Abstract: During the past two decades Chinese cities have experienced rapid urbanization process and dramatic rising of job and residential mobility. Recent literatures have paid attention to spatial features of home-work separation and residential relocation choices in transitional Chinese cities. Nonetheless, research on this issue has been limited by the lack of systematic data - especially large scale micro-survey data, on residents’social behaviors as well as other related aspects. In this paper, based on a multi-time survey datasets conducted from 10000 residents in 2009, we establish a mono-centric city’s household residential location demand function model to quantitatively explore the evolution of urban residential housing consumption and its mechanism. Based on the analysis, we find that the balance between commuting costs and housing costs has become the core variable in the residential decision-making process. Other residents’properties, like income, all have significant influencing power on residents’relocation decisions. To be more specific, high-income families would like to pay higher housing costs to reduce commuting costs. Median-income families value housing costs and are less influenced by commuting costs, organization offered housing costs and commuting costs, unit housing residents and affordable housing residents are more inclined to pay higher housing costs to reduce commuting costs while commercial housing residents choose to live in houses with lower housing costs. The empirical results have verified the efficiency of the residents housing consumption in the transitional China and provided the information for future land and housing policy making.

Key words: Beijing, Housing consumption, housing demand equation, preference to choose house