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Housing Studies
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The inbetweeners of the housing markets – young
adults facing housing inequality in Malmö, Sweden
Martin Grander
To cite this article: Martin Grander (2021): The inbetweeners of the housing markets – young adults facing housing inequality in Malmö, Sweden, Housing Studies, DOI: 10.1080/02673037.2021.1893278
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2021.1893278
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Published online: 04 Mar 2021.
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The inbetweeners of the housing markets
– young
adults facing housing inequality in Malm€o, Sweden
Martin GranderDepartment of Urban Studies, Malm€o University, Malm€o, Sweden ABSTRACT
Throughout Europe, reports of problematic housing situations for young adults have increasingly emerged during the last decades. This paper explores housing experiences among young adults living in a disadvantaged area of Malm€o, Sweden, taking the concept of housing inequality as its point of departure. The results suggest how young adults become stuck in between a number of parallel housing markets, leaving them no choice other than the illegal rental market – characterized by steep rents, insecure conditions and precarious quality. The paper advances a multidimensional understanding of housing inequality, as the limited access and poor quality of housing that young adults experience reproduces inequality in a broader sense: It influences potential wealth accumulation, the possibility to lead independent lives, the access to work and education, and thereby, the young adults’ health and well-being.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 2 March 2018 Accepted 6 February 2021
KEYWORDS
Young adults; housing inequality; housing market; generation rent
1. Introduction
‘Housing has a crucial significance for young people. Their progress towards full independence involves finding – and paying for – their own home’. With such a statement, the EU youth report (European Commission, 2012, p. 54), pinpoints housing as a policy field of great importance for young adults today. However, the housing opportunities for young adults are increasingly precarious. Sofa-surfing at friends’ apartments, subletting with insecure conditions and staying involuntarily with parents appear to be common experiences from all over Europe, which has made the housing opportunities of youth and young adults a question of increasing concern also for academics (See, e.g., Mackie,2016).
The rich literature on housing prospects of young adults has described in detail the limited access to both home ownership and the social rented sector (Clapham et al., 2014; Ford et al., 2002) and how such limitations create a dependency on parental wealth for access to owned housing (Druta & Ronald, 2017; Enstr€om €Ost, CONTACTMartin Grander Martin.grander@mau.se Faculty of Culture and Society, Malm€o University, S-20506
Malm€o, Sweden
ß 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
2012; Hochstenbach & Boterman, 2017; Hoolachan et al., 2017). As young adults often lack the financial resources necessary for entering the owned market (McKee, 2012), the term ‘Generation Rent’ has increasingly been used in the UK context for describing how young adults are at the mercy of the private rented sector (Cole et al., 2016). At the same time, young adults also face limitations on the rental market, as queues for social rented housing become longer and private rental housing is expen-sive and highly insecure (Clapham et al.,2014). The literature thus portrays a picture of young adults being particularly affected by rising housing inequalities, a field gain-ing interest lately (See, e.g., Dorlgain-ing, 2014; Hochstenbach & Boterman, 2017; Listerborn,2018; McKee,2012).
While the literature is rich in describing how unequal distribution of resources generates housing inequality and how such inequality is manifested in terms of unequal access to housing, there is less knowledge about the wider consequences of such inequality. This paper identifies a need to explore causes, manifestations as well as consequences of housing inequality in a multidimensional way. It takes on such an approach by the case study of Sweden, a national context of relevance as its housing regime differs from most other countries and has had a reputation of providing a socially sustainable housing solution.
The study is based on qualitative interviews with 36 young adults living in a ‘disadvantaged’ neighbourhood in the city of Malm€o and connects their area-specific experiences with the characteristics of the national housing regime and the concept of housing inequality. The first aim of the paper is empirical and involves describing the actual housing situation among young adults– showing how one side of the relational housing inequality is manifested in the local context. The second aim is to discuss the findings through a multidimensional perspective on causes and consequences of inequal-ity, providing a contribution to the literature on housing inequality. The paper starts out with a discussion of the concept of housing inequality and suggests a possible exten-sion of how to analyse it. The third part briefly presents the Swedish housing regime and discusses housing inequality in this context. Thereafter, the research method and research setting are described. In the fifth section the empirical evidence is presented in terms of thematised narratives of the young adults’ housing situations. In the sixth sec-tion, the findings are further discussed through the suggested lens of causes and conse-quences of housing inequality, while the final section draws conclusions viable for the international debate and research on housing inequality.
2. Towards a multidimensional view on housing inequality
Inequality and housing have cohabited for ages. In the seminal work ‘The Housing Question’, Engels (1872) took departure in the inequalities resulting from home-own-ership, or rather the capitalist urban land economies and polices, which were reflected in private property rights. He argued that the encouragement of increased private property, embedded in all aspects of political economy and led by the ‘bourgeoise socialists’, was the cause of stark inequalities and injustices. Engels’ work has greatly contributed to the work of Harvey on inequalities connected to ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2008), which includes property rights and, consequently,
housing. Smith’s work on gentrification (See e.g., Smith, 1982) has also leaned heavily on Engels’ work.
