Housing problems are very important to every country both from social or   economic perspective. Among these problems, solving the ‘medium to low-income communities’, meaning ‘urban poor’, housing problem is a main but difficult one.

Chinese urban housing reform started in the early 1980s, as a part of comprehensive economic reform. Work units, which provided substantial in-kind services including heavily subsidized housing to their employees, dominated the old system. It brought three serious problems: housing shortages, corruption and iniquities. The goals of housing reform were to solve these problemsby urban housing privatization, commercialization and socialization.

With economic transition of the socialist economy, the gap between the rich and the poor has been extended in China. Hence, the alternative term ‘low-income communities’ came out automatically. Housing reform has facilitated a major mobilization of resources in housing investment in the last two decades and has generally improved living conditions of a good population. Nevertheless the urban poor can almost not benefit from these progressive changes. It can be seen that inequality in housing allocation still widely exists.

In the middle 1998, central government of China accelerated a new housing reform policy, monetarisation of housing reform, by using direct money subsidies to replace all existing forms of welfare housing. It is a symbol that the old welfare housing system has transferred to privatization and marketization housing providing system.

Turning into the new housing system, the central government must establish a new suitable house assuring system to help the low-income communities solve the housing problems. From 1998, major housing reform polices, which have mainly implications for the medium to low-income communities include affordable housing, are housing subsidy and new social rental housing. Affordable housing is the most focused.

After almost six years investing, the reform of affordable house shows that it only can satisfy a little proportion of urban poor, accurately not the medium to low-income communities but the medium to high-income. For instance, in Beijing, capital of China, those families whose income blows 60 thousands RMB per year can buy the affordable house. And the average income level of Beijing in 2002 is only 24 thousands RMB per year (Yang, J & Liao, 2003). It can be seen that the affordable house is not supplied for low-income groups, is really supplied to the middle to high-income groups.

Researchers of Chinese housing reform are generally more concerned about the success and failure of housing reform progress, and focus more on the economic or rational side of the story. Few of them have attempted to view housing reform from social policy perspective until last century ending, such as distributive justice and to assure the disadvantage groups’ rights. In order to keep progress on economic area and stable social atmosphere, the government of China should really face to the rapid increasing gaps between the rich and the poor and establish an effective social public housing assuring system not only the affordable housing reform. New social rental housing, alternative term Public Low-rent House, will be the most important and emphasized part of housing assuring system in the next housing reform period.