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Housing and welfare in Sweden, Norway and the wider Nordic region
Abstract
In this chapter, we discuss the historical development and current state of the housing and welfare regimes in the Nordics, using Sweden and Norway as our main cases. We argue that it is still broadly correct to regard Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway, as four distinct housing regimes with major differences in terms of public policies and housing market characteristics. On the other hand, the contemporary Nordic housing regimes have many similar features and challenges, not least connected to the debt fuelled escalation of residential property prices. Our comparative discussion seeks to illustrate how common challenges related to globalization, financialization, affordability and inequality manifest themselves and are dealt with in two unique housing regimes. We conclude by briefly discussing the prospects of political initiatives to counter major obstacles to the goal of achieving fairness, freedom, and well-being for all in the welfare state’s ‘wobbly pillar’
... Norway is one of the more generous and universal welfare states in Europe. It is also one of the countries in Europe with the highest share of mortgaged homeowners (Sørvoll et al. 2024). This means that household debt, interest rates, and residential property prices are at the centre of most public debates concerning housing costs. ...
... Most Norwegian households are expected to acquire housing on market terms without any direct help from the government. Disadvantaged low-income households are, however, supported by housing allowances, social rented housing, and other selective policy instruments (Sørvoll et al., 2024). ...
... Thus, instead of increased housing market regulation to protect low-income tenants in the housing cost crisis, the government opted for transferring money directly to households through both universal and targeted policy instruments. This was in line with the selective, and market-oriented housing policy of successive Norwegian governments since the 1980s (Sørvoll et al., 2024). ...
In this chapter, we analyze the housing costs of Norwegian tenants and homeowners in the years of the energy crisis and the new age of inflation. Based on data from Statistics Norway, we show that the housing costs of homeowners increased the most in absolute and relative terms in the new age of inflation that started in 2022. However, as tenants make up a large share of low-income households, economically vulnerable tenants were probably the hardest hit by the housing cost crisis. We also discuss the drivers of increasing housing costs and examine the policy responses of the national government. The main policy responses of the government were the temporary electricity subsidy covering all households and adjustments to the targeted housing allowance scheme. These policies were arguably both consistent with the fiscally generous universal traditions of Nordic welfare states and the liberal Norwegian housing system. In the last part of the chapter, we summarize our argument and ask if there is a need to combine temporary emergency measures with a long-term government strategy to boost construction rates and affordability. Without a realistic government plan to boost construction rates the next housing cost crisis may hit Norwegian households even harder.
... It is evidently hard to disperse social housing when both property prices and NIMBYism in wealthy districts acts as counterforces. To transcend the obstacles mentioned above, ambitious urban local governments probably need to go beyond the confines of the very (neo)liberal Norwegian housing regime, that is characterized by limited government subsidies for housing construction, and negligible legal power for local governments wishing to influence the tenures and prices levels of homes built by private companies (Sørvoll et al., 2024;Nordahl, 2014). The main policy implication of the article is arguably that more government investment in public rented housing is needed, to make it easier for municipalities to influence the geographical distribution of social housing and increase the room of maneuver for social housing bureaucrats looking to house tenants in residential environments that are safe and beneficial to their future prospects. ...
The residualization of public rented housing is a prevalent phenomenon throughout Europe, and strongly present in the small and strongly means-tested social housing sector in Norway. In this article, we discuss the contested geographical dimension of residualization. Scientific studies of the geographical and locational aspects of social housing are scare in Norway and modest internationally. Based on qualitative interviews with representatives of social housing administrators in the fifteen largest urban municipalities in Norway, this paper contributes to the literature by exploring how these social housing bureaucrats perceive, reflect on, and respond to, questions related to the spatial localization of residual social housing. Does it matter where social housing is located? What are the consequences of the geography of social housing for tenants, their neighbours, and the wider socio-spatial development of cities? These are questions pondered in the interviews. In our qualitative analysis, we identify three broad themes. First, the theme of the internal social milieu – inclusive communities versus neighbour complaints and conflicts in the public housing projects. Second, the theme of neighbourhood effects; how concentrated poverty is influencing the local community in general and the upbringing of children in particular. Third, the theme of response from external neighbours and communities, in the form of either predominantly exclusive strategies (NIMBYism – Not in My Backyard), but also less prevalent inclusive strategies like (PHIMBYism – Public Housing In My Backyard).
... Rentestigningen som har fulgt i kjølvannet av inflasjonen bidrar antagelig også til leieprisstigning fordi mange utleiere overfører økte lånekostnader til nye leieboere (Poppe & Kempson, 2023a). Slik sett kan inflasjonen vaere en faktor som fremmer større ulikhet mellom leieboere og boligeiere i et norsk boligregime som allerede er eiervennlig (Sørvoll, Listerborn & Sandberg, 2023). I en tid hvor leieprisene har steget mye er det også en fare for at gruppe med beskjedne inntekter i økende grad nedskalerer sitt boligkonsum, risikerer utkastelse som følge av manglende husleiebetaling og/eller skjaerer så kraftig ned på annet forbruk at det reduserer deres grad av sosialt medborgerskap, dvs. ...
I dette diskusjonsnotatet drøfter vi hvilke virkemidler som er best egnet til å styrke botryggheten til leieboere med lave inntekter i en situasjon hvor deres utgifter til bolig og andre nødvendighetsgoder har steget betraktelig. Vi konkluderer med at det er nødvendig å kombinere virkemidler som påvirker henholdsvis etterspørsels- og tilbudssiden på leiemarkedet. En styrket bostøtteordning kan være det mest effektive virkemiddelet på kort sikt, men for noen vil kommunale boliger representere den største muligheten til å oppnå et trygt boforhold. Dermed løser ikke bostøtten eller andre økonomiske overføringer alt. For grupper som har problemer med å vinne fram i konkurransen om en egnet leiebolig på det private markedet, er det viktig med et tilstrekkelig volum av kommunale utleieboliger.
... Rentestigningen som har fulgt i kjølvannet av inflasjonen bidrar antagelig også til leieprisstigning fordi mange utleiere overfører økte lånekostnader til nye leieboere (Poppe & Kempson, 2023). Slik sett kan inflasjonen vaere en faktor som fremmer større ulikhet mellom leieboere og boligeiere i et norsk boligregime som allerede er eiervennlig (Sørvoll, Listerborn & Sandberg, 2023). I en tid hvor leieprisene har steget mye er det også en fare for at gruppe med beskjedne inntekter i økende grad nedskalerer sitt boligkonsum, risikerer utkastelse som følge av manglende husleiebetaling og/eller skjaerer så kraftig ned på annet forbruk at det reduserer deres grad av sosialt medborgerskap, dvs. ...