During the last decades ‘Housing inequality’ as a term has been broadly estab-lished, not the least through the works of Dorling, who in 2005 discussed the uneven increases in housing wealth among the UK population as the values of owned homes rose 50-fold between 1970 and 2000, which affected the future housing opportunities and thereby wealth accumulation of the homeowners’ children (Dorling et al., 2005). While Dorling initially was rather occupied with the mutual relation between wealth inequality and home ownership, his later work (2014) has taken a broader approach, illustrating how housing inequality manifests itself through less affordable, less secure and less decent housing – leading to the formation of a ‘housing precariat’ on one side of a polarized housing market. Several other scholars have also discussed the manifestations of housing inequality from such a multifaceted point of departure; Holmes (2003) has for example analysed unequal distribution of housing in terms of standard and quality of housing, the desirability of the neighbourhood and the ability of people to choose their home.
As housing inequality inevitably connects to wealth accumulation, the intergenera-tional aspects become evident; the situation of youth and young adults on the hous-ing markets is often highlighted in the debate on houshous-ing inequality. The body of research on the housing opportunities for this group has amplified during the last decade (See, e.g., Mackie [2016] for an overview of key issues). The increasing litera-ture on ‘Housing pathways’ has described the variety of paths young adults have taken for ending up in specific housing situations. Clapham et al. (2014) explain how different pathways emerge as a result of a complex web of structural causes and indi-vidual decisions. Indeed, the drivers of inequality are in many cases (See, e.g., Aalbers et al.,2017; Blessing, 2016; Fields & Uffer,2016) connected to structural changes; not the least national policies which have nurtured the privatization and financialization of rented housing, while at the same time, favoured homeownership. The austerity measures in the wake of the global financial crisis 2007–2008 have also made the housing markets increasingly inaccessible for young households, due to e.g., credit restrictions, welfare benefit cuts and a shattered labour market (Clapham et al., 2014), not only in cities but also in rural areas (McKee et al.,2017).
What is noticeable with several of the UK studies is the increased dependency on the private rental sector, as credit restrictions for homeownership and a decline of the social rental sector narrows the possible pathways. Such a trajectory of the UK housing market is seconded by the literature on Generation Rent, describing how young adults are being at the mercy of the private rental market and the financial downsides that this pathway implies (See, e.g., Arundel, 2017; Filandri & Bertolini, 2016; Foster & Kleit, 2015). McKee et al. (2017) argue that the rise of Generation Rent follows the ‘fallacy of choice’, meaning that while homeownership is the pre-ferred choice of tenure among young adults, ownership is deemed unrealistic due to their limited resources and the limited supply on the local housing markets. To put it simple– there is no choice for young adults but the private rented sector.
Although several of the aforementioned studies discuss the complexity of housing pathways, the heterogeneity of Generation Rent and what impact being part of this
generation‘has on young people’s lives and broader patterns of social-spatial inequal-ity’ (McKee et al., 2017), much of the literature nonetheless mainly deals with causes and consequences of housing inequality in relation to the precondition and reproduc-tion of financial capital, a development that might be argued being both a result of– and a contribution to – the increasingly dominating view on housing as a financial asset (McKee, 2012; Pattillo, 2013). More recently, several scholars have engaged in the wider consequences of housing inequality, for example Preece & Bimpson (2019), who discuss the association between housing insecurity and mental health in the Welsh setting. In a Swedish context, Rojas & Stenberg (2016) show how home evic-tions have a significant impact on individuals’ risk of committing suicide, while Listerborn (2018) uses narratives to illustrate housing inequality, for example how couples rather stay in destructive relationships than separate, fearing homelessness.
This paper agrees with such a view of housing inequality in a broader sense and argues that housing studies could be inspired by the wider body of research on inequality. For example by the influential work of Sen (1999), who argues that income inequality needs to be complemented with other variables, such as employ-ment, health and education. Therborn (2013) discusses inequality by means of a three-fold analysis. First, resource inequality refers to unequal recourses to act, for example, due to differences in income. Of interest to this study, Therborn (2013, p. 49) states, ‘Your first resource is normally your parents, their wealth, their knowledge and their support’. Second, existential inequality involves the unequal allocation of personhood, such as autonomy and right to self-development. Third, inequality can be vital, in the sense that unequal life chances may influence matters of life and death. Such an argument follows Marmot’s (2010) discussion on health disparity as the most important form of inequality, as it might be the emerging result of unequal opportunities in general– for example how differences in access to education leads to differences in life expectancy. Therborn (2013) further stresses that inequality must be seen as relational: It involves differences between socially determined groups. However, such differences must not be seen as problematic per se. The disparities must deviate from an assumed commonality of equality in a given context and, in order to be unequal, must limit the life possibilities of the disadvantaged part of the relation – the differences should be regarded as ‘violations of human rights’ (Therborn, 2013, p. 41), as they limit the capability to function fully as a human being, and freedom to choose a life path of dignity and well-being.
Applying Sen’s and Therborn’s perspectives of inequality to the field of housing, this paper argues that housing inequality should be discussed in terms of resource inequality, in terms of existential inequality and in terms of vital inequality, and thus needs to be seen as multidimensional. Inspired by critical realist epistemology (see, e.g., Fitzpatrick,2005), a multidimensional approach entails the analysis of underlying causes and the empirical manifestations of inequality, but also an analysis of what housing inequality as a mechanism in itself generates. This paper proposes that the causes of housing inequality need to be discussed in terms of financial assets but also in terms of dependence on social networks and know-how. It further suggests that manifestations of housing inequality can be categorized in two ways. The first is access to housing, which includes the possibility to choose type and location of
housing; and the second is quality of housing, including aspects relating to the quality of the dwelling itself and the quality of the surrounding houses and neighbourhood. Finally, the consequences need to be analysed in terms of increasing inequality in income and wealth accumulation (in the sense that housing is an asset which ideally increases in value, creating wealth inequality between those who own and those who do not), but also with regards to existential matters such as transition to adulthood; and vital parameters such as physical and mental health.
