ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a comparative study of housing politics and housing conditions in Sweden, the UK and the USA. Sweden, Britain and the United States provide distinctive examples of the three national approaches to housing policy pursued in the Western world. The Swedish government engages in comprehensive planning, which involves forecasting national and local housing requirements and controlling the rate of production of private as well as public and co-operative housing. The Swedish Social Democrats have succeeded in greatly improving working-class housing and neighbourhoods both absolutely and relative to those of middle-class people. They have even brought about a situation-probably unique in the West, in which wage earners pay lower proportions of their income for housing than middle-class salary earners. The Swedish ‘built environment’ provides an important demonstration of how government can exercise control without ownership and can impose its own social and political priorities without abolishing private enterprise supply of housing land, capital and labour.
