1 Introduction
racial capitalism produces “migrants” and “refugees” as relative surplus populations, and regulates movement and (im)mobility; especially in relation to the structures and processes of racialization, racialized fixation, and profit extraction at the urban scale. This is particularly true regarding refugee reception, accommodation, and housing, as they are increasingly governed in the urban realm, and are intertwined with distinctively racial logics of neoliberal urban governance, interacting with the wider and historical patterns of racialized exclusion and dispossession, racialized markets, and growing levels of race-based displacement. (Kreichauf, 2023, p. 472)
The right to a dwelling is considered internationally to be a basic human right,1 and so it is regarded by Swedish law.2 The ultimate responsibility for providing refugees with housing and other settlement requirements is with the municipality where people live (Lag 2000:1383). Nevertheless, the Swedish model for housing provision has been on the decline for decades now (Listerborn, 2018; Grundström & Molina, 2016; Listerborn & Molina, 2022), a development occurring alongside a process of intensifying racialization (Andersson & Molina, 2003; Molina, 2018). In 1991, the right-wing administration in power dismantled the regulated housing regime that had characterized Sweden’s housing policy from the post-WWII period, by transferring both risk and responsibility for housing provision to market actors. As such, the 1990s marked the end of the former model for housing provision in Sweden and the beginning of a new market-oriented era for housing policy (Grander, 2017; Rogat, 2022; Grundström & Molina, 2016; Forskarkollektivet Fundament, 2023).
Since then, marking an important shift in the collective consciousness regarding the notions of home and the right to housing, it has been strongly emphasized that housing should be seen as a commodity, not as a right (Hedin et al., 2012, p. 444; Bengtsson, 2001). Further, coupled with the immensely difficult task of finding adequate, affordable, and stable housing in metropolitan areas due to housing shortages, expensive rents in the newly constructed housing stock, as well as high prices when buying, housing can hardly any longer be considered a general right accessible for all to claim (Listerborn, 2018). Additionally, the housing stock produced during the so-called “record years” (1960–1975) has since about 2010 been subjected to a process of housing renewal that has been shown to result in high rental rises and renoviction (renewal + eviction) (Baeten et al., 2017; Polanska et al., 2024). Further, studies show increasingly challenging threshold effects and obstacles for households with lower incomes to be able to attain housing in the new production stock (Elmgren et al., 2017; Grander et al., 2018; Grander, 2018).
Also of relevance for this chapter is the fact that Sweden has long been an immigration country, which facilitated the construction of the strong and universalist welfare state that characterized the country until the end of the 1980s.
Here, we bring together scholarship on racial capitalism, urban migration governance and housing policy. We offer an in-depth exploration of the nexus between a dysfunctional and racialized housing market and refugee admission, analysed through the lens of the theoretical framework of racial capitalism. For this purpose, we conducted a case study in one municipality in a metropolitan area, focusing on refugee housing policies and strategies in the aftermath of the 2015 increased arrival of refugees to Sweden. Empirically, this study is based on interviews with officials carried out in the fall of 2023 and spring of 2024. Four municipal officials3 who deal specifically with planning and implementing the dispersal program called the Settlement Act, refugee reception and refugee housing were interviewed. The officials are not politicians, but their interpretations of political decisions can greatly influence the carrying out of policy. Additionally, they influence policy output through their ability to initiate efforts and projects. The analysis also builds upon policy documents, as well as previous literature. The aim is to use expanded literature on racial capitalism (Robinson, 2000 [1983]; Bhattacharyya, 2018; Fields & Raymond, 2021; Clare et al., 2022) to explore the connections between a dysfunctional and racialized housing market and a racialized population in urgent need of housing, as it has been with the groups of refugees from the Global South arriving in the country in 2015 and the following years.
According to Listerborn (2021), a dysfunctional housing market is one in which the existing system of housing provision has lost its capacity to solve the housing question for those in need of shelter, exacerbating the situation of precariousness for low-income and other vulnerable groups. “Dysfunctional housing politics reinforce inequalities and enclose existing neoliberal power relations,” Listerborn (2021, p. 1317) clarifies. As such, this dysfunctionality is characterized by negative, and at times detrimental consequences for low-income groups. Many scholars associate the worsening of access to housing for marginalized groups in Sweden, with the neoliberal turn in society in general and the system of housing provision in particular (Listerborn, 2021, Listerborn & Molina, 2022; Kollektivet Fundament, 2023). Listerborn (2021) characterizes these worsening conditions under the neoliberal housing regime as a process of precarization of housing.
At the same time, the housing market in Sweden is highly functional and beneficial for capital interests which are – and have long been – able to capitalize greatly from Swedish housing market conditions. Christophers (2021) show in a comparative study focusing on Sweden, Germany, Denmark and the US how the investment company Blackstone was able to profit from the open rent gap in tenants housing, and in the case of Sweden and the US – close it. In 2016 Blackstone invested in the property development company Carnegie (later renamed Hembla). The company owned an extensive amount of housing in suburban metropolitan areas mostly built during the million-housing program4 ; neighbourhoods not seldom racialized, densely migrant populated and identified in stigmatizing ways as “vulnerable or socially exposed neighbourhoods”, a categorization originally launched by the Swedish police but now widely used in policy. The categorization relies on a thoroughly racialized construction of “vulnerable areas” as the source of problems related to segregation – as such vulnerable areas are depicted as the source rather than an effect of segregation. Nevertheless, these neighbourhoods are rather characterized by higher degrees of deprivation resulting from a lack of social and financial investment and the exploitation by private economic interests (see Schierup, Ålund & Kellecioglu, chapter 12 in this volume).
