Residential Satisfaction of Young Adults in Large Chinese Cities: A Study on New College Graduates in Beijing

Currently, housing issues in large cities in China are being widely discussed and a new special group called "new college graduates" is getting much attention as representative of young educated adults from the media, but only a little done in academia field. In this paper, this group is taken as objective and Beijing is selected as deputation of large cities in China. The study is based on an investigation on residential satisfaction of new college graduates in Beijing. The impacts of individual social-economic characteristics, residence types and residential environment on residential satisfaction are detected using a Multinomial Logit Model (MLM). Personal characteristics of the group are defined from five aspects as financial, local identity, job, education and family support by Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Residence types are five kinds as self-owned housing, self-rent (family-rent), co-rent, dormitory of company and living in parents' housing. Besides, thirteen basic indices of residential environment indicating health, safety, convenience and comfort are used by subjective scoring. It was found that residential satisfaction is influenced by individual local identity, financial capability, residence type and environment index on comfort, convenience and health. Additionally, interior environment has a greater effect on residential satisfaction than exterior environment. On the impact of residence type, housing ownership is found to make higher residential satisfaction level by Analysis of Variance (ANOVA).