Dette er et diskusjonsnotat om boligsosiale virkemidler som kan fremme botrygghet blant leieboere med lave inntekter i en tid med kraftig prisstigning.
unicipal public housing is one of the pillars of the Swedish national housing regime, which is often understood as being universal in the sense that the national housing policy is directed towards the whole population, not merely filtering for financially vulnerable households. Much research has analysed this rather unique housing sector, focusing on how incremental policy changes during the last four decades have changed the role and significance of public housing. This paper aims to give a current review of the state of public housing, and builds on existing research and a quantitative analysis of recent data on housing construction and socioeconomic development. It identifies two contradictions of central concern for contemporary public housing and sets those contradictions in relation to the historical aims of the national housing regime. First, it analyses the large number of public housing units constructed during the last decade, which is contrasted with a parallel trend of decreased public housing stock. Second, the paper identifies a “dual selectivity”, where public housing on the one hand has turned towards well-off households through strict requirements on new tenants and expensive newly constructed housing; and on the other hand, an increasing residualization implying that increasingly the public housing sector is the sole option for low-income households who cannot access other tenures. Given these contradictions and the acute demand for housing solutions for households with low income, the article concludes with a discussion of the shape of Swedish public housing to come.
In this article we introduce an ideal type we call "needs-tested and market-based social rented housing (SRH)" which is fleshed out and compared to the complex empirical reality of the Norwegian SRH sector. The ideal type may arguably serve as a useful theoretical point of reference both in case studies and in comparative research, and is inspired by the literature on housing regimes, pro-market housing policies, as well as the empirical example of Norwegian SRH. In our contribution to the special issue, we discuss how and to what degree the Norwegian case deviates from the defining features and internal logic of the ideal type, drawing on comprehensive empirical evidence. We also ponder to what extent the policy challenges plausibly associated with the ideal type are evident in Norwegian SRH. In our conclusion, we argue that, as expected, Norwegian SRH in urban areas matches well with the ideal type since it is highly needs-tested and directed at the most disadvantaged households for a limited period. Nonetheless, geographical variation, urban-rural differences, third-generation rent controls, institutional divergence, and discretionary exceptions mean that there is a far from perfect fit between empirical reality and theoretical ideal type. We also argue that many of the policy challenges plausibly associated with the ideal type, such as NIMBYism, housing shortages and complex needs assessments, are present in Norwegian SRH. Increased provision of social housing could probably mitigate at least some of the challenges discussed in the paper, or so we argue in our concluding reflections. However, significant state investment would require a major policy shift from the Norwegian government-a government that, despite access to black gold from the North Sea, has been reluctant to spend heavily in the SRH sector.
Tenants in Sweden increasingly face rising rents and displacement due to decades of ongoing housing deregulation. In this text, we explore different manifestations of these injustices, and reflect upon consequences and responses as they crystalize locally. By visiting the three cities of Stockholm, Malmö and Uppsala, we highlight three different examples of how tenants respond and formulate protests vis-a-vis privatization through tenure conversion (Stockholm), gentrification spurred by private rental actors (Malmö) and battles over green space and displacement in the rental housing stock (Uppsala). These vignettes exemplify how policy changes play out in different local settings and illustrate how resistance manifests itself on the ground.
We conceptualise and measure welfare state change across 21 high‐income countries as a continuum delineated by a double movement, that is, the combined change of compensatory and employment‐oriented policies. Our double movement framework readapts Polanyi's concept into the context of welfare state change. We analyse this double movement across four decades using Principal Component Analysis and a new indicator that compares spending in 2015 to maximum and minimum spending levels since the 1980. We contribute to the literature in three ways. First, we empirically document an overall change in spending for compensatory and employment‐oriented policies, with the latter becoming more prominent over time. This change is more pronounced in the 1990s and even more so in the 2000s, and partially reduced classic regime differences. The PCAs generate a Cartesian space where each country is positioned across time (the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s and the 2010s) and space (within four quadrants, i.e., ‘the strong employment‐oriented space’, ‘the weak employment‐oriented space’, ‘the strong compensatory space’, and ‘the weak compensatory space’). Second, we develop a fivefold taxonomy of welfare state change characterised by: (1) retrenchment in Canada, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom; (2) abridged adaptation in Australia, Belgium, Finland, Norway, Spain and the United States; (3) minor expansionary adaptation in Greece, Italy, Japan, Portugal and Switzerland—where spending levels were low in the 1980; (4) adaptation with an equilibrium between the two movements in New Zealand and (5) strong expansionary adaptation in Austria, Denmark and France. Overall retrenchment and abridging adaptation prevail over expansionary adaptation—this is due to cutbacks of unemployment, family allowances and active labour market programmes not being counterbalanced by the expansion of childcare. Third, we critically interpret these changes, introducing the double movement concept into comparative social policy.
The question of the political has gained renewed relevance in recent years. New movements are challenging what has been called ‘the post-political consensus’ and have facilitated the repoliticisation of a wide range of social, political and cultural phenomena—both on the left and the right. One task for geographers is to understand this repoliticisation spatially. The housing sector is a prime example of how such a repoliticisation occurs. With an emerging global urban housing affordability crisis, housing is becoming an important arena for engaging in emancipatory democratic politics. In this paper, we use Oslo as a case to analyse how housing, which has long been governed through liberal consensus, is being repoliticised. We investigate Oslo's agenda of establishing a ‘third housing sector’ beyond the privatised model, and its role in popularising alternative models in housing. We focus on the mobilisation and rearticulation of the genealogy of failure of housing in Oslo and the alternative housing solutions brought together in the city. Discussing the emerging geographical referencescape of housing as a distinctly spatial process of politicisation we show how arguments and positions gain legitimacy by situating references to other situations and places in a multiplicity of local and foreign arenas.
Husbanken var et sentralt redskap i den omfattende statsstøttede boligbyggingen i etterkrigstiårene. «Husbankhus» og «husbankstandard» var og er velkjente begreper i norsk dagligtale. I løpet av de siste tjuefem årene har imidlertid Husbanken utviklet seg fra å være en rendyrket boligfinansieringsbank for folk flest, til å bli mer av en velferdsetat i en boligpolitikk orientert mot bostedsløse og andre vanskeligstilte. Husbanken og boligpolitikken 1996–2021 er en historiefaglig analyse av denne transformasjonen.
