Research on the Evaluation and Influence Mechanism of Public Housing Service Quality: A Case Study of Shanghai
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
I do think this work is of interest for housing scholars. However, I sometimes miss a clearer explanation and contextualization of specific concepts and notions used here. For those who are not familiar with the Shanghai context, essential elements are lacking to fully understand the importance and significance of this work.
A clear introduction to the Shanghai housing regime is strongly lacking in the beginning of the paper. Is social housing in Shanghai considered as a safety net for those people in need? Or is it a unitary system, marked by large public housing provision, provided for a larger part of the society (see for instance Kemeny, 1995, Harloe, 1995). If any, what are the general rules of access? Are they only related to income, or also to other deprivation categories? Who provides public housing in Shanghai? Smaller public housing companies that are subsidized by the state, or the state as such? What are the tenure systems? Only rental or also owner-occupied housing? It seems that further on, some of these issues are tackled, but it is difficult to understand the merit of this PHSQ, if we do not get any insight about what's at stake in public housing in Shanghai in the beginning, or the importance of including specific dimensions or indexes in this PHSQ.
Reading the description of the method, it seems a huge amount of potentially rich interesting empirical material went 'lost' through the analytical lens it provides. Some interesting conclusions are still presented in the conclusion, but unfortunately, the merit of PHSQ remains a bit unclear. Could the writer go into the advantages and disadvantages of the method in the conclusion?
The conclusion on improving the education of low-income groups in order to empower them to express themselves in neighborhood committees seems a bit contradictory for a non-Asian reader, as criticisms against the system do not seem to be really welcomed by the regime. Could you explain this argument a bit more? Or could you explain a bit better what this is according to you, a neighborhood committee?
Author Response
Response to Reviewer 1 Comments
Point 1: I do think this work is of interest for housing scholars. However, I sometimes miss a clearer explanation and contextualization of specific concepts and notions used here. For those who are not familiar with the Shanghai context, essential elements are lacking to fully understand the importance and significance of this work.A clear introduction to the Shanghai housing regime is strongly lacking in the beginning of the paper. Is social housing in Shanghai considered as a safety net for those people in need? Or is it a unitary system, marked by large public housing provision, provided for a larger part of the society (see for instance Kemeny, 1995, Harloe, 1995). If any, what are the general rules of access? Are they only related to income, or also to other deprivation categories? Who provides public housing in Shanghai? Smaller public housing companies that are subsidized by the state, or the state as such? What are the tenure systems? Only rental or also owner-occupied housing? It seems that further on, some of these issues are tackled, but it is difficult to understand the merit of this PHSQ, if we do not get any insight about what's at stake in public housing in Shanghai in the beginning, or the importance of including specific dimensions or indexes in this PHSQ.
Response 1: This is indeed a very important deficiency. The institutional background and policy content are the prerequisites for understanding the importance of PHSQ. In this round of revisions, an introduction to Shanghai's housing security policy has been added(Section 2.3). The target group of Shanghai's housing security policy is mainly for low-income groups, it is not universal. Because the government has set strict entry thresholds, the number of people who can obtain housing security resources is very small. At present, Shanghai has formed a four-in-one housing security system. There are mainly four types of public housing, including Cheap Rental Housin(CRH), Economic Comfortable Housing(ECH), Shared ownership housing(SOH), Economic Comfortable Housing (ECH). In this revision, this article adds a brief description of different types of application conditions. Admission conditions include income, household registration, social security contributions, employment industry, and family size. Many non-local residents and migrant workers are not eligible to participate in the distribution of these public resources, forming a clear deprivation of public services. The specific content can be seen in Table 2.
Point 2:Reading the description of the method, it seems a huge amount of potentially rich interesting empirical material went 'lost' through the analytical lens it provides. Some interesting conclusions are still presented in the conclusion, but unfortunately, the merit of PHSQ remains a bit unclear. Could the writer go into the advantages and disadvantages of the method in the conclusion?
Response 2: This is indeed a very good suggestion, which has deepened my follow-up thinking on this issue, and let me know more clearly where PHSQ contributes. PHSQ is different from the methods of satisfaction surveys, performance measurements, and social spatial effect measurements. By analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of PHSQ, we can better demonstrate the meaning of this concept and reflect the innovation. Thanks for your advice. In this revision, PHSQ has the three distinct characteristics, mainly the fusion of subjective and objective, the combination of process and result and the unity of instrumental rationality and value rationality. PHSQ highlights that thinking about housing issues requires a combination of the following three aspects, including the perspective of public value, basic housing functions, and basic human needs, rather than just material input and hardware facility construction. PHSQ also has certain shortcomings. PHSQ includes four dimensions and nine attributes. Each dimension has a great meaning, and the meaning of attributes is also broader. This also means that it is prone to under representation in actual measurement. In the conclusion of this article, this issue is briefly discussed.
Point 3:The conclusion on improving the education of low-income groups in order to empower them to express themselves in neighborhood committees seems a bit contradictory for a non-Asian reader, as criticisms against the system do not seem to be really welcomed by the regime. Could you explain this argument a bit more? Or could you explain a bit better what this is according to you, a neighborhood committee?