Blackstone e.g. was able to capitalize from the rent gap created by the lack of renovation and updates done in these neighbourhoods and, to these building, during the decades since construction in 1960s–1970s. Blackstone bought significant shares in Carnegie, renovated the housing units, raised rents significantly and then sold their shares. Blackstone is just one among several foreign companies that entered the housing market in Sweden, marking a new era of speculative rental housing ownership and management.
In 2011, after twenty years of neoliberal housing policy, a legal act (Lag 2010:879) crowned the project of marketization of the housing sector. The new legislation encouraged state and municipal housing companies to act profitably according to market logic. The contemporary political choices in housing have further worsened an already difficult housing situation for low-income groups (Westin, 2011; Thörn et al., 2023).
We ground our understanding of the racialized Swedish society on earlier research that has provided robust evidence on the racialization of labor (Mulinari & Neergaard, 2023, 2005; de los Reyes, 2002), the welfare system (Mulinari & Neergaard, 2022) and the racialization of housing and the urban (Molina, 1997; Andersson & Molina, 2003). Later interpretations of the relation between capitalist social relations and the racialization of migration have found good help in the theoretical framework of racial capitalism, which is the case for our study as well. We take our point of departure from the ways in which racial capitalism particularly operates in the case of the Swedish racial state (Goldberg, 2001). The chapter is structured as follows.
The analysis starts with an outline of the Swedish policy and the political discursive responses to what should be rightly defined as The Solidarity Crisis of 2015. As argued by Bhagat (2021), the term “crisis” refers to the receiving country’s management of mostly African and Middle Eastern asylum seekers as they flee conflict and attempt to enter the European Union. “That is to say, the migration ‘crisis’ is only named as such because the bodies seeking entry into Europe are dark-skinned and thus, demonized” (Bhagat, 2021, p. 634). We present the reader with some crucial changes taking place in connection to the year 2015 and move to situate these changes within a wider frame of migrant exclusion based on previous research on racialized inequality in Sweden.
In the two subsequent sections, we discuss the interviews, engaging in a discussion about how the housing market dysfunctionalities operate in a racially differentiated context in which refugee migration and the need of housing occur at the local level. Here we turn to some core examples with both dramatic and subtle consequences of local policy. In the last section, we offer a conclusion.
2 Racial Capitalism and Contemporary Migration in Europe
Capitalism is prone to create, recreate and use differentiation and divide. It lives on arbitrary and ambiguous dichotomies, such as “black and white,” “foreign and native” or “free and dependent.” Like Gutierrez Rodriguez (2018), we base an important part of our argument on the framework of Anibal Quijano’s (2007) “coloniality of power,” or what the author calls the “coloniality of migration.” The formation of the imaginary racial Other has been, and still is, necessary to justify genocides, enslavement and super exploitation of populations. This is, according to Cedric Robinson (2000 [1983]), the ground for all forms of capitalist accumulation and exploitation of labor since colonial time – capital needs difference. In this colonial logic, the construction of the migrant Other has been central for understanding the “refugee question” in terms of the precarious conditions that migrants from the South experience in contemporary Europe.
We would like to begin by inviting the reader to think with us about what racial capitalism as a concept does for our analysis on contemporary accommodation of refugees, particularly in Sweden. We are aware that racial capitalism, as with many other theoretical attempts to explain power relations in different times and in a variegated set of locations, is not the same everywhere (Bhattacharyya, 2024, p. 124). As Goldberg (2001) explains, every racial state has its own history, and it is also the case in Sweden. Most works on racial capitalism refer to labor; only a few refer to housing, but most of these are based in the United States and the United Kingdom. There is an evident lack of research seeking to understand housing inequality from the perspective of racial capitalism in general, and in Europe and Sweden in particular.
Racial capitalism is for us here not an answer; it is rather the theoretical frame that will allow us to interrogate how capital acts in concordance with racialization to produce a detrimental housing condition for refugees in Swedish society. Racial capitalism acknowledges and puts into view aspects that a focus on the global and formal economy might veil. The concept of racial capitalism can thus help unveil some of the innovations and techniques through which inequality persists and transforms (Bhattacharyya, 2024, p. 2). Bhattacharyya suggests an understanding of racial capitalism “as a set of processes that distribute populations into racialised categorisations and racialised [sic] opportunities as part of the process of accumulation” (2024, p. 3).
Consequently, we conceive of migration and racial capitalism as two intertwined phenomena in contemporary Europe. During 2015 and 2016, more than 2.5 million new asylum claims were made to the European Union countries. In Sweden alone, close to 163 000 people applied for refuge just in 2015. In response, the Swedish migration policy and long-standing ideology were drastically and radically changed, from a relatively generous refugee reception with the highest proportion of permanent residence permits in the EU, to a considerably more restrictive and minimum rights-focused migration regime, including only granting temporary residence permits for asylum seekers (Jutvik, 2020; Hansen, 2022). Besides the changes regarding residence permits, the restrictive turn in migration policy includes changes in labor, income and housing requirements for converting temporary permits into permanent residency; implementing a dispersal system called The Settlement Act (Lag 2016:38); restricting possibilities for family unification; and limiting the rights of migrants in choosing which neighbourhood to reside in. Although Sweden has seen recent radical changes in migration policy, it is important to note that this current political landscape is also a continuation of a dividing system that has been prevalent for decades (Khosravi, 2009), albeit taking different forms and communicated by different discourses.
Although the changes following the events in 2015 were unquestionably radical, the shift in attitude toward migration and migrants’ rights did not appear in a vacuum after this great refugee migration of 2015; rather, the move toward a less generous stance on migration has been ongoing from the 1960s, when Sweden implemented harsher legislation on labor migration. Even earlier, research has revealed, dominant political debates from the 1930s and forward highlighted an official reluctance towards migration to solve the Swedish demographic deficit caused by a mass emigration flow in the turn of the century 1800–1900. This reluctance was motivated by a desire not to have “the country be flooded by immigrants from countries with alien races” (Myrdal & Myrdal, 1935, as cited in Molina, 1997, p. 74).
