Power, production and disorder: The decline of Sweden’s housing industrial complex and the origins of the present housing discontents

Timothy Blackwell

doi:10.1177/09697764211009570

Abstract

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.

Highlights

Sweden’s housing system during the mid- to late twentieth century was very much the darling of the housing world
By locating the roots of Sweden’s ‘system switch’ to the breakdown of its mid-twentieth-century housing industrial complex (Jonung, 1993), the paper seeks to historically couch the processes and outcomes commonly associated with the post-1980s era of neoliberalisation and position them more concretely in relation to actors and their social relations through time
By the late 1970s, the differences between owneroccupation and cooperative ownership were largely semantic: rents were pulling away from consumer prices; house-prices were increasing unprecedentedly; the subsidy system, which had been designed to promote tenure neutrality, was subsidising owneroccupiers to ever-greater extents; housing supply was out of step with demand; speculative tycoons were buying up swathes of inner-city rental stock and displacing tenants; segregation, in municipal housing companies (MHCs) estates, was increasing (Linden, 1989); and planning decisions were being determined, to ever larger extents, by private interests

Summary

Introduction

Sweden’s housing system during the mid- to late twentieth century was very much the darling of the housing world. Because the credit that did flow into the housing system from the banks and finance companies following the financial deregulation of the early to mid-1980s served not to increase the homeownership and tenant-owner franchises, but to inflate prices (see Figure 2).

Results

Conclusion