ABSTRACT
The standard Social Democratic version of history, including housing history, is that with the party’s election in 1932 all changed; ‘blind eyes opened on a new sweet world’. Bourgeois historians also, with some recent exceptions, have accepted that 1932 was a watershed – except that they might quote a different line: ‘all changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born’. This chapter suggests that, although significant changes were made in the housing field in the 1930s, these are better labelled precursive innovations rather than strategic choices. The Social Democrats’ Crisis Bill, which was designed to combat the economic depression which severely affected Sweden in 1932-33, included subsidised loans to private enterprise builders. The politics of housing in the 1960s were dominated by continued shortages in urban areas and a rising crescendo of criticism on the part of the bourgeois parties, the bourgeois controlled media and economists of the whole apparatus of Social Democratic housing finance.