As such, it is crucial to situate the shift in Swedish migration politics within a broader historical frame of pre-existing migrant exclusion and racial inequality. Sweden’s relatively recent policy changes reflect not (only) a response to acute challenges but deeper-seated patterns of racialized disparity and systemic exclusion that predate The Solidarity Crisis. Sweden stands out among the OECD countries for its growing social inequality (Schierup et al., 2020, p. 93), and the migrant population is more likely to experience “material deprivation than native born people” (OECD, 2017, p. 66). As such, racism can be defined as the ongoing process of producing inequality and differentiation along racialized lines. However, in Sweden, discussions about race and racism are largely avoided. Instead, the focus shifts to political categories such as “migrants” and “foreign-born individuals,” or the term “race” is replaced with “ethnicity” (Osanami Törngren, 2022). This replacement of terminologies carries significant implications for understanding inequality. By attributing disparities to factors like time spent in the country, cultural or national background, and the perceived inherent differences, attention is diverted from the structurally created underlying racial inequalities present. Notwithstanding the reluctance to address racism directly, structural disparities are evident in capital and housing ownership, wage disparities, education, and political participation (see Mulinari & Neergaard, 2010, 2022; Jedrzejewska & Spehar, 2019; Behtoui et al., 2019; Wind & Hedman, 2018). And notably, disparities tend to persist over generations across various domains. Schierup and Ålund (2011) have argued that the Swedish development, or rather degradation – from a society of exceptionalism, universalism, tolerance, and multiculturalism that extended rights to all people residing within its borders, to a neoliberal state – has substantially eroded what was previously a relatively egalitarian framework.
The aspects explaining the continuum of racial inequality are many and complexly interwoven. Long-standing discrimination and racism in the labor market, the housing system, the school system, among other societal arenas, are all crucial aspects. As is the tax system that claims equal tax from refugees as it does from citizens, no matter the type of residence permit. As such, refugees are being exploited by means of subordinated subjects within the capitalist core but not allowed to enjoy rights on equal grounds as other fully taxed groups. As stated by Fraser (2022), they end up in a situation of being “lucky enough” to be forced into a position of exploitation. Their labor power is incorporated into the movement of capital for accumulation. But importantly, they are not to be confused with a “free labor force” that sells its labor power, because to remain in the country it is, following the changes in 2015, by no means an option; on the contrary, it is forced, in all senses of the meaning. Without stable earnings from labor, the threat of permanent temporariness or of deportation looms. To convert a temporary residence permit into a permanent one, it is required that the applicant has stable and secure employment. To reunite with family in Sweden, it is required from the applicant to have a stable income high enough to support all family members, as well as a stable housing situation. For the fulfilment of those requirements, the role of the municipality in referral is crucial.
3 The Intersection between Housing Market Dysfunctionalities and Refugee Reception
To ensure participation among all municipalities in the refugee reception work following 2015, when 163 000 asylum seekers arrived in Sweden, a dispersal system called the Settlement Act (Lag 2016:38) was introduced in March 2016. Under this legislation, municipal reception and housing provision for refugees granted residence permits, whether temporary or permanent, became mandatory rather than negotiable as before. The government determines the allocation of individuals to different municipalities through this dispersal program. The Settlement Act applies to individuals who resided in accommodations provided by the Swedish Migration Agency during the asylum process. Additionally, it includes individuals granted residence permits based on family reunification. The Settlement Act does not take housing availability in municipalities into consideration. Instead, the dispersal of people is calculated based on population size, the local labor market, the total number of adults and unaccompanied children referred through the dispersal system, and the number of asylum seekers already living in the municipality.5 In the preparatory work for the legal text, it reads that:
The Government’s intention is that the municipalities should offer the new arrivals who are covered, as far as it is possible, permanent housing. However, it cannot be ruled out that municipalities will have to offer temporary housing in order to be able to fulfill their obligation. In order not to limit the flexibility that is necessary for the municipalities to be able to offer accommodation of a more temporary nature, the Government considers that it is not appropriate that the Act regulates the type of accommodation referred to. (Prop. 2015/16:54, p. 18 [original in Swedish, our translation])
As illustrated in the above excerpt from the preparations to the Settlement Act, it states that the government’s intent is that municipalities should work to provide sustainable and long-term settlement for refugees assigned. However, the law does neither specify any duration or quality standards for the housing that should be provided by municipalities, nor the financial and political tools needed for housing provision according to the proposition’s demand. Consequently, there are considerable variations among Swedish municipalities regarding their interpretation of the Settlement Act. Recently, the National Audit Office issued a report evaluating the outcomes of the Act. The report is named The Settlement Act – did the reform live up to the intentions? (Riksrevisionen, 2021:29 [original in Swedish, our translation]). In light of how the intentions are formulated in the preparations, the title of the audit report suggests that the stability and permanence offered in housing would be evaluated. However, the audit report focuses on whether or not the legislation contributed to shorter times for municipal reception, spreading refugees more evenly across the country and increasing labor market participation. Considering these aspects, the report concludes that the Settlement Act was successful and did live up to the intentions. But, as noted, the report lacks focus on individuals and does not analyse to any length how this legislation affected stability and permanence, the right to housing or different outcomes for the refugees depending on the interpretations implemented in the municipality of referral. The Settlement Act only grants automatic state funding for municipalities for the initial two-year period upon reception. Consequently, the rationale of impermanence over permanence simmers through the national down to the local levels, creating differential inclusion of groups in Sweden. The Settlement Act compelled municipalities to devise local solutions. While some of these solutions are somehow effective, they raise questions about equal inclusion given the varying approaches among municipalities (Jansson-Keshavarz & Nordling, 2022). This disparity in reception, coupled with a dysfunctional housing market, impacts who benefits from the system and highlights social and racial inequalities in housing opportunities and support services across different regions. Some municipalities might have more resources and political will and thus offer comprehensive support to the newcomers. Others, particularly those with fewer resources, might struggle to provide even basic housing and support, exacerbating inequalities and marginalization. Further complicating the issue of housing for refugees is the fact that, while many municipalities use the public housing stock (allmännyttan) to steer the market along certain social lines and have done so in relation to refugee housing policies, others, like Nacka municipality (Fastighetsvärlden, 2017), have entirely gotten rid of their public housing stock by converting it or selling it to private developers, thus forfeiting the possibility to steer the local housing market. The public housing companies were, together with the municipalities, obliged through political assignments to partake in providing housing through the Settlement Act, and as such they had a social obligation. This obligation is not directed at private housing companies.