Faglitteraturen om velferdsstatens utvikling i Norge neglisjerer ofte boligsektoren, noe som er bemerkelsesverdig gitt at det er et av samfunnsområdene som endret seg aller mest fra slutten av 1970-tallet. Denne boken analyserer det store systemskiftet i norsk boligpolitikk (ca. 1978–2004), de behovsprøvde boligøkonomiske virkemidlenes utvikling (bostøtte, startlån mv.) og Husbankens rolle som boligsosial velferdsetat fra årtusenskiftet. Den gir dermed viktige bidrag til den historiefaglige forskningslitteraturen om bolig-, trygde- og velferdsstatsspørsmål.
This paper uncovers the local state's complex intersections with the market and its multifaceted relations with the public through an in-depth qualitative case study of municipal housing privatization and urban renewal in one of the heartlands of the Swedish welfare state project, Rosengård in Malmö, Sweden. Drawing on the political-economic literature, I argue that housing privatization is entangled with complex interrelations among the (municipal) local state, the market, and the public and that an exploration of these relations reveals contemporary features of the local state. Hence, this investigation highlights the local state's motivation for privatization, the remaking of a market in a place where the market is believed to have failed, and the powers the local state retains. Additionally, the paper elucidates how the function of public assets changes due to privatization and considers tenants’ and residents’ worries, criticism, and concerns about municipal interventions. Subsequently, by grounding these findings in the historical function of municipalities in Sweden, the study contributes new knowledge on the local state in a deepened neoliberalized and financialized urban landscape.
Hemmet är den plats som ger oss trygghet och kontroll, det nav i tillvaron där vi umgås med familj och vänner på våra egna villkor.
Något har dock hänt. Sedan några årtionden har starka krafter förändrat innebörden av hemmet för den som bor i hyresrätt. Hyresvärdar renoverar som de vill och höjer hyrorna dramatiskt, vilket tvingar hyresgäster att flytta. De blir renovräkta.
I den här boken granskas de rättsliga instanser som ger hyresvärdar tillstånd att utföra renoveringar som leder till kraftigt höjda hyror. Skarp kritik riktas mot hyresnämndens och hovrättens tillämpning av hyreslagen och mot rådande praxis. Författarna blickar också tillbaka i historien för att spåra hyresgästers rättigheter vid renovering och sätter hyresboendet i en vidare bostadspolitisk kontext.
There is an emergent field of writings on financialized landlords’ undertaking of apartment renovations as an investment strategy and its effect on housing inequalities. Seldom do these studies contextualize these tendencies within countries’ specific housing policy traditions. Therefore, through a qualitative case study in a neighbourhood in Sweden, this paper aims to uncover how private landlords undertake renovations as an investment strategy and its effect on tenants and, in turn, on the hybrid character of a universal housing system. It finds that renovations enable landlords to extract value from the built environment while tenants experience rising rents, a lack of information, poor property maintenance, and apprehension. Hence, I argue that renovations represent an investment strategy that serves to undermine the traditional social right to housing within a universal housing policy context. The paper thus furthers knowledge on how the situatedness of financialization tendencies entails their translation through and transformation of housing systems.
_ Housing exclusion and homelessness is an increasing problem in Europe. Norway and Finland are the only two countries where there has been a reduction in the homeless population. The aim of this article is to analyse and discuss the key results from the Swedish homelessness count in comparison with the previous homelessness surveys. The results show that they resemble some of the trends that are emerging in other European countries. On the one hand we can see a growing exclusion of the poor and an increase in social-spatial inequalities. On the other hand, we can also see that the profile of people experiencing homelessness has changed. A growing number of people experiencing homelessness are children, or children growing up with lone mothers. There is also a growing number of young people that cannot get housing on the ordinary housing market and an increasing number of families with a migration background. Many of the people experiencing homelessness do not have any other problems than the lack of housing. Due to low incomes and poverty, many people cannot get a lease of their own and thus are dependent on the social ser vices for housing arrangements within the secondary housing market. But the article also shows that the lack of housing is not enough for being eligible for help. Another challenge is that being homeless is often seen as an individual failure due to bad choices rather than a situation caused by the effects of the financial crisis, housing shortage, or the ever-increasing rental costs of newly produced housing. An integrated, housing led, homelessness strategy, with a strong focus on housing provision and homelessness prevention should be the way forward.
_ The four Nordic countries, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden all have long time series data on homelessness, which is more or less comparable between the countries. The data is gathered through particular homeless-ness censuses ('counts') using methods developed for the purpose. The four countries initiated the counts at different times, Finland as the first in 1987 and the latest, Denmark, in 2007. Despite some national differences, the definitions and methods are widely similar. In all four countries, the definition of homeless-ness encompasses not only rough sleepers and shelter users but also people staying temporarily with family and friends. This is also reflected in the methodology of the counts as they draw not only upon homeless services but include wider parts of the welfare system into the data collection. However, one notable difference is that Denmark, Norway and Sweden collect substantially more information about homeless individuals than Finland, thus allowing for identifying particular subgroups within the homeless population. In Finland and Sweden the data collection is carried out by state agencies, while in Denmark and Norway the data collection is conducted by research institutes. In Norway the first count was initiated by researchers, however the definition of homelessness and the methodology was almost a duplicate of the state-initiated count conducted in Sweden. Regardless of origin, and which agencies carry out the registration, these registrations and the numbers they produce are vital tools for the respective governments' steering of the homeless policy.
Precarious housing research has become increasingly relevant to previous welfare housing contexts, such as Sweden. In the 1990s, Swedish housing became gradually market-oriented, which induced a shortage of affordable rental housing and increased housing costs in all major cities. This article presents the results from interviews with individuals about their experiences of the unequal housing market in the city of Malmö, Sweden. The article furthers knowledge of the lived experience of housing precariousness in the Global North. The narratives from the housing precariat are analysed through the lens of housing inequalities, and the analysis theoretically adds to ‘research on critical geography of precarity. The article aims to illustrate the consequences of the shift from a general welfare approach of housing to an individualized and neoliberal housing market. In particular, this article adds insights on the gendered and racialized aspects that affect housing precariousness.