Response 3: Education is an important method to prevent inter-generational transmission of poverty, and it is also an important aspect of improving the discourse expression ability of low-income groups. On the one hand, neighborhood committees is a statutory autonomous organization of the masses; on the other hand, it also undertakes a large amount of administrative work and is the extension of the state in the grassroots society. The results of factor detection show that the improvement of PHSQ should not only focus on the supply side, but also the demand side. Compared with the instability caused by online public opinion, local governments are more likely to support residents to express their demands in institutionalized channels. Therefore, neighborhood committees play an important role in China’s grassroots political participation. In this revision, this article briefly introduces the dual attributes of Chinese community neighborhood committees.
The grammar and spelling of the full text have also been checked and revised.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.doc
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper concerns the interesting and actual problem. It is very well written, structured, and documented. I think that instead of a note "This article only shows partial districts due to space limitations. Readers may contact the author to obtain the full results. ", you can attach the full results as an annex to article.
Article shows no noticeable flaws in its methodological approach or its argumentation. The graphic section is complete, but you can add a figure with the location of Shanghai and second with with the location of the analysed housing in Sanghai (but this is not necessary).
I have noticed minor editing errors, which will certainly be corrected during the proofreading (for example, line 339-340: duplicate reference to the table 4).
Author Response
Response to Reviewer 3 Comments
Dear reviewer, thank you for your suggestions, your suggestions are very good, and I am trying to correct them. Among your suggestions, I have accepted and corrected the problems in the article, and for some, I may still need further thinking. Thank you, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Point 1: The paper concerns the interesting and actual problem. It is very well written, structured, and documented. I think that instead of a note "This article only shows partial districts due to space limitations. Readers may contact the author to obtain the full results. ", you can attach the full results as an annex to article.
Response 1: Thanks for your advice, I tried to add all the data to the attachment, I found that this would take up a lot of layout and affect the aesthetics of the paper layout. The specific PHSQ value of each street and town is not the focus of this article. The main contribution of this article is to propose a new perspective to evaluate public housing services. I think it might be better to keep the original layout. I will submit the results of the data to the editor for use when needed.
Point 2: Article shows no noticeable flaws in its methodological approach or its argumentation. The graphic section is complete, but you can add a figure with the location of Shanghai and second with with the location of the analysed housing in Sanghai (but this is not necessary).
Response 1: Thank you for your suggestion, it is a good suggestion. The research object of this article is 530 social housing communities, including four different types of housing. But the community address is a point of data, and the object of my analysis is the PHSQ under the spatial scale of the street and town. It would be great if there is a positional view, but after adding it, it affects the beauty of the layout. Due to the overlap of these four types of community locations, the data of the display points is not very helpful to solve the core problem of this article. Therefore, I did not add the address of the community to the paper.
Point 3: I have noticed minor editing errors, which will certainly be corrected during the proofreading (for example, line 339-340: duplicate reference to the table 4).
Response 1: The error in line 339-340 had been corrected. There are indeed some spelling errors in the article, and there are also certain problems in semantic expression. The author has read it through several times and made certain corrections.
The grammar and spelling of the full text have also been checked and revised.
Reviewer 3 Report
This is an interresting study looking at housing market characteristics in a large, rapidly growing megacity. I appreciated your outstanding literature review, which led to a logical framing of your research question and methods. I thought your methods were solid, especially the inclusion of a measure of spatial autocorrelation, which is critical in this type of study. Finally, I think your conclusions flowed from your analysis and tied back to the original question.
My only major concern is I struggled in following your three methods of analysis you introduced in the research methods section (3.2). You identified the Full Arrangement Polygon method, the Geodetector model and the spatial autocorrelation method. I was able to see the results of the Full Arrangement Polygon and the Moran's I for Spatial Autocorrelation. I did not see any other discussion of the Geodetctor model. I'm not sure if I missed it, or not, but I would suggest you review this section and include a more prominent mention of the results of the geodetector model. That will help me follow the logic of the paper better.
Overall, I thought the topic was appropriate, well researched, well analyzed and well writted. Congratulations!
Author Response
Response to Reviewer 2 Comments
Point 1:My only major concern is I struggled in following your three methods of analysis you introduced in the research methods section (3.2). You identified the Full Arrangement Polygon method, the Geodetector model and the spatial autocorrelation method. I was able to see the results of the Full Arrangement Polygon and the Moran's I for Spatial Autocorrelation. I did not see any other discussion of the Geodetctor model. I'm not sure if I missed it, or not, but I would suggest you review this section and include a more prominent mention of the results of the geodetector model. That will help me follow the logic of the paper better.
Response 1: Thanks for the suggestion. I reviewed this section, in order to show the results of the geodetector more clearly, I added a part of the content to the introduction of the method. Table 7（Interactive detection results of each factor）and Figure 7(Detection factor determination) are the results of Geodetctor model. In the research methods section (3.2), I added a description of this method and talked about the main model content used in Geodetector Model.
The grammar and spelling of the full text have also been checked and revised.