The lack of definitions about time and quality for reception in the Settlement Act, together with the state’s withdrawal from its housing responsibilities (Sahlin, 2004, 2015; Christophers, 2013; Knutagård, 2018), has conceivably fostered geographies of differential inclusion because it is coupled with the housing deficit crisis, a crisis that hits precarious groups the hardest (Listerborn, 2018, 2020; Listerborn et al., 2020). Addressing these disparities requires renewed state involvement and support to ensure that all municipalities have the resources necessary to provide equitable housing and services, promoting a more inclusive society (Forskarkollektivet Fundament, 2023). While some municipalities offer permanent housing for migrants settling via the Settlement Act, implying a view on housing as a resource facilitating integration, others offer temporary housing for a minimum of two years, implying a responsibility perspective where the individual will need to secure the necessary resources to then be granted permanent housing (Holmqvist et al., 2022, p. 5). Refugees referred to municipalities applying a restrictive housing policy and thus granting only temporary housing are often left to fend for themselves on the regular housing market after their temporary housing contract expires (Jansson-Keshavarz & Nordling, 2022). In a recent study on the pathways toward stable housing among refugees in Sweden, Herbert (2023) found that it takes on average six years to find a more permanent housing solution. In 1995 more than 80% of Swedish municipalities experienced a housing surplus, whereas twenty years later, a housing shortage was instead reported by more than 80% of the municipalities.
In Sweden, there are different formal routes toward securing housing, all requiring different resources. One is through the real-estate market, which requires financial capital and secure employment to be granted a loan from the bank. Further, one needs savings or a private loan because 15% of the mortgage needs to be paid up front. Apart from taking time to attain, these resources are totally unrealistic to fulfill for newly arrived refugees, and the formal requisites of the private housing market turn into discrimination practices against migrants. A second path is to instead try to attain a rental contract, for which there are public and private queue systems containing both private and publicly managed housing. Given the current affordable rental housing shortage in metropolitan areas, to secure a rental housing contract on a formal basis is almost impossible in the short term. For many people, this leaves the sole option of living in the informal sublet housing market. This market is unregulated, expensive and, as research has revealed, often discriminatory on an everyday racist basis (Herbert, 2023).
Further, research has shown a great disconnectedness between refugee housing policy and the reality these policies are implemented in. Municipalities have motivated their application of time restricted contracts, not seldom as short as two years, by stating a “hope” that this will have provided refugees with sufficient time in the queue, knowing nonetheless that the average time in the housing queue is sometimes up to five times as long (Wikström & Eriksson, 2023). Consequently, migrants are often put in situations of housing precariousness manifesting itself through chaotic housing pathways (Hochstenbach & Boterman, 2015; Herbert, 2023). These pathways for migrants often entail long, difficult, unstable, stressful, and often expensive routes to gaining one’s own house or apartment. In other words, the Swedish rental housing market is keeping refugees and other migrants out and functioning as discriminatory toward this group on several bases: structurally, through its dysfunctionality and as a corollary of the neoliberal turn of housing policies; through everyday racism in the informal spheres of housing provision; and through institutional discrimination given the incapacity/lack of interest of state institutions to solve the problem of accommodation.
Thinking with Bhattacharyya, racial capitalism can help us map the “emergence of a landscape or machinery or a grid where the components of differential dispossession and disentitlement are established” (2024, p. 10). In refugee reception and accommodation systems, the differentializing is made, quite arbitrarily, through the right to housing. A recent directive to limit asylum seekers’ rights to settle in the municipalities instead of living in the Swedish Migration Agency accommodations while waiting for their residence permits (SOU 2022:64) illustrates this logic of differential dispossession. Refugees in the asylum determination process are today allowed to choose to either live in accommodation offered by the Swedish Migration Agency with a full housing subsidy or find their own housing (Lag 1994:137) but then without the housing subsidy. The proposal to restrict this option of settlement has been foregrounded by a decade-long debate (see, for example, Riksdagen, 2002, 2006, 2013, 2016), grounded in a hegemonic and racialist understanding of urban segregation and social neighbourhood quality connected to the amount of asylum seekers in the neighbourhood. This is what researchers have called the racialization of the city (Molina, 1997; Andersson & Molina, 2003), a process in which the people and the areas they inhabit are stigmatized, demonized and criminalized. As Bhattacharyya (2024, p. 10) argues, in the present time of capital reworkings there is an extension of bordering practices that involve and encompasses states and other actors creating a system of capture, closing of mobilities for some and, importantly, a criminalization machinery. This criminalization machinery has successfully coupled the racialized neighbourhoods and their inhabitants with criminal activity. Criminalization of migration, or “crimmigration” (Bhattacharyya, 2024, p. 93), has been operating for a long while in Sweden (Ericsson et al., 2002; Schclarek Mulinari, 2020) and is a consistent part of the process of racialization of the Swedish cities. The government proposal intensely restricting the right of asylum seekers to settle in a municipality instead of living in the Swedish Migration Agency accommodation is assumed to be implemented in 2026 (Dir. 2024:47). Besides intensified urban racialization and criminalization, the proposal disregards research showing that the option of settlement in a municipality for asylum seekers has contributed greatly to labor market participation outcomes (Bevelander et al., 2019) and rather focuses on the presumed positive outcomes on segregation and municipal cost reduction.