The historical-comparative study of social democracy and cooperative organization are the foster children of historical sociology. This article offers a first account of systematic ideological differences in social-democratic ideology regarding private ownership and different cooperative traditions in the housing sphere of Northern European and continental German-speaking countries. The long-run trajectory of housing welfare regimes in these two country groups has been one of divergence: Nordic countries have moved to Anglo-Saxon levels of high homeownership, high levels of mortgage indebtedness, and house price increases, whereas private tenancy, lower indebtedness, and lower price increases still characterize their German counterparts. Based on historical case studies of Germany and Norway, we argue that the divergence in these two countries can be understood by the different social-democratic and cooperative solutions to the urban housing question from the 1920s onward. Supported by a pro-ownership social democracy, Norway started to develop housing cooperatives of the owner cooperative type, whereas German social democracy was in favor of associations of the tenant cooperative type. The differential growth of these two types of cooperatives and disparities in social democratic party ideology contributed to the urban housing divergence between the two country groups that has been observed ever since. We argue, more generally, that varieties of social democracy and welfare-anticipating cooperative organizations are important in helping us understand the welfare differences between countries.
It is often assumed in housing and urban studies scholarship that the roots of Sweden’s present housing discontents are to be found in a neoliberal ‘system switch’ following the early-1990s banking crisis. This paper offers a different account, identifying and expounding how insuperable contradictions in Sweden’s complex of housing production, distribution and finance, from the 1970s onward, led to a marked deterioration in its much-lauded housing model. Advancing a historical institutionalist framework, the paper seeks to historically couch the processes and outcomes commonly associated with the contemporary neoliberal era and position them more concretely in relation to actors and their social relations through time. Using a range of data pertaining to housing finance, subsidies, house prices and building output, as part of a mixed-methods analysis, the paper explores how macroeconomic factors, mediated by interactions between the state and sectoral cleavages, influence urban and regional development aspects. The paper’s conceptual and methodological relevance to housing and urban studies scholarship thus extends beyond Sweden.
The chapter demonstrates that while the Nordic countries remain relatively affluent and egalitarian, inequality of disposable household income has been on the rise over the past 30 years. The increase in income inequality and relative income poverty has been strongest in Sweden and more modest in the three other countries. In Sweden, and, to a lesser extent, in Finland and Denmark, a reduced role for social transfers among the working age population has contributed to a decline in relative income levels enjoyed by the bottom deciles. Often in the wake of serious macro-economic downturns, politicians have reduced the generosity of social transfers to improve labour market incentives. Even if these reforms have had the intended effect on employment, the increase in earnings has not been sufficient to replace the loss of social transfers.
This paper evaluates the resilience of social rental housing in the UK, Sweden and Denmark. Throughout the OECD, processes of retrenchment and privatization, alongside the growth of the owner-occupied and private rental sectors, have led to nigh universal declines in the size and scope of social rental housing.These processes have not transpired evenly, however. Embracing a historical institutionalist approach, alongside novel data and methodology, this paper assesses the variegated patterns of sectoral decline and resilience in these three northern European countries. We find the Danish, association-based model - with its polycentric governance and multi-level system of financing - to have been the most robustly resilient hitherto. In the UK and Sweden, we observe patterns of decline and evidence that the non-profit and needs-based principles which traditionally underpinned these systems have reached precarious thresholds. Nevertheless,despite manifold retrograde threats and vulnerabilities over the past decades, the social rental sectors in Sweden and the UK have proved surprisingly resilient.
Denne artikkelen gir et forskningsbasert oversiktsbilde av bostedssegregasjon og politiske strategier for å bekjempe geografisk ulikhet i Oslo. Artikkelens empiri er i stor grad hentet fra kvantitative registerbaserte studier publisert innenfor rammen av to store forskningsprosjekter finansiert av Norges Forskningsråd. Disse studiene bekrefter, nyanserer og utdyper bildet av Oslo som en delt by med betydelig bostedssegregasjon – konsentrasjonen av husholdninger med lignende landbakgrunn og sosioøkonomisk profil er sterk. De registerbaserte studiene illustrerer også hvordan innvandring, fødselsstatistikk og flyttemønstre bidrar til å opprettholde og forsterke bostedssegregasjonen i den norske hovedstaden. Sammenlignet med Danmark er imidlertid de politiske strategiene utformet for å bekjempe geografisk ulikhet lite inngripende og av beskjedent omfang. Det finnes ikke et norsk motstykke til den danske parallellsamfunnsavtalen. I artikkelen argumenterer vi for at de viktigste virkemidlene benyttet for å lindre effektene av bostedssegregasjon i Oslo – områdeløft, plan- og bygningsloven og geografisk spredning av sosiale utleieboliger – er preget av norsk boligpolitikks markedsliberale karakter og har begrenset potensiale som redskaper for å motvirke geografisk ulikhet.
The lack of affordable housing for people with low income, shrinking public resources, and new political conflicts threaten the availability of housing, at the same time as aggressive forms of urban renewal are causing displacement through 'renoviction', putting tenants in critical situations. In this article, we focus on the acts of resistance and new social organization trends that have emerged in relation to the praxis of renoviction used by landlords and other local authorities, and the frustration caused by this praxis. We claim that these new forms of organization are using the concept of renoviction in articulating current struggles for housing justice. Methodologically, we point out the necessity of urban research conducted in close collaboration with activism, as a way for mutual learning and support. Moreover, we suggest that these acts of resistance should be understood as happening within a broader context of economic and political changes affecting the housing market, and in relation to the increased racialization of poverty and territorial stigmatization in Swedish cities. To illustrate and then strive to understand the ongoing resistance and demands for housing justice, we focus on national activist networks emerging in response to the neoliberal housing crisis. We maintain that emerging resistance in Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Uppsala represents a growing claim for housing justice. This resistance is based on people's everyday lives and is a cry for dignity in neighborhoods neglected by housing companies.
In this article, we analyze the social distribution of residential property in Norway post-1945 in light of the concept of social citizenship. Drawing on data from censuses and tax registers, we examine the social stratification of owner-occupation and housing wealth in a Nordic nation of homeowners. Our study shows that residential property and housing wealth is very unevenly distributed, and that the share of low-income homeowners decreased markedly after 1990. The implications of these findings are discussed with reference to three different conceptions of citizenship: the socio-liberal, the republican and the libertarian. Our main argument is that the falling rate of low-income owner-occupation constitutes an erosion of social citizenship viewed from the socio-liberal and republican conception of citizenship. This follows from theoretical arguments and empirical studies linking homeownership to positive welfare outcomes, such as civic engagement and social integration. The latter is arguably particularly true in some high-homeownership countries, such as Norway, where owner-occupation is the cultural norm and rental housing is associated with low quality and insecurity.
