Housing tenure and residential mobility in Stockholm 1990-2014

In this thesis the links between housing tenure, income and selective, segregation generating, residential mobility are explored. The development of these links is analysed against the background of housing regime changes in Stockholm between 1990 and 2014. Housing policy changes in Sweden, and Stockholm, promote ownership through, for instance, housing tenure conversions and the tax-system. What this development means for residential mobility trends and may mean for ethnic and economic segregation is explored in three articles. Paper 1 contrasts two time periods and provides an analysis of residential mobility and economic sorting. It is shown that the socioeconomic composition of movers is relatively stable over time while the increasingly owner dominated housing market in Stockholm contributes to stronger socio-spatial residential patterns through the strengthened economic sorting of movers across the whole income scale. Paper 2 has a focus on ethnic and socioeconomic differences in out-mobility from poor neighbourhoods. The findings indicate that foreign background residents are dependent upon housing wealth and income to be able to leave poor neighbourhoods when they move, while the Swedish background group has a variety of resources at their disposal when they move. Paper 3 analyses how housing tenure affects moving, and movers' destinations, in neighbourhoods with high concentrations of non-western foreign-born residents in Stockholm. By comparing two cohorts (1993-2000 and 2001-2008) it is analysed how this relationship develops over time. Housing tenure and income do not seem to be pivotal for who moves, but increasingly important for where movers end up. Results display ethnic differences and how the changing housing market in Stockholm reproduces ethnic segregation. Two main conclusions from the thesis are that (i) the changing housing regime in Stockholm produces stronger economic sorting of movers – this has been affected by the geographically, socioeconomically and ethnically uneven gains from the housing market transformations experienced over the last three decades. (ii) The residential mobility patterns and the economic stratification of residential mobility opportunities that the reconfiguration of Stockholm’s housing market gives rise to increases the economic, political and social marginalization of neighbourhoods characterized by low income levels and high shares of foreign-born residents. Combating ethnic segregation is today even more closely related to the socioeconomic differences between the foreign-born and native-born parts of the population