4 A Municipal Case Study: Refugee Settlement and the Dysfunctionalities of the Housing Market
As illustrated thus far in this chapter, housing provision is a municipal responsibility. The task of housing refugees’ lands in the hands of the local officers who have to navigate among different alternatives to manage the difficult situation of providing housing within a system of affordable housing scarcity. Our results show that the municipality in focus for this research has applied three main strategies: 1) special efforts for families with children; 2) public–private agreements; and 3) giving housing guidance. We understand these strategies as moving within a hybrid economic political system (Christophers, 2013), in which neoliberal politics coexist with remnants of the abandoned welfare system. We present our findings and analysis according to these logics in the following section.
4.1 A Welfare Policy Logic: Special Efforts for Families with Children
The Settlement Act created a new policy landscape and new issues were foregrounded, and thus new ways of dealing with issues were made possible for officials working with reception and settlement at the local level. Sometimes, the municipalities implement targeted policies that are more proactive. The studied municipality has since 2021 carried out a project targeting families with children, offering them an additional contract, in another apartment, after the initial five-year municipal contract expires. These families have not been able to arrange other housing solutions and are therefore at risk of becoming homeless and being placed in the social services’ short-term temporary emergency housing, which is often renewed on a weekly basis. The additional contract offered through the project was, after some time, decided to be possible to transform into a permanent one for these families.
A project was started, not by the politicians but they were informed. Our then director, plus the directors of the municipal housing companies, they all gathered and the directors of the four social administrations made a project about short-term housing for families with children. Those families got another year and a half and then, when that started to come to an end – the average time in the housing queue is eight years and a half to get a three-room apartment, so a further decision was made that families with children in short-term contracts could be able to take over their contracts under certain conditions. If they have behaved according to the Tenancy Act and live up to a number of requirements set by politics, we can ask the property owners if they can take over their contracts. (Interview with municipal official 3)
This project was prolonged in 2023, however not without contestation. A member of the public appealed the project with the motivation of it breaking with the principle of equality stated in the municipal law (Kommunallagen 2017:725) The core argument in the appeal is excerpted below:
The decision pits groups against each other, where the advantage in practice is based on factors such as origin and length of stay in Sweden. It also means that the decision is in conflict with the Discrimination Act’s prohibition against discrimination on the basis of ethnicity. All families with children are inevitably affected by the current housing situation. [The Municipality] has a satisfactory safety net to ensure that no family with children becomes acutely homeless and can in most cases solve the housing situation so that the children do not have to change schools or friends. The only reasonable thing is that the families with children who, after a total of six and a half years of special solutions, have not arranged their own housing are covered by the same social safety net as other families with children. [The Municipality] is the municipality of residence of the person assigned and has to treat him or her in the same way as other residents, unless there are objective reasons for otherwise. Distressing circumstances do not in themselves constitute grounds for special treatment. Neither the Settlement Act nor the preparatory work for it support the claim that municipalities have the right to give assigned new arrivals priority to housing, or that assignment would be an objective reason for circumventing the municipal principle of equality, either in the case of families with children or other new arrivals. Giving a contract to a small group of housing applicants is not treating everyone in the same situation equally. The Settlement Act imposes the same requirements on all municipalities. It is therefore legally uncertain that the obligation to offer housing ceases for two years in a municipality while other municipalities use the Settlement Act as an argument for circumventing the principle of equality after four years.6
The court ruled in favour of The Municipality, but the appeal illustrates differentiation in action based on notions of equality and deservingness. Further, this arbitrary differentiation of humans in turn creates hierarchies that organize the distribution of resources. Why the families were not granted the permanent contract to begin with (and people without children never) was explained by an inter-municipal conflict. The local political parties could not agree on a reception system based on permanence and it was believed that permanent contracts for refugees would cause negative reactions of unfairness among the population. As such, the additional contract for families with children was only made possible because it was carried out within a project initiated by officials within The Municipality, not by the political rule. What is illustrated with the example of The Municipality’s housing projects for families with children is the increasing trend toward a projectification of inclusion or integration policies. This project, and similar ones (Jedrzejewska & Spehar, 2019), cannot be conceived of as a permanent feature of the local refugee policy and concurringly this project was suspended at the end of 2024. Instead, officials are initiating various efforts that are only granted financing for a couple of years. After that they are either shut down or a new application process for funding begins. When asked about why permanence has not been part of the local government strategy for housing the refugees, one official state that:
It’s simply that it’s too controversial; they [the local politicians] think that the public would react negatively to this group being allowed to be prioritized and cut in line. That it is unfair to others who are also in the housing queue for many, many years but never get a larger apartment and who also have vulnerable situations. So, they don’t want to create that discussion about an injustice. (Interview with municipal official 1)
This quote mirrors what Gilroy (2000) calls a racialized structure of emotions. According to the principle of equality in the municipal law (the law that regulates what constitutes municipal affairs), all Swedish municipalities are obliged to treat all residents equally. In times of adequate resources, this principle would serve its universal purpose as people would have equal opportunity to attain the resources they need, on the same premises. However, in a racialized society, when resources are made scarce, equal treatment shifts into notions of deservingness along racial lines:
this with the time-restricted housing contracts is because there is a housing queue, and also the justice aspect […] [The Municipality] wants to the largest extent to make it possible for new people to move here but you have a dilemma because you don’t want to be unfair towards people already living here. (Interview with municipal official 2)
“Equal treatment” is a flexible concept that, depending on the political and economic context, can either reinforce inclusion or exclusion. Although it may appear neutral or fair, its application can exacerbate inequalities, especially for vulnerable groups like refugees. The logic of equal treatment that promises inclusion for people in need but delivers restrictions rises out of a politics of austerity. As such, the concept of equality can, when operationalized, instead serve the process of racial differentiation, where the way resources are distributed can still favor some groups over others, creating inequality despite claims of equality. The notion of “fairness” is often invoked to justify unequal treatment in resource distribution. For instance, politicians may argue that providing refugees with permanent housing is “unfair” to others, but this logic protects a system of unequal opportunities by limiting what is given to marginalized groups, like refugees, which can prevent broader social resistance or upheaval (Danewid, 2023).
