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ABSTRACT
A socially mixed population is a political ambition in Stockholm. By providing a mix of tenure alternatives throughout all neighbourhoods this objective could, at least partially, be fulfilled. Since current tenure proportions display a weak balance in many neighbourhoods it could be assumed that governing politicians – by primarily utilizing Stockholm’s vast landownership and municipal housing developers – attempt to bridge observed gaps. Distribution of new rental and ownership apartments in municipal land allocations should acknowledge the existing tenure composition in a neighbourhood. Methodically this article focuses on all (nearly 50,000) apartments channelled through Stockholm’s land allocation system between 2002 and 2012. After classification of all apartments based on tenure, location, year and developer (private or municipal) the information is merged with yearly housing stock characteristics for 128 neighbourhoods. The outcome is a unique data set allowing for statistical assessment of whether Stockholm’s tenure (and in extension social) mix ambition is reflected in practice. The present article aims to highlight the crucial importance of landownership in Swedish municipalities with an aspiration to achieve or maintain a balanced tenure mix. While the findings indicate Stockholm is complying fairly well with its ambition, the results do reveal some contradicting signs.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The terms ‘municipal developer’, ‘municipality-controlled developer’ and ‘municipal housing developer’ is used synonymously and all refer to a developer owned by the municipality (see more in Section 2).
2. Bodstöm (Citation1994) constitutes another prominent example of land allocations being used as empirical data for studying housing outcomes in Stockholm.
3. Municipalities still today have far-reaching legal power to, if necessary, expropriate land. Expropriation concerning land for housing is however practically non-existing nowadays and the financial support previously offered by the State for municipal land purchases vanished over two decades ago.
4. In a land allocation setting, the developer is economical viable for a project but does not necessarily undertake actual construction which might often be done by a sub-contracted constructor.
5. Since land allocations in Stockholm normally are assigned to developers early in the planning phase there could be, depending on the length of the planning process, a significant time-lag until construction.
6. Whereas private developers could be assigned land allocation for rental- and ownership housing, municipal developers usually get rentals only. In Stockholm all land allocations to municipal developers’ equal rentals.
7. For readers interested in this change we recommend Koglin and Pettersson (Citation2017) and Taşan-Kok and Baeten (Citation2011).
8. Of the rental category roughly 9% (788) concerns apartments aimed exclusively for students.
9. The municipality of Stockholm regularly publishes aggregated information (online) of assigned land allocations.
10. A fourth apartment type, resembling cooperative, are the condominium-like ‘owner apartments’. So far, none of has been assigned through land allocations in Stockholm and this type is thereby excluded in the present study.
11. From a tenant perspective, it should also be noted that the use-value system only puts marginal weight to the location-parameter. Otherwise equivalent rental apartments (private and public) thereby have similar rent and thus, theoretically, facilitate a socio-economical mix even in attractive locations, such as the inner city.
12. This is currently the case in, for example, Stockholm where the governing politicians recently further decreased the income requirements for apartments in their own stock (i.e. their public rentals).
13. This mainly follows from current rent restriction, applying to public- as well as private rental apartments, favors constructions of ownership apartments that generally produces higher and more instant revenue for developers.
14. Looking beyond the primary ‘tenure mix’-focus in this article it should be stressed that Andersson and Magnusson Turner (Citation2014) comes to the overwhelming conclusion that, on at least a more general level, conversions contribute negatively to ‘social mix’.
15. It should, however, be noted that the political view on promoting ownership always been far from uniform. The political majority governing each municipality consequently have a substantial impact on the degree to which this policy has been implemented – not least concerning conversion of public rental apartments.
16. Of all 131 neighborhoods, three did not have sufficient data each year, resulting in 128 neighborhoods being left for analysis.
17. As of March 2016, 1 € (euro) equals about 9.3 SEK.
18. It should be reasonable to assume that more land is available further away from the determined city centre and that income correlates positively with land- and property prices.
19. Here the results of the model estimating the excess zeros have been left out.
20. It is here ‘maliciously’ presumed that politicians are relatively short-termed and economically constrained.