To summarize, the paper suggests that housing inequality is defined as contextual norm-deviating differences regarding access to and the quality of housing that unequally affects the life possibilities of individuals. Housing inequality is thus rela-tional and deals with questions regarding if we reside, where we reside, how we res-ide, and most importantly, what implications such questions have for our future life opportunities. Moreover, housing inequality must be considered in relation to what is expected in each national context. What is regarded unequal in one context might not be so in another. That is also why housing inequality needs to be seen as relative and not absolute– it depends on the context.
3. The Swedish context
As housing is distributed via market mechanisms ( thus departing from other parts of welfare provision [See, e.g., Bengtsson, 2001; Torgersen, 1987] ), differences in income inevitably influence variances regarding the accessibility and quality of hous-ing. Therefore, a key question with regards to inequality is how different systems of housing provision are set up to minimize the implications of such differences. The lit-erature review portrays how, in the UK, homeownership is regarded as the ideal ten-ure, implying the assumption that ownership is affiliated with wealth accumulation and that rental housing is less desirable. Such a norm has been problematized by McKee et al. (2017), who argues that inequality should be addressed by investments in all tenures, not only by striving for more equal access to homeownership.
Here, the Swedish context makes a contrasting case study since it is based on a dif-ferent relation between owned and rented housing, as well as a difdif-ferent approach of social rental housing.
Although being the dominating tenure, homeownership in Sweden has tradition-ally not been regarded as ‘better’ than the rental sector. Instead, the housing policy has aimed at tenure neutrality (Lundqvist, 1987), meaning that the homeowners (of stand-alone houses and cooperatively owned apartments) should not have any finan-cial benefits over renters, also implying that the rental sector, private and public, should be a tenure of good quality, suitable for all types of households, thus not car-rying with the stigma that often is connected with rental housing in other national contexts. However, rented housing is becoming more and more expensive in relative terms. A governmental investigation (SOU 2014, p.1) show that the average rented apartment is around e300 more expensive per month than the equivalent coopera-tively-owned apartment, which reflects the failure of the housing regime to achieve the aim of tenure neutrality.
The housing regime is centred around a universal housing policy aimed at all citi-zens without the means- or needs-testing that would characterize a selective housing policy. Intertwined with such a universal policy is the system of universal public housing – constituted by municipal housing companies (MHCs) – directed at all types of households, distributing apartments through a local or regional queue sys-tem. MHCs were the backbone of the housing regime formed during the post-war era, and public housing became the most common tenure in apartment blocks after the massive state-supported construction era of the 1960s–1970s (see Table 1). As public housing is directed at everyone, the housing regime includes what Kemeny (2006) calls an integrated rental market, where public and private landlords operate on the same market and under the same conditions (e.g., providing the same security for the tenant), also competing over and catering to the same – universal – target group. Thus, no needs-tested selective social housing sector formally exists in Sweden as in the UK. However, the municipalities have a system of secondary market rental contracts, where the municipalities’ social services rent apartments from property owners and, in turn, sublet them to households who are unable to access housing on the ordinary market. To be eligible for such a contract, poor income is not enough. The apartments are meant for individuals with drug abuse or mental illness. However, in times of housing shortage, these apartments are increasingly handed out also to individuals without such problems (Grander,2017).
The Swedish context, with its lack of a designated safety-net for people with low income is highly interesting to discuss in terms of housing inequality. As European models for public and social housing are mainstreaming, research has highlighted Sweden as the last integrated rental market in Europe (Borg, 2015; Grander, 2019). While the UK norm of equal housing provision seems connected to the possibilities for accessing homeownership, the Swedish regime, with its motto of ‘good housing for all’, obliges a certain assumed commonality of equality which is not strictly related to a specific tenure, but the guarantee to good quality housing regardless economic status and inherited conditions.
Regarding the specificity of young adults’ housing, the national welfare regime is of importance for understanding what would characterize (in)equality. In the social democratic welfare regime (See Esping-Andersen, 1990), young adults are likely to move out from their family homes at an early age to become independent and lead their own lives. They are not expected, as in conservative welfare regimes, to stay in the family home to take care of the elders. Thus, Sweden has the lowest median age in the EU of leaving the parental household; 21 years compared to 25 in the UK and 30 in Italy (Eurostat, 2017). However, the past decades have seen an increase of the Table 1. Tenure breakdown in Sweden 1945–2019 (Source: Statistics Sweden).
Homeownership Cooperatively owned Private rented Public rented Total
1945 38 4 52 6 100 1960 34 9 43 14 100 1980 41 14 21 24 100 2000 39 17 21 23 100 2010 40 22 19 19 100 2019 38 24 20 16 100
median age in Sweden, contrary to the common European development. 25% of the young adults in the age of 20–27 is staying in their family household, compared to 14% in 1998. This development could be connected to lack of accessible housing. As Table 1 shows, the rental sector is retreating in comparison with the cooperatively owned sector.