In this paper, I analyse the postwar development of social rental housing in Norway. During the 20th century, Norwegian municipalities created some of the more means-tested and market-oriented social housing sectors in Europe. Given developments in other countries in recent decades, the Norwegian case is therefore highly relevant to the general debate on the residualisation of social housing in Europe. Using the case of Oslo as the main point of departure, I discuss key challenges of residual and market-oriented social rental housing. Drawing on city council debates, local government reports, and previous studies, I argue that the logic of extreme means-testing creates policy dilemmas connected to contradictory policy goals.
Research shows there is a current wave of housing renovation in Swedish cities, where private as well as public rental housing companies use "renoviction," or displacement through renovation, as a profit-driven strategy. This article focuses on emotions and renoviction, in particular the emotions of tenants currently facing forced renovations, in Sweden. We discuss how power is reproduced and questioned, and illustrate methods used by housing companies to carry out extensive renovation. The following questions have guided our analysis: What kinds of emotions are evoked among tenants experiencing an extensive, top-down and costly renovation? What particular injustices and violations are identified by the tenants in this situation? How can these violations be understood in relation to the current housing policy? Our research is qualitative and builds on semi-structured interviews with tenants as well as extensive ethnographic work in a neighborhood undergoing renovation, followed by steeply increased rents. We use the metaphor of "fractured trust" to conceptualize the emotional reaction of tenants, and argue that citizens' trust in the Swedish welfare system is being broken locally, in the wake of ongoing top-down renovation processes, by use of a rationality that does not take into consideration tenants' perspectives and needs. We conclude that anxiety, angst, anger, and loss, attached together in a common feeling of shock, were the most prevalent emotions expressed and were described by tenants as a response to unfair treatment. In the interviews, a complex set of violations performed by the housing company in a renoviction neighborhood is brought to the forefront here, and set in this context of systemic violence exerted against tenants in contemporary Sweden.
An important feature of the Swedish housing system is universalism, meaning that housing provision should encompass broad income groups and thus not only be directed towards poor households. Considering the recent decades of marketization and liberalisation of the Swedish housing system, concerns have been raised whether universalism remains as a key feature of the Swedish housing system. The aim of this paper is to improve our understanding of processes of residualisation in Sweden. This is a process whereby the public housing sector is becoming dominated by low income households. To describe, analyse and understand processes of residualisation in Sweden and across regions, I use a novel Index of Residualisation and longitudinal register data covering the period 1993–2012. The results indicate that the rental sector as a whole is undergoing a process of residualisation, but that there are clear variations in the magnitude of residualisation across regions. The process of residualisation is most pronounced in sparsely populated regions. The relative size of the public rental sector is a key factor to consider in order to understand the diverging trends. Regions with smaller rental sectors are associated with higher levels of residualisation, indicating that public housing may have the function of social housing in these regions.
Inequalities relating to ownership of housing have become a major issue de jour in many Western societies. This article examines how the distribution of homeownership in Sweden relates to two factors widely seen as significant to such inequalities, namely parental tenure status and place of birth. We use longitudinal registry data to examine the bearing of these two factors on individual-level tenure progression since the beginning of the 1990s for persons at different stages of their housing careers. We extend existing understandings of Swedish homeownership patterns by demonstrating that inequalities relating to place of birth and parental tenure intersect with one another in ways that substantially advantage certain subgroups while disadvantaging others, and by demonstrating that experiences of entry into homeownership have in recent years been changing in markedly different ways for these different subgroups. Overall, Swedish homeownership inequalities, far from dissipating, appear to be hardening along existing lines.
About 12 per cent of households in Finland live in social rental housing. The Finnish system of social housing is now facing challenges. Finland has reached a situation where large numbers of social rental dwellings are free from regulation because the state housing loans have been paid off, while new production of such housing is unable to make up for this loss. Potentially this means a decrease in the social rental housing stock. Current housing policy discourse sees social housing more as a failed policy than a necessary welfare measure. Such developments can be related to a larger change in the Finnish housing regime. It has entered a phase of retrenchment, where the government withdraws from its previous commitment to housing provision in order to give more room to market forces. Retrenchment has led to the strengthening of one of the basic features of Finnish housing policy, its selectiveness. © 2017, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Institute of Sociology. All rights reserved.
In Norway, mass home ownership has been an important part of social housing in the post-war period. Social housing became available to everybody and a great majority seized the opportunity. The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) had little effect on the Norwegian housing market other than to create a more rigorous housing finance system for the purpose of counteracting increasing house prices and housing debts. This, in turn, has affected the possibilities of young adults entering home-ownership. Nevertheless, the share of young homeowners has been stable or even growing in recent years. Today, social housing in Norway mainly refers to a rather marginal and targeted system providing housing only for the most vulnerable groups. © 2017, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Institute of Sociology. All rights reserved.
Denmark got through the global financial crisis reasonably well, with the result that policy changes to the social housing sector caused by the crisis have been limited. Nevertheless, changes have taken place both in terms of policy and in the residential composition of the sector to which the policies are trying to react. This means that several challenges lie ahead for the Danish social housing sector as this paper will show. The future remains uncertain; depending to a large extent, on the application of the policies already in place and policy reactions to current challenges. © 2017, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Institute of Sociology. All rights reserved.
Full-text available here: http://www.housing-critical.com/home-page-1/the-danish-social-housing-sector-recent-changes
Based on interview material relating to the current wave of housing renovation in Swedish cities, this article will analyse the profit-driven, traumatic and violent displacement in the wake of contemporary large-scale renovation processes of the so-called Million Program housing estates from the 1960s and 1970s. We maintain that the current form of displacement (through renovation) has become a regularized profit strategy, for both public and private housing companies in Sweden. We will pay special attention to Marcuse’s notion of ‘displacement pressure’ which refers not only to actual displacement but also to the anxieties, uncertainties, insecurities and temporalities that arise from possible displacement due to significant rent increases after renovation and from the course of events preceding the actual rent increase. Examples of the many insidious forms in which this pressure manifests itself will be given – examples that illustrate the hypocritical nature of much planning discourse and rhetoric of urban renewal. We illustrate how seemingly unspectacular measures and tactics deployed in the renovation processes have far-reaching consequences for tenants exposed to actual or potential displacement. Displacement and displacement pressure due to significant rent increases (which is profit-driven but justified by invoking the ‘technical necessity’ of renovation) undermines the ‘right to dwell’ and the right to exert a reasonable level of power over one’s basic living conditions, with all the physical and mental benefits that entails – regardless of whether displacement fears materialize in actual displacement or not.
