In China, skyrocketing housing prices in large cities make homeownership an unachievable dream for many. Despite a large quantity of affordable housing having been built or being built by governments, accessibility remains as a major problem in terms of the remote location of this new state-supplied housing and its stringent criteria, which exclude the large majority of rural migrants in the city, cumulating to more than 260 million in recent years. Against this backdrop, one peculiar informal housing strategy known as “Small Property Right Housing (SPRH)” is thriving on collective land owned by villagers, which has accounted for about 20% of total housing stock in the whole country. SPRH can therefore be seen as an informal countermeasure responding on the one hand, to the deficit of formal sector affordable housing supply and on the other, to towering housing demand from low-income groups and rural migrants. Constrained by their limited property rights, SPRHs are inalienable by law. Being well aware of the risks and uncertainty of SPRH, a large number of rural migrants still participate in the SPRH market. In this research I delve into an important question: What are the socio-spatial implications of SPRH (as an alternative form of homeownership) for migrants in terms of social mobility and social integration? Based on a pilot study conducted in Guangzhou, 2015, which involved 9 in-depth interviews and 394 questionnaires, this study aims to contribute to a renewed understanding of urban villages by pinpointing several new findings: 1) urban villages are more than a spring board for migrants, in which SPRH provides a counterforce for precariousness and insecurity and serve as a breeding ground for upward social mobility; 2) yet, SPRH also emerges as “clubs” for better-off migrants, which raises a new question: whether SPRH promotes social integration or creates new dynamics of segregation?