Young adults in particular suffer from such a development, as they often lack suffi-cient funds for entering the owned market and rental housing is a natural first tenure with flexibility in terms of the length of the lease (See, e.g., Enstr€om €Ost, 2012). Further, public rented housing in Sweden seems to have lost its role as an entrance point for young adults to own housing. In addition to the shrinking share of public rented housing, studies shows how Swedish ‘New Public Housing’ (Grander, 2017) increasingly shuts out groups with moderate and irregular income, e.g. young adults and single parents, as construction of affordable housing and stricter financial demands for signing a contract are results of MHCs adapting to risk-minimizing financial logics due to legislative demands on competition. To use Christophers’ (2013) words, the Swedish housing regime has become a ‘monstrous hybrid’ of financialized principles and state regulation. Whether it lives up to the earlier reputation of‘solving the housing question’ (See, e.g., Lundqvist et al., 1990), and whether it ensures that differences in housing situations are not too great and limits the negative influence on life possibilities for those with lesser resources, is therefore of interest for this paper.
4. The research method and setting
This research presented in this paper is underpinned by critical realist epistemology and methodology. Of central concern here is abduction as a logic of inquiry, which involves the interpretation and contextualization of a certain phenomenon, allowing the researcher to move back and forth between their theoretical framework and empirical material. Crucial in critical realism and abduction is to abstract the basic conditions needed for a phenomena to occur (See e.g. Fitzpatrick, 2005; Lawson, 2006). For allowing such a process, a case study (Yin, 2014) is particularly feasible. The case study presented here draws mainly on interviews during 2014–2016 with a total of 36 young adults (age 19–28) living in or in the proximity of the Malm€o neighbourhood of South Sofielund (S€odra Sofielund). The neighbourhood is located in the south-central part of Malm€o and has roughly 4.600 inhabitants. It has gained lot of attention in media for drug trafficking and crime of violence. The area is one of 23 areas on the Swedish police’s list of ‘especially vulnerable areas’ and could be characterized as an area of social exclusion, as it has a majority of low-income house-holds and individuals dependent on social benefits. However, the area is gradually going through a revitalization period, as it is popular with university students and other young adults.
The selection of South Sofielund was made on the basis of its dual character – on the one hand a social distress and stigma, and on the other hand an ongoing process of rejuvenation and increased attractiveness among young adults. The‘socially mixed’ character adds to the relevance of study, and the ambition has thus been to reach young adults with different living conditions.
The housing structure is characterized by mixed settlements in terms of scale, function and age. The most common tenure is private rental units, which adds up to 43% of the stock, while the municipal housing company owns 26% of all apartments. The share of cooperatively owned apartments is 25% and homeownership is 6%. Regarding the rental sector there is an unusual fragmentation of private ownership: Around 120 private landlords are owners of the circa 1.000 private rental apartments, which is a very high number of owners seen in a national context.
A first sample of young adults was reached through Malm€o’s official institutions in the area, such as libraries, youth clubs, a rehearsal space/music venue and the unemployment office. Employees handed out information about the research project to visitors and posters were put up. Everyone in the age span 18-28 were invited to participate. The young adults’ housing situation or their interest in the housing ques-tion were not criteria for participating. Rather, the research project wanted to reach young adults in different life situations to discuss inequalities in a larger sense. Young adults in employment or education as well as unemployed were encouraged to participate. In order to provide access to informants who were not visiting the muni-cipal meeting places or institutions, information about the project was posted in out-door bulletin boards in the area, in local social media groups and at the University’s different faculties. Finally, random young adults in the area were approached in the open space and in meeting places run by NGOs and the municipality.
Of the 36 interviewees, 19 were female and 17 male. The average age was 25 and around half of them were students, 25% in employment and 25% unemployed (seeTable 2). Consulting statistics, the young adults interviewed are representative for the area with regards to age, region of birth and employment rate. We need to remember though, that they do not represent the average young adult in the city, as the area has higher unemployment rate. Thus, the prerequisites for the interviewees when it comes to getting an apartment might be more harsh than for the average young adult in Malm€o.
The interviews were conducted at meeting places in the area, where the young adults felt at ease. The participants only presented their first name and age, and were com-pletely anonymised during the transcription of the recorded interviews. While most of the informants were individually interviewed, a couple of group interviews were done. In addition to young adults, employees working with the question of housing at the municipality and the municipal housing company have been interviewed.
The qualitative approach has been important for the study. Interviews explores not only current housing situation, but the meanings connected to housing and the individual reasoning for housing choices, which could not be captured in statistical data alone. The research method and the abductive approach have similarities with the housing pathways method (Clapham et al.,2014) as the interviews have concerned the young adult’s percep-tions of their housing situation both in terms of underlying structural causes and inde-pendent choices. The interviews started with the young adults’ lived experiences of inequality and thereafter continued with their thoughts on causes of inequality.
In the analytical process, the narratives were thematized utilizing the multidimen-sional view of housing inequality suggested above. What came out from interviews could be categorized in terms of unequal access to and quality of housing, but also in terms of manifestations, underlying causes and prolonged consequences of hous-ing inequality.
While not all informants are cited, young adults with secure as insecure housing situation are represented in the material. However, the empirical section will espe-cially highlight the situation of those in the‘losing end’ of housing inequality, as these narratives illustrate the wider consequences of such inequality, which will be further reflected over in the analysis.