Co-operative housing in Sweden and Norway are true success stories of civil society housing in terms of market shares. This stands in stark contrast to some other European countries, where attempts to promote co-operative housing have consistently met with difficulties, both politically and in the market. The paper explores the history of co-operative housing in Sweden and Norway since 1945 through the lens of path dependence. Notably, co-operative housing changed gradually in both countries between the 1950s and the 1990s, when co-operative companies went from being civil society organisations espousing the ideals of self-help, democracy, non-profit and solidarity, towards becoming more market oriented and profit seeking. We argue that two drivers, ‘the logic of conflicting member interests’ and ‘the logic of competition and growth’, contributed decisively to this development. These drivers may also be good candidates for general mechanisms of civil society housing based partly on collective or individual ownership – if they are not kept at bay. In our view, there seems to be some trade-off between the pursuit of civil society objectives and market success. This should serve as a marker for advocates of civil society housing.
This article analyses the political and ideological transformations underlying the gradual privatisation and deregulation of the mid-twentieth-century Keynesian model of housing provision in Sweden. We identify a series of three political and ideological shifts in housing policy and urban form since the 1930s: regulating Folkhem housing, deregulating Folkhem housing, and back to business in housing. We argue that even though the Folkhem parole of ‘housing for all’ differs extensively from the current situation where the market is ‘housing the privileged’, segregation trends have, from the Folkhem to the post-welfare period, been shaped by both state interventions and market forces. Second, we argue that there is a continuing trend through which newly constructed housing has metamorphosed from a basic human right for the working class into an expression of individual distinction and ‘style’ for the upper middle and middle classes. While privileged classes, more than ever before in modern Swedish housing history, have the possibility to choose new forms of housing, the most impoverished groups live in residual and often stigmatised peripheral housing areas. One main conclusion is that recent forms of housing for privileged groups signal a cultural and ideological shift towards new, more elitist conceptions of housing and privilege.
Both Sweden and the Netherlands had housing systems that include broad models of municipal housing (Sweden) or social housing (Netherlands). These broad models, however, came under discussion due to the competition policy of the European Commission. Financial government support – state aid – for public or social housing is considered to create false competition with commercial landlords. The countries chose different ways out of this problem. The Netherlands choose to direct state aid to a specified target group and had to introduce income limits for dwellings owned by housing associations. Sweden instead chose to change the law regulating municipal housing companies and demands that these companies should act in a ‘businesslike way’ and with that aims to create a level playing field. This paper will describe why the two countries chose different options, the development during the first years, and also speculate about the consequences on the longer run and the future role of the public/social housing sector in housing and urban policy.
An important issue in Sweden is the extent to which the public (or municipal) housing sector is a tenure form open to everyone and is on a level playing field with other tenure forms. The issue became more important when the European Union stated that public companies must have a pronounced social role, given their favourable institutional position. This paper reveals that vulnerable families are overrepresented in public housing, compared to other tenure forms, especially in the metropolitan cities and in the larger cities. This pattern is less pronounced in other cities and in rural areas. An index is constructed which measures the share of vulnerable families within a municipal housing company, when the share of vulnerable families within the municipality is controlled for. This index of social responsibility is used as a dependent variable in a regression analysis, using all Swedish municipalities as a database. The analysis reveals that the value of the index increases with a diminishing relative size of the municipal housing company. This effect is particularly strong for families on social benefits and immigrant families from poor countries. We also find evidence that the composition of the housing stock as well as the political regime in a municipality is correlated to the “index of social responsibility”. From an EU point of view, it is obvious that vulnerable families to a large extent are accommodated in the municipal housing sector. The relative size of this sector will in most cases determine the degree of dilution. In this respect, there is no separate social policy in public housing companies in Sweden. Instead, they seem to be social by default.
We study inequality generated by capital gains in the housing market by exploiting two countrywide data sources in Norway: a registry of housing units and a database of transactions. We identify and follow all individuals in six birth cohorts in Norway, who were owners on January 1, 2007, and on January 1, 2019, and estimate the sum of their actual and potential capital gains from their owned and sold properties. We demonstrate that there is a substantial increase in capital gains inequality over the period, both across and within geographical strata and across and within birth cohorts. We find a statistically significant and economically meaningful difference between the distributions of capital gains of female and male owners in Oslo.
In this book, Bo Bengtsson and Martin Grander combine an analysis of Swedish housing policy today and over time with discussions of various theoretical perspectives relevant to the understanding of the policy field. The book's starting point is that the housing issue is not only about public policy and politics, but is also shaped by a struggle of interests between different actors.
The Swedish housing regime rests on five institutional pillars. The emergence and development of these are discussed in detail in the book. Their main features have remained remarkably unchanged since they were formed after the end of the Second World War, which can be explained by the strong path dependence in housing policy. At the same time, the pillars have been gradually hollowed out, especially since the 1990s. The book analyzes the political game in housing policy, but also the role of the large interest organizations where there is – in particular – a clear interplay between the content of rent policy and the organizations' influence on the field. The authors show that the outcome of housing policy has become less and less universal in recent decades, which is exemplified by the development of public housing. They also discuss the extent to which housing can still be seen as a social right in Sweden. The book is rounded off with a discussion of equality in housing as a normative yardstick for housing provision.
Swedish abstract:
Bo Bengtsson och Martin Grander kombinerar i denna bok en analys av svensk bostadspolitik i dag och över tid med diskussioner kring olika teoretiska perspektiv av relevans för förståelsen av detta område. Bokens utgångspunkt är att bostadsfrågan inte bara handlar om offentlig policy och politik utan också formas av intressekamp mellan olika aktörer. Den svenska ”bostadspolitiska regimen” vilar på fem institutionella pelare vilkas framväxt och utveckling ingående behandlas i boken. Till sina huvuddrag har dessa varit anmärkningsvärt oförändrade sedan de formades efter andra världskrigets slut, vilket kan förklaras med bostadspolitikens starka stigberoende. Samtidigt har pelarna successivt urholkats framför allt sedan 1990-talet. I boken analyseras det partipolitiska spelet om bostadspolitiken, men också de stora intresseorganisationernas roll där det framträder ett tydligt växelspel mellan särskilt hyrespoli-tikens innehåll och organisationernas inflytande. Författarna visar att bostadspolitikens utfall har blivit allt mindre generellt inriktat under de senaste decennierna, vilket exemplifieras med allmännyttans utveckling. De diskuterar även i vilken utsträckning bostaden alltjämt kan ses som en social rättighet i Sverige. Boken avrundas med en diskussion om jämlikhet i boendet som en normativ måttstock för bostadsförsörjningen.
