The Housing Careers of Turkish Households in Middle-sized Swedish Municipalities

Abstract

This paper examines how Turkish households adjust their housing consumption to their needs by making a housing career. The study was conducted in three middle-sized municipalities in the central part of Sweden: Gävle, Västerås and Jönköping. The longitudinal analysis is based on specially processed census data, and is limited to the period 1975-90. The study focuses on the housing choice by Turkish immigrants put into the conceptual framework of the life course. The supply of dwellings and their accessibility as well as the households' resources as constraining factors are explicitly recognised. This study reports a strong impact of higher income and increased household size on the households' moves to larger dwellings, and, in some cases, a move from rented into owner-occupied dwellings. This is in accordance with results from earlier residential mobility studies. Therefore, it would be expected that Turks go through more or less the same housing career as indigenous households, in this case as Swedes, but this is not true. The study reports that Turkish immigrant households are less likely to move out of the municipal rented sector and have a higher probability of remaining in certain immigrant-dense areas of the municipality than indigenous Swedish households.

Keywords:

• Housing Career
• Life-COURSE
• Immigrants
• Residential Mobility