the units was sold at an affordable price to the worker at Jilin Grocery who lived in the unit.Ownership was transferred from the company to the individual.

Jilin Grocery Worker Housing's total area is 13312 square meters. Including the legal and illegal buildings, the community has 15 buildings. Nine of them are apartment buildings, which provide only a single living space from the ground floor to the upper level. Other buildings have different purposes, such as utility rooms, vacancies, retail stores, and limited community spaces.

The first apartment building of Jilin Grocery Worker Housing was built in 1975, it was welfare allocation housing and aimed to provide living space for the employee who worked for Jilin Grocery Company. With the increase in the number of employees, the company gradually built more apartment buildings for them. The first building has 47 years of history. The conditions are relatively dilapidated.

1981

Welfare Allocation Housing Reform of the Housing System

Gradually established since the 1950s, China’s urban housing supply system was mainly government- planed welfare allocation based on the work-unit system.44 Under this housing allocation system, the work units or the bureau of housing management in the government allocated housing to employees as welfare according to their cadre ranking, occupation grade, seniority, marital status, and household size. Workers only had the right to live in the houses while the ownership of the houses belonged to the work unit or the state. At the end of the 1970s, China started market-oriented reform of the housing system, gradually shifting the main housing supply from the state to the market. And accomplishing the commodification of housing and the monetization of housing distribution. China adopted a gradualistic approach to the housing reform “old methods for old houses” referred to selling the original work-unit-owned or state-owned welfare housing to the residents living in the houses at affordable prices. This reform was a long, gradual, and controversial process with a large amount of pilot work. It was not until 1998 that a radical approach was adopted nationwide, terminating all kinds of welfare housing allocation. 45

1989

44 Li, Chunling, and Yiming Fan. “Housing Wealth Inequality in Urban China: The Transition from Welfare Allocation to Market Differentiation.” The Journal of Chinese Sociology. Springer Singapore, September 11, 2020. https:// journalofchinesesociology.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/ s40711-020-00129-4. 45 Ibid.