5. ‘My only problem is getting a place to stay’– manifestations of housing inequality in South sofielund, malm€o
5.1. Navigating: on access and the fallacy of choice
To start out with the current housing situation, the interviews show that 22 out of 36 informants could be characterized as having an insecure housing situation, either by illegal second-hand contracts or living involuntarily with parents or friends (see Table 2). Several of the interviewees claim that housing is the main concern in their life. Interestingly, this applies for both employed and unemployed informants. While a couple have considered turning to the social services for help in finding a place to reside (a ‘social contract’) most of them refrain to do so. They claim that social Table 2. The informants.
Respondent Code Age Gender Occupation Housing situation Resp. 1 22 M Unemployed Public (MHC) rental contract Resp. 2 23 F Employed With parents (involuntarily) Resp. 3 24 M Student Private rental contract Resp. 4 23 F Student With a friend, shares bedroom Resp. 5 23 M Student Private rental contract
Resp. 6 21 F Student On a mattress in a friend’s kitchen Resp. 7 20 M Student With parents (involuntarily) Resp. 8 27 F Student With parents (involuntarily) Resp. 9 23 M Employed Sofa-surfer
Resp. 10 20 M Student With parents (involuntarily) Resp. 11 19 M Student With parents (involuntarily) Resp. 12 25 M Student Informal (illegal) second-hand rental Resp. 13 22 M Student Second-hand rental contract (formal) Resp. 14 25 F Employed Second-hand rental contract (formal) Resp. 15 27 M Employed Second-hand rental contract (formal) Resp. 16 26 M Student With parents (involuntarily) Resp. 17 19 M Unemployed With parents (involuntarily) Resp. 18 25 F Student Second-hand rental contract (formal) Resp. 19 22 F Student Private rental contract
Resp. 20 25 F Student Informal (illegal) second-hand rental Resp. 21 25 M Student Informal (illegal) second-hand rental Resp. 22 25 F Student Public (MHC) rental contract Resp. 23 26 M Employed Informal (illegal) second-hand rental Resp. 24 25 F Employed On a friend’s sofa
Resp. 25 26 M Employed With parents (involuntarily) Resp. 26 23 F Student Informal (illegal) second-hand rental Resp. 27 22 F Unemployed Informal (illegal) second-hand rental Resp. 28 25 F Unemployed Second-hand rental contract (formal) Resp. 29 28 F Unemployed Second-hand rental contract (formal) Resp. 30 28 F Unemployed In a friend’s living room
Resp. 31 24 F Unemployed Second-hand rental contract (formal) Resp. 32 22 F Unemployed Second-hand rental contract (formal) Resp. 33 28 F Student Public (MHC) rental contract Resp. 34 27 M Unemployed With grandma (involuntarily) Resp. 35 27 F Employed Sofa-surfer
services ‘are not for them’ since they do not consider themselves as having social problems. ‘My only problem is getting a place to stay’, explains one interviewee – a student who works extra hours at an electronics warehouse and has a stable income.
To find accommodation, to get a first-hand contract – that is my biggest obstacle right now. I just want to have my own apartment, which is difficult if you do not have contacts in Malm€o or have [not] been in queue for several years. (Resp. 12)
A first-hand rental apartment in South Sofielund would be the preferred housing choice of most informants. The average queue time for obtaining an apartment in Malm€o through the regional queue system, Boplats Syd, through which the MHC and 25 private landlords assign their apartments, is more than 3 years – but in South Sofielund, it is significantly longer. Moreover, even if the qualification regarding queue time has been fulfilled, young adults might still be rejected as tenants because of an irregular or insufficient income.
I have been in a queue for a rental apartment, and I finally got [an offer] from Boplats Syd, but since I am unemployed and have not met the requirements for unemployment benefit, they said I lack sufficient income [to secure the apartment]. So now I try to arrange with my parents so they can rent an apartment which I can live in. But it’s hard, you know. They have not been in the queue/ … /For now, I have to stay with my friend. (Resp. 24)
Most of the private landlords on the highly fragmented rental market in South Sofielund are small – owning on average eight apartments – and not connected to Boplats Syd. Instead, they make individual and rather arbitrary decisions for assigning rental contracts. Being dependent on benefits disqualifies young adults from accessing housing from these landlords, but even those with a regular income have a hard time. Three of the informants have been‘lucky’ to get an apartment from the private landlords through friends’ or parents’ contacts, but most of them have been chasing after the landlords (an email contact list has been circulating among young adults on social media) without success. As a result, many put their hopes in the MHC, as they are the property owner with the largest stock, are connected to the queue system, and are the only company in the area that accepts tenants who have a low income or are dependent on social benefits. But again, the queue-times are long.
Thus, even if rented housing is the preferred choice among the young adults in the study, the rental market is‘lost’. Several interviewees have given up hope of ever obtaining a rental apartment after many years of waiting, Instead, a few of the informants are reluctantly considering buying a cooperative apartment despite their relatively low income. Interestingly, this could be discussed in terms of an ‘inverted’ fallacy of choice (c.f. McKee et al., 2017). Rather than seeing homeownership as the preferred tenure but simultaneously a no-choice, rented housing is the preferred but inaccessible tenure for the young adults in this study. But as the outlooks are slim, some young adults are instead looking into buying a flat. However, and ultimately, the fallacy of choice is evident for most young people. Rising prices and stricter requirements from banks on cash deposits and amortizations have made it harder for young adults to enter the owned market. Respondents 13,18, 28 and 29 – who all have formal second-hand contracts – say they might get financial help from their parents, but the others do not have this possibility. Instead, their only hope is to take
out a high-interest personal loan for the cash contribution: ‘I don’t have a job, so I can’t save for the cash advance in order to buy an apartment. But I know there are [so-called] SMS loans which could help me’ (Resp. 34). In the end, the ‘fallacy of choice’ seems to include all tenures. There is no actual choice, and as the housing regime does not provide any safety-net for those who cannot choose, they face the dead end of the informal and illegal rental market.