Within a setting of understanding “right to resources” rather as “deserving of resources,” the categorization of people as “refugees” serves an important purpose; it is made to represent the carrier of the crisis – in this case, the housing deficiency crisis. The concept of equal treatment is often framed as inclusive, suggesting that everyone in need (like refugees) will be treated the same. However, in times of limited resources, this logic often results in restrictions rather than inclusivity. It may be claimed that everyone is treated equally, but in reality, limits are imposed on access to resources because there isn’t enough to go around. Further, a creation of an Other as a threat to the order diffuses the origins of resource scarcity, i.e. that is the result of political choices concerning the supply of welfare goods. The construction of scarcity justifies spending cuts and welfare retrenchments. Instead, it becomes perceived as a struggle among and between people over these scarce resources (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2018) and this is most apparent in housing policy, particularly in terms of refugee housing. It is about (re)distribution and political and public conflict (Dahlstedt & Neergaard, 2019, p. 203). In the court appeal excerpted above, the diverse responses to the Settlement Act are used as a means to advocate for a minimum rights approach referring to ideas about equality, as such resource distribution is motivated by the discursive expression of equal treatment, and fairness.
Recently The Municipality, used here as a case study made agreements with surrounding municipalities in the region to distribute assigned refugees to those municipalities instead, thus lowering the number of refugees coming to The Municipality through the dispersal system significantly. When one official was asked about how this had been motivated, they said that:
It’s a political decision, it has nothing to do with us working as officials. On the contrary, we think it is better to take more people. We have built up this capacity that is dependent on The Municipality taking a few hundred people every year. But I think that the local government wants to signal that we should instead focus on working with integration concerning those already here and not admit so many new people. (Interview with municipal official 1)
This official was then asked if this signal had entailed new directives or assignments for working with integration, and if so, how these were formulated. The person then responded that:
No, this is nothing that has come to our department. We share part of the responsibility for the housing provision, part of the reception system with another department that focuses more on the administrative issues making sure people are listed everywhere they need to be. But no, I don’t know, I don’t think they have gotten any clear new directives or assignments either but, well I don’t know, I’m speculating now but it might just be signal politics. (Interview with municipal official 1)
Responding to the same question about how the decision to ask other municipalities to take parts of the refugees assigned to The Municipality had been motivated, another official expressed that:
The politicians formulated this request to other municipalities in the region as allowing them to take a bigger responsibility because they [the politicians] believe that [The Municipality] has historically taken a relatively bigger part of the responsibility than other municipalities have. (Interview with municipal official 3)
The decision to implement the Settlement Act by offering time-restricted, non-permanent housing for refugees seems not to be open for alterations, even though the influx of people has drastically declined. Arguably, this is because the circumstances that served as a defense for the original stance are in fact redundant. No matter the circumstances, the allocation of resources can be differentiated through the notion of deservingness along the neoliberal logics (Kundnani, 2021). This illustrates how the “contemporary debates on the need to control the entry and settlement of ‘refugees’ are not substantiated by facts” (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2018, p. 18).
4.2 A Neoliberal Logic: Private–Public Agreements
accommodation for refugees is tied to, structured by, and developed within the logics of racial capitalism. It serves to continuously construct refugees as the racial “other” and to make them relational surplus populations for capital accumulation and profit extraction under racial capitalism. (Kreichauf, 2023, p. 472)
The project of securing refugee housing in the cities often involves public–private partnership and collaborations (Darling, 2016), as was the case in The Municipality, which entered into agreements with the private housing sector to acquire housing units for the assigned refugees. Although similar public–private collaboration agreements existed before the Settlement Act, the earlier ones are about ensuring The Municipality has access to housing units for people granted a social contract through the social services. These contracts are, through remittances, granted to people who, for various reasons such as health issues, cannot attain a housing contract on the regular market. The remittance contracts typically consist of a trial period before the tenant is allowed to take over the contract as the permanent contract holder. Although the agreements created to host the refugees are similar in some senses, they differ in crucial ways, mainly because they do not consist of a trial period to then allow the tenant to take over the contract. Instead, these contracts are temporary secondary contracts held by The Municipality, who in turn sublet the apartment to the assigned refugee, who must waive all rights of occupancy when signing the contract. [The Municipality] agrees to bear all costs and risks should anything happen. The compensation received by the private landlords for these contracts is the spatially fixed profit extraction from municipally owned land through favorable positions in land extraction deals. Put simply, the private companies were given priority in the negotiations on land extractions, making their accumulation spatially fixed; all the while, the refugees were granted temporary housing.
