Too Much Yet Not Enough: Housing Segmentation and Household Consumption in China

China's urban housing system is structurally segmented: market-based residential housing accounts for only about 40 percent of occupied urban dwellings, with the remainder split between rental and legacy housing acquired outside the market. Using 2000–2020 Population Censuses and the 2019 China Household Finance Survey, this paper documents that housing tenure is systematically associated with distinct household consumption patterns. Conditional on income, wealth, and household characteristics, legacy homeowners exhibit lower discretionary consumption and higher income responsiveness than renters, while market homeowners' consumption is closely tied to housing wealth. These patterns are stable across survey waves and broadly consistent with panel-based evidence, pointing to structural balance-sheet differences across residential regimes as important correlates of household consumption behavior in China.