5.2. The dead end: on quality, characteristics and stigmas
I have been living in ‘black market’ apartments, which were very shitty, to say the least. (Resp. 33)
Proceeding to the manifestations of housing inequality in terms of quality, the fragmentation of the property ownership structure in South Sofielund has proven to be a major challenge in developing safe and attractive environments. Some of the pri-vate property owners have a history of neglecting houses and apartments. They are referred to as ‘slumlords’ – landlords who make a business out of buying apartment blocks, neglecting them and then selling them on for profit, as the current housing shortage guarantees a market value rise over a short period of time (See, e.g., Lind & Blome, 2012). The fallacy of choice makes young adults feel obliged to accept what-ever is offered. Facing such a dead end, six respondents are illegally subletting in second-, third- and even fourth-hand apartments at steep rents, as the slumlords do not care who lives in the apartments and thus do not regulate the subletting. Some of the interviewees pay rent that is higher than for newly built apartments in Malm€o’s high-end areas. Afraid of losing their apartment, they dare not complain about high rents. And accordingly, as they sublet illegally, they dare not complain directly to the landlord about malfunctions or poor conditions.
Further, the neglect from such landlords has, according to the interviewees, resulted in residents giving up their hopes of ever living in a nice area and, conse-quently, develop a careless approach to their physical environment.‘It’s dirty, because people don’t care’ (Resp. 5), says one of the persons interviewed, who argues that because the landlords neglect the buildings, the tenants have little incentive to look after the houses and apartments. Several of the interviewees connect neglectful land-lords with a lack of safety and criminality on the open streets, meaning that irrespon-sible landlords attract criminal elements and vice versa. One thing is certain: the interviewees are tired of social unrest in South Sofielund. Interestingly though, the interviewees argue that the media exaggerates the negative image of the area, which contributes to the stigma. What is noteworthy is, however, that the informants feel heavily attached to the area, notwithstanding its bad reputation. They wouldn’t move to live elsewhere even if they actually had a choice.
The local authorities pin their hopes to changes in the ownership of the properties. The large property owner Willhem, owned by an investment buffer fund in the Swedish national income pension system, bought a number of houses in the area in 2011. They signalled distance from the short-term speculation principles by the slum-lords, and claimed that they were in it for the social responsibility:
There has been an ownership structure which has been completely financially ori-ented and with a short-term perspective. This implies that operations are managed differently than if you are an industrial, long-term player. (CEO of Willhem in Sydsvenska Dagbladet,2011, my translation)
However, after four years, Willhem sold the houses with a substantial profit but without having made any renovations. To be sure, the financialization of rented hous-ing does not seem to be profitable for young people, regardless if they are insiders or outsiders on the rental market.
5.3. The‘inbetweeners’ of the housing market
To sum up, most of the young adults bear witness of ending up on the losing side of housing inequality. Regarding access, they seem to be stuck in a no-man’s land, where they have limited access to any form of tenure. As none of the young adults in the study have their own financial resources (few have parental support) in order to enter the owned housing market, they are heavily dependent on the rental housing market, categorizing them as what is called Generation Rent (McKee et al., 2017). The results confirm previous research (Grander, 2017) on Swedish housing that shows how many young adults are outsiders on the public rental market because they have not had sufficient time in the queue nor the financial qualifications to obtain an apartment through the ordinary queue system, yet are not poor enough or have the social problems required for a secondary contract provided by the social services. Moreover, they are also outsiders on the private rental market. Entering this market on a formal basis is equally difficult, as private landlords’ models for assigning con-tracts are arbitrary and thus not only demand regular income but also – and more importantly– social networks and skills. The principles of the integrated rental mar-ket (Kemeny,2006) withers, as private operators pick and choose their tenants, while only the MHCs accept individuals with insecure income. As all choice of formal housing is ruled out, a dead end emerges where the informal– and illegal – housing market of second-hand contracts is the only remaining option.
The results suggest the existence a number of parallel housing markets, each with their own characteristics and qualities, their own formal and informal barriers and their own transactions. The young adults appear as the Inbetweeners of these markets, where the fallacy of choice inevitably leads them to the illegal market. Here, the trade-off for their access is steep rents, insecurity and, especially in the case of South Sofielund, precarious quality. However, for the Inbetweeners of the housing markets, such concessions are deemed necessary.
To the manifestations in forms of limited access, the findings disclose also the second category of manifestations: poor quality of housing – which has been rela-tively undiscussed in the contemporary Swedish housing context. What emerges is a neighbourhood-specific situation in South Sofielund, characterized by fragmented ownership and neglect of the apartments and buildings. Such neglect is arguably caused by the lack of housing and the increased financialization of the rental market – making it possible for landlords to take advantage of rising property values without having to maintain the property. Such a development may accelerate the decline of
the neighbourhood and the social turbulence and criminality in the area, counteract-ing potential gentrification in the wake of increased attractiveness among young adults.
