Urban segregation in Sweden housing policy, housing markets, and the spacial distribution of households in metropolitan areas

Abstract

The postwar Swedish housing standard has been raised considerably. But there were also unforeseen and undesired side effects in the form of increasing segregation. Between 1965–1975 a great number of rental apartments were built in the periphery of the metropolitan areas. They originally received an overrepresentation of the poor, immigrants, social welfare recipients, and members of the working class. Today these areas face long distances, increasing deterioration and the lower socioeconomic level of their population is accentuated. The following wave of rebuilding in the central metropolitan areas also reinforced residential segregation. As the dwellings became larger and totally modern, the rents rose. Ownership forms often changed to tenant-owned dwellings which drove up the prices of tenant-owned dwellings. The older working-class population was replaced by wealthy families with middle-class backgrounds. The rebuilding in the city centers has in all likelihood been the motor in the overall relocations and migrations of the metropolitan populations during the 1980s. The movement of the middle-class towards the centers corresponds to an increased concentration of workers and various resource-weak groups on the peripheries. This analysis uses a new large micro data base integrating Swedish census and level-of-living survey data on individuals, households and neighbourhoods.

Housing segregation has not been seen as a very serious problem in Sweden. Attention has primarily been aimed at providing spatial and modern dwellings for everyone. The construction of housing was explosive through the middle of the 1970s, and it has been supported by substantial general subsidies. Today, Sweden, together with Norway, has Europe's highest and most evenly distributed housing standard. Overcrowding and unmodern housing have for all practical purposes been abolished.

Thus, in the country as a whole, the problem of providing housing has been solved. The big cities, on the other hand, are facing housing shortages. During the 1980s, the waiting lists for housing have become longer, and the prices of tenant-owned apartments and private homes have at times increased faster than real wages. In recent years, we have also seen signs of increasing segregation in the metropolitan areas: more poor, social welfare recipients, and labourers in the least attractive housing areas, more well-to-do families and persons with high incomes in the more attractive areas. In the political arena, this differentiation is observed in the form of declining political participation. In the least attractive housing areas (public multi-family apartment buildings in the suburbs), where the social democrats and leftist parties had their strongest footholds, voting participation decreased by 8 percent from 1979 to 1988.

In 1988, the Swedish government appointed a public commission to analyze this development and to propose measures for improving the living environment in the metropolitan areas. This article summarizes one of the reports released by the commission (Vogel, J. et al., 1990).