Commentary: Single women may be driving gentrification in Hong Kong
MICHIGAN: Gentrification is reshaping urban areas all around the world, displacing large segments of the population and making cities increasingly unaffordable.
In San Francisco, only 12 per cent of households can afford a median priced home, which is over US$1.five meg.
In Hong Kong, the globe'south virtually unaffordable city aslope Singapore and Paris, there are currently some ninety,000 families living in inadequate housing weather condition.
We recently examined two decades of cultural transitions in Hong Kong with a focus on how attitudes toward marriage accept contradistinct the real estate marketplace, and found that single women in Hong Kong take played a surprising and little-studied role in gentrification.
MARRYING Afterward
Women have been marrying afterward in life around the world for many years. The extent of this trend has varied globally, though, reflecting unlike levels of cultural change and resulting in different regional economic impacts.
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Throughout the second half of the 20th century, East and Southeast Asia, in item, witnessed a growing number of single men and women. From 1950 to 1990, the number of young single women across Asia – Prc excluded – increased nearly fourfold, from 22 million to 82 million.
1 reason this trend has happened outside of China is cultural. If you're a adult female and you're single on the mainland, it's viewed negatively. Unmarried women over the age of 27 are called sheng nu or "leftover women." But in Hong Kong information technology'due south seen in a more positive lite. There, they're known as xing nu or "blooming women".
This tendency has produced a ripple effect throughout the economy, including the belongings market and local redevelopment, as the increased number of single women – who are also attaining higher-paid jobs – boosts demand for housing.
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GENTRIFYING NEIGHBOURHOODS
Nosotros analysed standardised census data from 1986 to 2006 beyond all of Hong Kong, with a focus on exploring the touch of women on neighbourhoods that were gentrifying. The analysis, which took four years to consummate, identified about 34 per cent of Hong Kong as experiencing gentrification.
The process of gentrification involves capital reinvestment into neighbourhoods that encourages their concrete upgrading, along with the displacement of groups of lower incomes who have traditionally occupied these communities.
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A tell-tale sign of gentrification is the shift from rentals to owner-occupied housing. The share of units with owners living in them in these areas climbed from 45.5 per cent in 1986 to 64.2 per cent two decades later.
During the same time flow, the number of people employed in traditional, working-class sectors like manufacturing more than halved, from 177,917 in 1986 to 73,870 in 2006. At the same time, the number of residents employed in finance, insurance, existent estate and concern services tripled, from 49,276 in 1986 to 150,237 in 2006.
Only information technology is non only the occupational structure that is irresolute within these neighbourhoods. These gentrifying areas take been increasingly dominated past single women.
The proportion of single women in these neighbourhoods has increased past 53.two per cent over the two decades, compared with a rise of simply 15.2 per cent amidst single men. Similarly, the number of divorced and separated women in these neighbourhoods rose at twice the stride of divorced and separated men.
Equally a result, the share of households led by single women, whether never-married or divorced, jumped to 47.1 per cent in 2006 from just 25.viii per cent two decades before.
GLOBAL TRENDS
Overall, not just are single women emerging as a growing and critical attribute of Hong Kong's economy, they are also driving the city'southward increasingly expensive real estate marketplace.
While our written report focused on Hong Kong, we believe there is reason to think the same thing is happening in cities beyond the world, such as New York, London and Vancouver. These same cultural trends – a rising number of single women in high-paying jobs and delaying tying the knot – take been happening in those cities for many years.
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For example, in the United states, Pew Research Center projects that when today'southward young adults reach their mid-40s to mid-50s, a quarter of them volition never have married, compared with less than ten per cent a few decades agone. And in Iceland, some 70 per cent of children were built-in to single mothers in 2016, more than double the share in 1970.
This is not to say that we should arraign women for gentrification, far from it, when their growing representation and success in the workforce in Hong Kong and elsewhere is something to be celebrated.
And women at the other end of the income spectrum, specially single mothers, besides bear the burden of gentrification.
Igor Vojnovic is professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences at Michigan State Academy, with cross-appointments in the School of Planning, Pattern, and Construction and the Global Urban Studies Programme. Minting Ye is a visiting adjunct scholar of Global Urban Studies at the same university.
This commentary commencement appeared on The Chat. Read information technology here.
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