Throughout Europe, reports of problematic housing situations for young adults have increasingly emerged during the last decades. This paper explores housing experiences among young adults living in a disadvantaged area of Malmö, Sweden, taking the concept of housing inequality as its point of departure. The results suggest how young adults become stuck in between a number of parallel housing markets, leaving them no choice other than the illegal rental market-characterized by steep rents, insecure conditions and precarious quality. The paper advances a multidimensional understanding of housing inequality, as the limited access and poor quality of housing that young adults experience reproduces inequality in a broader sense: It influences potential wealth accumulation, the possibility to lead independent lives, the access to work and education, and thereby, the young adults' health and well-being.
The growing significance of housing to wealth inequality in Western societies is now well recognised and widely debated. This paper argues that understanding of the nature and causes of this problem and discussions of potential approaches to addressing it through progressive policy responses are both hampered by adopting a partial perspective on the housing question. Focusing singularly on ownership – how it has been idealised and subsidised, how it might be democratised and so forth – has led to scholars and policymakers tending to neglect the other main tenure form, in strict relation with which ownership always exists both materially and discursively: rental. We can neither understand why and how today’s asset-based inequalities have materialised nor plot realistic and meaningful policy responses unless we conceptualise and approach ownership and rental relationally. Using the United Kingdom and Swedish cases as exemplars, and examining how relevant national policy realities and logics have been constructed over time, the paper further argues that the emergence of significant asset-based inequalities in recent decades is rooted in the policy-driven emergence of significant inequalities – ideological as much as economic – between tenure forms, whereby ownership has increasingly been privileged over rental. If Western societies are to have any credible prospect of reducing existing property asset-based inequalities, preventing those inequalities from being reproduced within younger generations and limiting the likelihood of the re-emergence of comparable inequalities in the future, (re)instituting principles and practices of tenure equality should be made a primary political and policy objective.
Housing has a special place in the Swedish welfare state. Ever since Gustav Möller, Minister for Social Affairs, in 1945 was handed the result of Bostadssociala utredningen, a state investigation on housing from a social perspective, housing has been a bearing pillar in the Swedish ‘Folkhem’. Since the post-war period, Swedish housing policy has been universal in the sense that housing consumers have not been categorized by income or living conditions. Instead, the policy has had the aim of ‘good housing for all’. The main instrument for achieving this goal—the figurehead of the universal housing policy—has been allmännyttan, the national model of public housing, constituted by municipal housing companies with the task of offering rental housing of high quality, for the benefit of everyone.
This PhD thesis analyzes allmännyttan based on the observation that the contemporary housing situation is largely characterized by inequality. The housing consumer is to a lesser extent independent from inherited conditions: Access to housing and the characteristics of housing are increasingly dependent on economic resources. The dissertation highlights the role of public housing in this development. The municipal housing companies and the context they exist in have changed over the past decades through gradual political reforms and alignment with European competition law. Such a development might influence the ability of allmännyttan to contribute to keeping housing inequality at bay. The purpose of the thesis is thus to study the potential and actual significance of allmännyttan for housing inequality in Swedish cities. The thesis is grounded in critical realist ontology and analyzes how and why (or why not) allmännyttan’s latent mechanisms to counteract inequality are actualized.
Through studies of municipal housing companies throughout Sweden, including eleven in-depth case studies, the thesis seeks to answer whether the contemporary allmännytta counteracts housing inequality, or if it rather contributes to a more unequal housing provision. The dissertation consists of three peer-reviewed papers. Together with the framing chapter of the dissertation, the papers highlight how housing inequality could be understood from a national context and in terms of multidimensionality; how events triggered by allmännyttan counteracts or contributes to housing inequality; and how allmännyttan’s discretion to counteract housing inequality is identified and used by the municipal housing companies.
The results indicate that, despite a gradual shift towards businesslike conditions and demands on return on investment, allmännyttan still has a latent and potential ability to counteract housing inequality. The core of universalism consists, so do the expectations of social benefit. However, the contextual conditions have changed: The state-organized housing provision has gone from state-financed to financialized, i.e., dependent on financial motives, institutions, tools and financial capital. Allmännyttan exists in a state of financialized universalism. In spite of this development, the thesis identifies ample discretion for municipal housing companies to actualize underlying mechanisms which contribute to counteracting housing inequality. However, how this discretion is perceived and used varies from city to city. The discretion is interpreted—consciously or unconsciously—in different ways, depending on the local political governance, but also on the local institutional path-dependence, i.e., its past decisions, its culture and traditions. How the discretion is identified has implications on the events that affect housing inequality. The conclusion is that public housing is more than ever locally diversified. An imaginary of financialized economy has been adopted by many municipal housing companies, but this imaginary is challenged and negotiated by other companies. Given this variation, allmännyttan simultaneously—and contradictory—contributes to both reduced and increased housing inequality. The character of the ambiguous allmännytta is thus determined at local scale, a conclusion which stands in contrast with national objectives of a state-organized housing provision based on good housing, for the benefit of everyone.
Homeownership has long been associated with a myriad of economic, social and civic benefits, prompting countries such as Norway to expand access to homeownership for socio-economically disadvantaged households. In this paper, we explore the impact of homeownership on residential stability using a longitudinal data-set of renters who applied for a state mortgage programme in Norway between 2004 and 2010. These data allow us to specifically address the issue of selection bias in our analysis. We find that even after controlling for a wide range of demographic, socio-economic and housing market characteristics, homeownership has a substantial, positive impact on residential stability. This effect is stronger for groups that are more marginalised in Norwegian housing and labour markets, including East European and non-Western immigrants. The Norwegian case suggests homeownership policy can help to promote social goals, but also highlights the importance of providing welfare supports in tandem with access to mortgage credit in order to reduce the risks of homeownership for lower-income households.
Since the mid-1980s, Swedish housing finance has been radically transformed from a tightly regulated to an efficient market-oriented system. Mortgage loans are now offered by commercial banks funded by covered bonds. Interest margins between mortgages and government bonds at comparable maturities are low by international standards. Loan demand is stimulated by the tax system, which strongly favours owner-occupation. A step towards neutrality was taken in the 1990s, when the tax deductibility of interest payments was reduced and interest subsidies for new construction were removed, but more recent changes to property taxation have again increased the asymmetry. The household debt-to-income ratio has gradually increased from 90 percent in the mid-1990s to 175 percent today, with most households holding variable-rate non-amortising loans. In order to reduce household indebtedness an 85 percent loan-to-value (LTV) cap was introduced in 2010 and a decision was recently taken to require amortisation on loans above 50 percent LTV.
