ABSTRACT
Abstract Sweden has had a long tradition in providing high-quality and affordable housing for all. From the early 1990s, Swedish housing policy has shifted radically: the housing market regulation was reduced and market principles were introduced, investment subsidies were mostly abolished and the percentage of municipalityowned public housing has dropped, especially in the Stockholm region. In the context of these profound changes, this chapter maps the residential socio-spatial outcomes of the structural changes in Swedish society in general and in the Stockholm housing market in particular. For the 1990-2010 period we study how long-term changes in social inequality, as well as neoliberal shifts in housing policy, have modified socio-spatial formations and residential segregation. We look both at the socio-economic and ethnic dimensions of this changing residential landscape by applying data from a complete set of individual longitudinal registerbased data of all residents living in Stockholm. The results show that over the last two decades, socio-economic residential segregation has increased in Stockholm. Concentrations of low-income groups have become denser and such ‘pockets of poverty’ are located mostly in and around neighbourhoods that already displayed some social decline in 1990, mainly large housing estates from the 1960s and 1970s. We also found a ‘double sorting’ process whereby low-income natives tend to live in other areas than low-income non-Western immigrants.
