A house divided
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However, even if every resident of a major city is financially able to rent an apartment that meets the new regulation, the limited leasing capacity of places like Beijing may still force many to share a room.
According to a report released Wednesday by the market research center of Woaiwojia, a well-known real estate agency, 83 percent of the over 5 million mobile population who flooded to Beijing last year needed to rent, but the Beijing Statistics Bureau estimated the leasing capacity of the city is only enough for between 900,000 and 1.2 million people.
Surging costs
Less than a week after the ministry published the new regulation on its website, Woaiwojia released its annual report showing that the average rent in Beijing this year hit a seven-year high at 2,417 yuan ($363) per unit, up 15.56 percent from last year.
The average monthly income of Beijing-area college graduates was around 1,800 yuan ($300).
Apart from Beijing, rents have also increased in second- and third-tier cities across China due to tightened housing rules that have prompted many potential buyers and sellers to switch to the rental market, according to the Annual Report on the Development of the Housing Market in China by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences early this month.
"It was not my intention to cram into a place like this, but what else can I do?" said a despairing Gong.
Like Gong's place, many apartments in cities like Beijing and Shanghai have been divided into multiple rooms, splitting the rent between 10 tenants, according to Zhang, who estimates that 20 percent of Beijing's rented apartments are used in this manner.
However, joint renting can also cause a variety of other problems. In one extreme case, a Beijing resident surnamed Wang rented her three-bedroom apartment to over 20 people whose misuse of the bathroom caused the pipeline to break and water to flood the rooms below. Wang's neighbor filed a lawsuit against her last year.
Wang Hongliang is an associate professor with the Housing Law Research Center at Tsinghua University, and one of the people who helped draft the Housing Security Law.
"It is too soon to regulate the minimum renting space at this point," Wang said.
He added that the rights of tenants need to be safeguarded, but restricting joint renting at this point is too hasty, as public housing is still underdeveloped and income disparity is relatively high.