To sum up: The limited access to all tenures and the financialized logics and poor quality of private rental housing could be said to form the bearing pillars of a local housing regime in South Sofielund, where the national housing regime’s forces of housing inequality are amplified.
6. ‘I can’t get on with my life’ – causes and consequences in the cycle of housing inequality
Following the multidimensional definition of housing inequality that this paper has suggested, the main cause for ending up as an Inbetweener is seemingly linked to resources. Limited supply of rental housing, high income barriers and steep second-hand rents make young adults dependent on own financial resources. The results thus confirm earlier findings on housing inequality as a result of the financialization of rental housing (Fields & Uffer,2016), leading to shortage of affordable and access-ible rental apartments. However, a stable income or parental wealth is not a guarantee for access to rental tenure: Resources in terms of queue-time, social know-how and networks are increasingly necessary to obtain a rental apartment. At the same time, rising prices and stricter mortgage conditions make young adults increasingly dependent on financial resources and parental wealth, the ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’, to gain access to the owned market.
As a consequence of the housing regime’s failure to achieve the aim of tenure neu-trality, renters are facing more relative costs for housing than those who have entered the owned market. Also, renters are disqualified from the ‘real-estate-as-an-accumula-tion-of-wealth’ race. Although rental apartments are the preferred choice for most respondents, one 25-year old student (Resp. 21), dream of buying a cooperatively owned apartment, only since they are associated with financial benefit: ‘It would be nice to ensure retirement capital’, he says, referring to friends the same age who have profited from their‘housing career’.
Subsequently, while resource inequality is a condition for the emergence of hous-ing inequality, the current houshous-ing regime also reproduces such inequality. Resource inequality can thus be seen as both a cause and a consequence of housing inequality.
The lack of access to rental housing has further consequences than steering young adults towards home-ownership and worsening economic inequality. The housing regime seems to create, reinforce and reproduce also other types of inequality. In terms of existential inequality, the dominating discourse (although not among the young people in this study) on ownership as the more desirable tenure and as a gen-erator of wealth accumulation might stigmatise young adults who – voluntarily or involuntarily – live in rented housing. And to add insult to injury, a South Sofielund address might also be stigmatizing for young adults. When discussing employment during an interview, one young woman laughed and said,‘I would not say that I live in [South] Sofielund when at a job interview. That would just lead to a lot of unnecessary questions, if you know what I mean’ (Resp. 2). The Inbetweeners risk
being regarded as second-class citizens, which could be argued to have far-reaching consequences in terms of access to the labour market, which limits the opportunities and future outlook in general for young adults. Also, living in households too crowded for peace and quiet implies existential consequences, which some young adults reflect on in regard to their studies: ‘when an apartment gets too crowded, children and young adults can never get peace and quiet to do their homework’ says respondent 11, who lives with his parents and siblings.
The perhaps most aggrieving consequence of existential inequality is how young adults in the study reveal how the transition to adulthood is postponed due to the lack of own housing. As described, the social democratic welfare regime is based on young adults moving away from home and leading individual lives. The lack of hous-ing opportunities for young adults seems to disrupt this logic. One 26-year-old who lives with his parents in South Sofielund explains that he does not feel like an adult and cannot start his own family:
I’m stuck in my boyhood room. And the funny thing is that my girlfriend is in the same situation– she also lives with her folks. So, she comes to stay with me and my parents. It’s strange, and often makes me quite annoyed with my parents. I’m 26, and I feel like when I was 15 [laughs]– sneaking silently through the door and hid-ing my life with my girlfriend from [my parents]. You know, we want to have our own kids, but it feels like we can’t get on with our life. (Resp. 36)
The young adults’ right to self-development and autonomy is seemingly cut short, as staying in your family home diminishes one’s sense of what it means to be an adult.
The consequences of housing inequality discussed here could further be argued to generate vital inequality, both in the short-term perspective and in the long run. All young people living in insecure conditions are having anxiety over not having long-term security in their housing, a mental stress that the six respondents living in first-hand rental housing does not reflect over. A few of the informants are or have been ‘sofa-surfers’. One woman, who states that her financial situation is ‘pretty good’, has been sleeping on various friends’ floors for more than three years. For a couple of months, she solved her acute housing situation by sleeping on a sofa at her school, where a teacher let her stay after class. However, such a solution had implications on her health:‘I lived on bread and candy, as I neither had a refrigerator nor a stove’, the woman (Resp. 35) states. The young adults’ experiences of poor housing conditions, sofa-surfing, and living without proper facilities directly affect their physical and mental health. However, and more importantly, the mechanisms that limit access to employ-ment and education might increase the vital inequality, as access to education and employment is directly connected to health, life expectancy, and of course, income and wealth accumulation (Marmot,2010). Again, fewer resources means more limited access to housing– and the cycle of housing inequality starts over again.
7. Conclusions
Firstly, this paper has illustrated the limited possibilities for many young adults to navigate the local housing market in order to get access to secure and good quality housing. The paper gives further evidence to the literature on the complexity and
variety of housing pathways (Clapham et al., 2014; Druta & Ronald, 2017) among young adults, but also illustrates how the possible pathways seem to become more limited as the rental sector is shrinking and becoming increasingly guided by financi-alization (Fields & Uffer,2016; Grander, 2019).
