Segregation, gentrification, and residualisation: from public housing to market-driven housing allocation in inner city Stockholm

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.