Job-housing imbalance and commuting of coastal industrial town in Liaoning province, China

2017 3rd International Conference on Energy, Environment and Materials Science

能源学;生态环境科学;材料科学

Chen, Fei^1 ; Lu, Wei^1 ; Cai, Jun^1 ; Yang, Qiyao^1

Urban Planning Department, Dalian University of Technology, 2 Linggong Road, GaoXin District, Liaoning Province Dalian, China^1

关键词: Case study approach;    Energy intensive industries;    Industrial development;    Industrial enterprise;    Industrial policies;    Petrochemical enterprise;    Port constructions;    Residential housings;   

Others  :  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/94/1/012027/pdf
DOI  :  10.1088/1755-1315/94/1/012027

来源: IOP

【 摘 要 】

During the Twelve Five period, China promulgated industrial policies promote the energy-intensive industries relocate to coastal areas in order to utilize marine shipping resources. Consequently, some major state-owned steel and petrochemical enterprises have relocated and resulted in a large scale coastal area development. Restricted by the port construction, most of the coastal industrial areas are located in the outer suburbs. To balance between employment and housing, new industrial coastal towns were constructed. In this paper, we adopt a case-study approach to analysis some typical industrial coastal towns of Liaoning Province situated in the Bohai Bay, which is currently under rapid economic growth. Our investigations reflect the common phenomenon of long distance commuting and massive amount of vacant residences. More specifically, large plant relocation caused hundreds of kilometers of daily commute and enterprises had to provide housing subsidies and education incentives to motivate employees to relocate to coastal areas. Nonetheless, many employees still refuse to relocate due to job stability, diverse needs of family members and access to convenient services. These employees averaged 4 hours of commute daily and some who lived further had to reside in temporary industrial housing units and subject to long-term family separation. As a result, only a small portion of employees purchase new coastal residences but mostly for investment and retirement purposes, leading to massive vacancy and ghost-town phenomenon. In contrast to the low demand, coastal areas tend to develop large amount of residences prior to industrial relocation, which may be directly related to local government finances. Some local governments have sold residential land to developers to general revenue to support the subsequent industrial development. Subject to the strong preference of ocean- view, residential housing developers tend to select coast-line land to construct new residential towns, which further reduces the access of marine resources for major industrial enterprises. This violates the original intent of developing industrial coastal towns and drastically limits the availability of marine resources. Lastly, we analyze the co-existence of over-exploiting residential areas and massive vacancies in reference to the demand and supply of land, as well as the demand of residential housing units with the choice criteria of enterprise employees.