Building upon the universal characteristics of the social democratic welfare regime, public housing in Sweden has traditionally been a central instrument in contributing to socially inclusive cities; however, changes in policy have gradually changed the landscape. This paper presents concerns for public housing’s endeavour for social inclusion and suggests that the universal approach, of which Swedish public housing is a standing role model, is diminishing in favour of an ambiguous model of universal discourse and selective output. A ‘New Public Housing’ is emerging with higher thresholds, making it harder for economically disadvantaged groups to gain access to housing; at the same time, this is compensated by the increase of ‘social contracts’, which provides the financially vulnerable with an entrance to the housing market, however on very uncertain conditions. Increasingly catering for the most well off and the most vulnerable in society, this New Public Housing appears to exist in a contradictory state between its claims of universalism and the practice of excluding certain groups.
It is commonplace to refer to the Nordic countries of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland as a distinctive and homogenous welfare regime. As far as social housing is concerned, however, the institutional heritage of the respective countries significantly frames the ways in which social housing is understood, regulated and subsidized, and, in turn, how housing regimes respond to the general challenges to the national welfare states. The paper presents a historical institutionalist approach to understanding the diversity of regime responses in the modern era characterized by increasing marketization, welfare criticism and internationalization. The aim is to provide outside readers a theoretically guided empirical insight into Scandinavian social housing policy. The paper first lines up the core of the inbuilt argument of historical institutionalism in housing policy. Secondly, it briefly introduces the distinctive ideal typical features of the five housing regimes, which reveals the first internal distinction between the universal policies of Sweden and Denmark selective policies of Iceland and Finland. The Norwegian case constitutes a transitional model from general to selective during the past quarter of a decade. The third section then concentrates on the differences between Denmark, Sweden and Norway in which social housing is, our was originally, embedded in a universal welfare policy targeting the general level of housing quality for the entire population. Differences stand out, however, between finance, ownership, regulation and governance. The historical institutional argument is, that these differences frame the way in which actors operating on the respective policy arenas can and do respond to challenges. Here, in this section we lose Norway, which de facto has come to operate in a residual manner, due to contemporary effects of the long historical heritage of home ownership. The fourth section then discusses the recent challenges of welfare criticism, internationalization and marketization to the universal models in Denmark and Sweden. Here, it is argued that the institutional differences between the Swedish model of municipal ownership and the Danish model of independent cooperative social housing associations provides different sources of resistance to the prospective dismantlement of social housing as we know it. The fifth section presents the recent Danish reform of the governance model of social housing policy in which the housing associations are conceived of as 'dialogue partners' in the local housing policy, expected to create solutions to, rather than produce problems in social housing areas. The reform testifies to the strategic ability of the Danish social housing associations to employ their historically grounded institutional relative independence of the public system.
Economic and financial crises are often connected to crises in the housing market. Some housing systems are, however, more sensitive than others. Traditionally, Sweden’s system aimed to protect households from such volatility, but changes in the welfare state model and increased mortgage indebtedness suggest that Sweden’s housing market might have become more exposed to macro pressures. The starting point for this article is an understanding of the Swedish welfare state model in which housing was traditionally a core value and where the link between income and housing outcome has been weakened. Deregulation and liberalization have fundamentally changed the special features on the Swedish housing market. In particular, the rental sector is decreasing in favor of increased ownership and greater speculation. In this article, we aim to give a picture of the grand restructuring of the Swedish housing sector including its implications for the link between income poverty and housing poverty and an understanding of the contradictory reaction of the welfare state to the global financial crisis (GFC). Our results show that affordability is a problem and that the proportion of households at risk of poverty has been increasing when taking housing costs into consideration. However, a combination of the lessons learned in the 1990s crisis and resultant increases in regulation together with a stronger and more immediate recovery than might have been expected meant that Sweden and its housing system came out of the GFC fundamentally intact. However, there must be concerns that future crises will not be so readily addressed.
In this article, I introduce the notion of symbolic boundaries to the study of homeownership. Data for the article are qualitative interviews with ‘housing strugglers’ in two cities in Norway, a ‘homeowner nation’. The social categories in question are refugees, people with drug and/or mental health problems and the ‘déclassé’. The analysis reveals patterns that are familiar from studies of homeowner countries; homeownership is associated with safety/security, freedom/autonomy, savings and belonging. Each of these values is explored, and from this examination, I show how homeownership constitutes a symbolic boundary between the ‘worthy’ and ‘less worthy’, and ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. Disadvantaged non-homeowners, who struggle for security and autonomy in private renting or social housing, often find that their exclusion from homeownership is associated with a perceived lack of moral worth and dignity, and with symbolic exclusion.
In the leftist Western political imagination, Sweden continues, for many, to represent a vision of a ‘better’, more egalitarian political-economic model than the neoliberal capitalism that has come to dominate the Anglo-American world in particular; and its housing system is widely regarded as an integral component of this alternative, social-democratic model. The present paper argues that this envisioning of the political economy of Swedish housing is thoroughly outdated. Yet it insists, equally, that the competing envisioning of Swedish housing advanced by prominent scholars within Sweden – of a radically (neo)liberalised domestic housing system – is not accurate either. Rather, Swedish housing in the early twenty-first century constitutes a complex hybrid of legacy regulated elements on the one hand and neoliberalised elements on the other. Recognising this hybridity is essential, the paper submits, to understanding the nature and source of the most pressing issues facing the Swedish housing sector today. The system's hybridity, moreover, is ‘monstrous’ – following Jane Jacobs's coining of the term – in the sense that those issues reveal the pivotal role currently played by the Swedish housing system in the creation, reproduction and intensification of socio-economic inequality.
From the 1930s and into the 1990s, public housing in Sweden was a key
element in the Social Democrats’ ambition to construct a housing system that
would secure high-quality, affordable housing for all. The Liberal–
Conservative national government of the early 1990s initiated important
changes to housing policy in Sweden and allowed for local decision-making
concerning tenure conversion, the conversion of public rental housing into
market-based (cooperative) housing. Stockholm city decided early on to invite
public housing residents to buy their dwellings, under the condition that at least
half of the residents living in a particular property were in favour of buying. In
this paper we ask two questions: in what way did the subsequent and substantial
tenure conversions change the population mix of affected neighbourhoods?
Second, have tenure conversions in inner city Stockholm contributed to
increasing levels of segregation in the city of Stockholm? We hypothesise that
inner city Stockholm has further gentrified and that non-converted public
housing properties, predominantly found in the suburban parts of the city,
experience residualisation (households have become poorer in relative terms).
In short, we expect and also document increasing levels of socio-economic
segregation as the result of this right-to-buy policy.