Housing demand is often divided into market demand and security demand, but little attention has been paid to the internal differentiation of market demands. This paper fills this gap by analyzing the narratives and measures in China’s urban housing regulatory policies from 1998 to 2018. We find that the government has claimed to protect “rigid demand” since 2010, meanwhile curbing housing investment and speculation. However, the flexibility of regulatory policies both in temporal urgency and spatial distribution reflects the contradiction between housing as a tool of urban development and the socialist goal of market economy, and might lead to unintended consequences which are contrary to expectations.