The paper has portrayed many of the young adults as Inbetweeners, stuck between several housing markets which are characterised by divergent barriers, qualities and transactions. What these markets all have in common is the‘fallacy of choice’, as sug-gested by McKee et al. (2017); most young adults have no choice at all but faces a dead end – the informal and illegal rental sector. The paper’s findings on the Inbetweeners recognises the existence of a Generation Rent (Dorling, 2014) also in other contexts than the UK. However, in line with the critique of Generation Rent from scholars such as McKee et al. (2017), the Inbetweeners is a heteregenous group, having very different financial preconditions and housing experiences, albeit increas-ingly excluded from the housing market. What differs Generation Rent from the Inbetweeners is that the former is seeing homeownership as the ideal tenure, but have to ‘cope’ with the rental tenure; while the Inbetweeners in many cases are pre-ferring public or private rental housing, but as this tenure is highly inaccessible, homeownership is seen a ‘necessary evil’. In practice, however, the Inbetweeners are – just as the Generation Rent – lacking the financial resources to access homeowner-ship. The fallacy of choice in the Swedish context means having no choice at all – but being left out to the illegal market.
While this fallacy of choice is a general conclusion, transferrable to young people in all larger cities, neighbourhood-specific circumstances have made the informal ren-tal sector in the disadvantaged area of South Sofielund especially precarious. The study has illustrated how a local housing regime has emerged, which is characterized by both a lack of access and a lack of quality not usually seen in the national housing regime. Thus, the case of young adults in South Sofielund might not be fully general-izable for the national context, the case study shows how the specific local circum-stances might aggravate national causes of housing inequality. Thus, the result adds to the literature about the rationality of the previously well-reputed Swedish housing regime in terms of inequality (Christophers, 2013; Listerborn, 2018) and the insuffi-ciency of public housing (Grander, 2019). Seemingly, the situation for many young adults has emerged as a result of a national housing regime which does not live up to its reputation. The shortage of accessible housing, the financialization of rental sector, the failure of tenure neutrality and high barriers for homeownership are drivers of making many young people in Sweden part of a housing precariat (Dorling, 2014; Listerborn,2018; McKee et al.2017), amplified in the local context of a disadvantaged area. Connecting the contextual and norm-deviating definition of housing inequality presented in this paper, the precarity is obviously deviating from the assumed com-monality of‘good housing for all’ in Swedish housing regime, as both ‘good housing’ and‘for all’ is clearly bracketed.
Secondly, this paper has discussed the precarity of young adults’ housing situation through a multidimensional perspective on inequality, contributing to the discussion on housing inequality through a critical realist approach integrating Therborn’s (2013) three-folded analytical framework. While the hitherto literature on housing
inequality has addressed the complex combinations of structural changes and individ-ual choices leading up to uneqindivid-ual distribution of housing, the presented research adds the perspective of how unequal housing outcome serves as a generative mechan-ism for not only resource inequality but also existential and vital inequality. While housing inequality must be seen as relational, this paper has mainly portrayed one of the sides of the relation– the majority of the informants have precarious housing sit-uations. Only a few have formal contracts and none have been able to access home-ownership to give witness about, for example, wealth accumulation due to market value increases. This says something about the situation for young people in general but especially in areas such as South Sofielund, which is among the most disadvan-taged areas in Sweden according to the police. It shows how young adults who have limited finances are at the greatest disadvantage. They are not only lagging behind in relation to wealth; they are hindered in their transition to adulthood; they become stigmatized, anxious about their future and increasingly lose out on opportunities for future education and work– factors that, in the long run, may have vital consequen-ces. The housing situation for many young adults appears to be a catch-22 situation, as those who are in the most precarious housing situation are precisely those with the fewest possibilities to obtain good housing.
As the research finds that many young adults, despite stable financial situations, fall between the‘markets’ also in the well-reputed Swedish housing regime, the policy impli-cations of this study might be to question the rationality of universal housing policy for an equal housing provision, not the least regarding young adults – or to add to the debate whether a precarious housing situation is actually part of being young.
The main theoretical contribution of the study is the suggestion of an expanded under-standing of housing inequality, arguably transferable to other contexts. Looking into resource, existential and vital dimensions when discussing causes, manifestations and wider consequences of inequality has proven to be suitable for the field of housing, and in particular to describe the situation for young adults. Such a multidimensional approach would be applicable for analysing housing inequality in any national housing regime. Finally, as this research has mainly portrayed one of the sides of the relational inequality, future studies should take greater efforts to examine both ends of housing inequality.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
This work was supported by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration [grant agreement no:320359].
Notes on contributor
Martin Granderis a researcher at Malm€o University, holding a PhD in Urban Studies. With a
background in political science, Grander has been researching and teaching on issues regarding the political aspects of the urban question since 2005. During recent years, Grander has been focusing on the urban housing provision and the changed role of the role of the state in the
national and local systems of housing provision. His PhD thesis was about the significance of contemporary Swedish public housing for urban housing inequalities. He is head of the research environment Studies in Housing and Welfare at Malm€o university and currently edit-ing an international book on housedit-ing with the workedit-ing title Handbook in Housedit-ing of Welfare.
ORCID
Martin Grander http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5896-2016
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