Since we own the land and can decide who is allowed to build on a certain plot of land and who is allowed to submit bids and who is given priority to submit bids on a certain plot, it is a very small thing for them [the property owners] to tell us [The Municipality] that you can dispose of, for example, ten apartments in our portfolio. But for us [The Municipality] it’s a big deal, but for them it’s a condition in a deal that is worth a lot of money because the land in [The Municipality] is very attractive. And the city owns a lot of land, about half of all land. There’s a lot of construction going on and everyone wants to be involved. So shaking out these apartments doesn’t seem to have been a major problem. And with new arrivals, you’ve also known that you’ll get the apartments back after four or five years, so it’s not such a big sacrifice. But put simply they are given priority to buy, or build on, or dispose of land in the city. (Interview with municipal official 2)
As illustrated in the quote above, in exchange for provisory and time-restricted hosting of assigned refugees, the agreement gives the private company the possibility to buy land for future urban developments. The companies should produce housing on this land where a certain percentage must be disposable for The Municipality to use for social contracts and the like. These private developers got advantages in land extraction deals over primarily other developers for lending out apartments in their existing stock to refugees for a maximum of five years. Out of these households, only a few of the many families housed there over the years were, after the five years, offered the permanent contract, based on the entirely voluntary choice of the landlord to grant them a permanent contract or not.
They needed only to lend out apartments already vacant in their stock. The cost therefore was zero, but the financial gain is potentially enormous. They got tenants that pay rent during these designated years and after that they would get the apartments back. Contrary to this rather good deal for the housing company, the refugees were given temporary contracts, and after these expired, they were (if not included in the project offering housing for families with children) left to fend for themselves on the highly competitive and expensive housing market, in which the most expensive alternative, but almost the only one left for refugees, is subletting from a private individual.7 This creates surplus tenants, surplus participants on the capital market of housing (Bhattacharayya, 2024, p. 10). As Fraser writes:
Advantageous even in ‘normal times’, expropriation becomes especially appealing in periods of crisis, when it serves as a critical, if temporary fix for restoring declining profitability. (Fraser, 2022, p. 34)
In the Swedish metropolitan housing market, refugee housing is a financial opportunity (Kreichauf, 2023) – when there is money to be made, there is accommodation and housing for refugees, but when there is no prospect of revenue, housing for refugees appears more difficult to secure. This technique of differential inclusion through capital logic creates expropriable subjects (Fraser, 2022) in the realm of a capitalist-governed social system of housing provision.
The interview material and the municipal–private housing company agreements point to a complex development over time where, as a direct or indirect consequence of the state withdrawing from its social responsibilities, the private sector has gained leverage in land negotiations and development by in return allowing the public sector access to the private stock. When asked if the private sector increased their share in providing social and Settlement Act contracts, and thus their opportunities for acquiring land, one official responded that:
Yes, you can probably say that it did because the proportion of the apartment that the private sector left for municipal contracts, i.e. for the old classic social and medical priority track, was in percentage terms lower than it was during the years when we had the most housing for new arrivals in operation. So, the private sector increased its share quite sharply during those years. And that was partly through land allocation agreements. Then [The Municipality] went out with a proposal to the large private property owners, they contacted some of the big private ones, […] they promised the large private companies that they would get certain land agreements in the long term if they delivered a certain amount of apartments in their existing stock, because at that time we could not wait for housing to be built, like you would with the earlier agreements. So, they were given a completely transparent and open promise that they would, in the long run, be paid back. But in the beginning that was a special solution to quickly get apartments from the existing stock from the private property owners. and they increased their share of contracts with [The Municipality], the private share was up to 25% if you account for their share in all the different municipal contracts that we had. And before the Settlement Act, that proportion was never above 10% so it increased quite a lot. (Interview with municipal official 3)
From our interviews, we see that the distribution of housing provision responsibility shared between the private and the public through various agreements has a couple of fundamental implications. One is the potential for the private sector to acquire public land. A second is the possibility of the private actors to evaluate tenants over a period of several years and then decide if they want to, although totally optional, offer the tenants a permanent contract. Thirdly, compared to regular tenants, the refugee tenants have little power over their housing situation, and simultaneously The Municipality has transferred responsibility to private actors. This system is heavily influenced by the public–private agreements, allowing the private to increasingly dictate the right to housing and the right to the city, creating further racial inequality lines. This illustrates the power of the private actors in the housing market in Sweden and how these companies are part of and have power in the local settlement practices. This is more or less forceful in different municipal settings, depending on how much power the public has granted private actors.
In the context of housing commodification and the historical development of housing as a commodity that can be profited from, which has generally benefited the home-owning population, it is conceivable that the consequences of the fact that the municipalities have interpreted the Settlement Act restrictively, and thus do not offer a permanent entry into the housing market with reference to equal treatment and fairness, have skewed wealth trend further. Life has become a prop for the remaking and maintaining of resources rather than the other way around (Fraser, 2022). Rather than the need of people guiding the allocation of resources, we end up with a system that, albeit taking on different shapes and routes, is guided by the need of the distribution itself and the remaking of resources.
As shown by Kreichauf, “refugee accommodation forms an arena of racial capitalism – sites of profit-making and sites where value is extracted from refugees, their continued racialization, and the spaces they occupy, serving urban state ambitions for creating and sustaining the conditions for accumulation” (2023, p. 478). The fact that refugee migrants are not offered permanence on equal grounds may conceivably continue to feed the racial wealth inequalities that already exist in Swedish society, where people born in Sweden tend to own their housing, to a greater extent, and thus be able to make money off it. People born outside Sweden live to a greater extent in rented dwellings, a form of housing that has not been commodified to the same extent.
