Accommodating Difference: Evaluating Supported Housing for Vulnerable People by David Clapham

Author:David Clapham [Clapham, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, City Planning & Urban Development, Social Science, Political Science, Poverty & Homelessness
ISBN: 9781447306351
Google: TvHBDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Policy Press
Published: 2017-01-11T06:11:43+00:00

Housing policy

The 1990s were also a watershed in Swedish housing policy, which, from the 1970s, was close to the social democratic model, with a policy based on tenure neutrality and generous general subsidies to all tenures.

Bengtsson (2013: 169) argues that the Swedish housing system from the late 1940s up to the beginning of the 21st century has five distinctive characteristics:

• a universally oriented housing policy directed at all tenure forms without individual needs or means testing;

• a public rental sector with housing companies that are owned by the municipalities and professionally managed at arm’s length from political influence;

• a so-called ‘integrated rental market’ whereby both public and private rental housing is available for all types of households, and formal links exist between rent setting in the public and private sector;a ‘corporatist’ system based on centralised rent negotiations between (public or private) landlords and representatives of a well-established national tenant movement;a large cooperative sector based mainly on the specific tenure of ‘tenant ownership’. The prominent role of housing cooperatives can be linked to a legal prohibition (until 2009) against owner occupation in multi-family buildings.

Bengtsson (2013) argues that it is the combination of these five factors that makes the Swedish housing system unique, as many of the individual factors are found in other countries. The only really unique factor is the corporatist system of rent setting, whereby tenant unions represent the individual tenants at the negotiating table.

The large public sector was administered by municipal housing companies that allocated properties on the basis of waiting time without any financial means test or assessment of housing or social need, unlike in Britain. However, this tenure acted as a place of last resort as well as a general tenure for a substantial proportion of the population. There was an important private rented sector, similar in size to the public sector, which was subject to rent control through the corporatist negotiation system. In some areas, particularly in the larger towns and cities, private rented properties were allocated through the municipal housing exchanges run by the local authorities, which used a system of allocation of properties based on waiting time. Sweden had what Kemeny (1992) labelled a unitary rental system, in which the private sector is secondary to the public sector and is subject to the same kind of regulation.

The cooperative sector enabled people to own apartments and houses, although with price restrictions on sale until 1968. Since this date the tenure has become more similar to the British leasehold ownership of flats or the US condominium system, although the communal management arrangements are different from those in the other two countries.

Bengtsson (2013) divides the establishment of the current housing system in Sweden into four phases. The first establishment phase was from 1900 to 1945, which saw the establishment of the National Union of Tenants in 1923, partly in response to the abolition of the first attempts at rent control in that same year. In 1933 the ‘historical compromise’ between the Social Democrats and the Farmers’ League

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