In the 1990s, British scholar Oswald put forward the famous “home ownershiptrap” hypothesis. He believed that home ownership would reduce the mobility of home buyers, leading to an increase in unemployment and a decline of economic vitality. Drawing experience from foreign scholars’studies on the “housing ownership trap”, this paper investigates the current Chinese cities and finds that the high asset attributes of private housing in big cities will help the homebuyers who want to move to get more financial support and protection, will not bring“lockin” effect to the homebuyers, and will create positive external effects for urban development.Conversely, in small and mediumsized cities with contraction risk, the lowasset property of private housing will indeed lead to the “housingownership trap” for buyers and urban development. Based on the above conclusions and combined with the trend of urbanization in the future, this paper puts forward some suggestions for housing policies.