4.3 State Withdrawal Wrapped Up in “Housing Guidance”
Part of the neoliberal policy development in Sweden is the notion of “empowerment.” As a concept, “empowerment” has undergone a significant transformation, aligning with the prevailing neoliberal economic paradigm. Although “empowerment” is rooted in civil rights activism and feminist thinking (Rushing, 2016), the term has been co-opted by neoliberal discourse on human capacity. In this discourse, empowerment has been made to signify people’s ability to compete within neoliberal frameworks and is thus used to justify state withdrawal from the provision of social welfare. The ideas of strengthening the individual to participate in the market and stress individual responsibility is visible in the local strategy of offering housing guidance, a common strategy in many Swedish municipalities post-2015.
We offer housing guidance about how to apply for housing and what the different requirements mean. And we stress that it is every individual’s own responsibility to secure housing, so we push and encourage people in their quest for housing. (Interview with municipal official 1)
Consequently, when governments fail to translate empowerment rhetoric into tangible measures that equip individuals with the essentials they are entitled to, it becomes a mere façade that conceals the inherent struggles for equality and justice. It risks becoming “just another disempowering practice dressed in a liberation jumpsuit” (Buono, 2015, p. 139). Empowerment, as a guiding principle for municipal housing efforts, despite its presumably well-intended nature at the local governmental level, exacerbates the unequal framework migrants encounter in the Swedish housing market through a neoliberal logic that critically shifts responsibility from the meso to the micro level, from the state level to the individual. It becomes perceived as the duty of individuals rather than a mandated responsibility of national and local governments to see to all people’s rights to housing. This responsibility relocation inadvertently obscures the reality of reduced resources for social efforts, such as refugee housing, masking systemic inadequacies through the dedication of the municipal officials.
The ultimate goal for many parties on the political spectra is for the housing market to become, to the largest extent, private and thus promote private property in its variegated forms instead of rental housing. This ideology is evidenced through policy discourse as well, when officials are expressing owning one’s house as a measurement for migrant success. When asked if The Municipality evaluates their efforts and finds out what happens with the assigned refugees after their municipal contracts expire, one official said that:
When it comes to families with children, roughly 50% of the households are able to find housing on their own while around 50% move on to live in housing provided within the project supplying housing for families with children. […] but around 50% have found housing on their own and among those it differs what kind of housing solution they have found. Sometimes it’s a sublet contract and sometimes they actually become homeowners. Some have actually come that far in their five years in [The Municipality], they are established on the labor and housing market. (Interview with municipal official 1)
As such, home ownership is interpreted as a successful integration trajectory for the migrants. Consequently, the ultimate goal, the ultimate measurement for successful integration is major debt (Fraser, 2022, p. 40). Contrary to the social ideal of the Swedish public housing and the universalist idea, we have, since the 1990s, seen politics and policy of deregulation and periods of mass conversion of the public housing sector in favor of privatization (Magnusson Turner & Andersson, 2008, pp. 3ff), resulting in fewer housing opportunities for those at the bottom of the housing market (Baeten et al., 2017, p. 638). Through, among other things, urban renewal projects taking place in several metropolitan areas, people become at risk of evictions and displacement and the outcomes of such projects enforce the struggles and obstacles for people not able to get into the housing market to begin with. This is one of the detrimental consequences of market power in housing policy.
5 Conclusions
This chapter has attempted to contribute to the literature on racial capitalism and systems of housing provision in the context of the Swedish public sector’s task of housing the refugees after the arrival of asylum seekers in 2015. We have argued that local outcomes, regarding interpretations and implementations of national policies, have contributed further to increasing racial inequalities in an already racialized housing market. By utilizing the lens of racial capitalism, and combining the migration and housing policy regimes in Sweden, both experiencing dramatic transformations as a result of decades of neoliberal policies, our research is able to point to some of the trends in the municipal management of housing accommodation for refugees. We identified three strategies for coping with housing the refugees in The Municipality. Those are: 1) prioritizing families with children, which can be seen to remain from a welfare system of social security; 2) signing agreements on temporary rental housing contracts with private housing companies, which appears to in the long term benefit private actors’ financial interests; and 3) transferring the responsibility for solving the housing question to the refugees themselves, arguing reasons of empowerment. In sum, two ideological lines were identified in the analysis of the narratives of the municipal officers: one is what we call racialized deservingness, and the other is the shift from rental housing as a traditional proxy for the welfare state’s housing regime to that of homeownership as the optimal integration model. Nevertheless, the racialized and marketized system of housing provision acts with special cruelty against the refugees and their families, leaving most of them in a precarious housing condition in a country where stability is a norm rather than the exception. We conclude by arguing that even though, following 2015, Sweden took a restrictive turn in national and local policies for refugee inclusion, this shift is part and parcel of a historical process and project of migrant exclusion based on the overarching racial order. Through the analysis of what the state administrative levels are doing for housing the refugees, we come to the insight that the Swedish system of housing provision is excluding refugees systematically.
Acknowledgements
This research was possible thanks to FORMAS project number 2021-00085.
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“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control” (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 25).
“It shall be the responsibility of the public in particular to secure the right to health, work, housing and education and to work for social care and security” (Swedish Constitution, Chapter 1, para. 2).
For ethical reasons, the municipality of focus for our case study and the officials interviewed have been anonymized and will throughout the chapter be referred to as The Municipality and the municipal officials.
The Million Housing Program was a political initiative aimed at constructing one million housing units between 1965 and 1974 in response to the growing housing shortage.
Government proposition 2015/16:54 Ett gemensamt ansvar för mottagande av nyanlända.
Excerpt from juridical process concerning the project targeting families with children. Original in Swedish; our translation.
This individual can be the owner or have a permanent lease and in turn rents it out. Often for an additional cost and for a time restricted period. The sublet tenant does not have the typical tenants’ rights guaranteed to the permanent contract holder.