Chinese weddings Now a school teacher, Li said, The housing prices are too high here, in the newly constructed part of Zhengzhou. According to the local statistics bureau, the average income per month in Zhengzhou is roughly $483 while property prices in the new district stand at $1,660 per square meter, and are expected to climb. Amid growing unrest over swollen property markets, Premier Li Keqiang has made affordable property prices a pillar of his leadership. However, tighter controls on property markets, such as limitations on homes per person and higher taxes on transactions, have failed to rein in speculative buyers since they were first implemented in 2010. The following year, as part of its twelfth five-year plan, the government vowed to build 36 million low-income housing units by 2015 in a bid to quell distressed homebuyers. The rush to the cities Demand for housing has followed the migration of workers from rural areas to cities where work is better paid and easier to find. In early 2012, for the first time in history, figures showed that more than half of the country's population live in urban areas. The pace of urbanization has been staggering and the government is counting on it as a main driver of economic growth for decades to come. Currently China's urban population is a little over 700 million people, said Tom Miller, author of China's Urban Billion. By