Public Housing and Overcrowding in Swedish Municipalities
Titel:
Public Housing and Overcrowding in Swedish Municipalities
Auteur:
Lindberg, Goran
Verschenen in:
Housing, theory and society
Paginering:
Jaargang 10 (1993) nr. 3 pagina's 129-143
Jaar:
1993
Inhoud:
This article discusses some of the theoretical assumptions of “the Swedish Model” in the field of housing provision. It is argued that there are good reasons to expect the housing market, when left to a non-interventionist kind of policy, to be especially sensitive to innate, self-destroying forces. In opposition to this is the view that political intervention always leads to a decrease in the total welfare and intervention in the housing market is no exception. The Swedish situation, where local governments vary in their degree of interventionist housing policy, provides a potential field for testing the consequences of more or less intervention. The empirical section of the article is a modest illustration of this insight, where multiple regression analysis is used for testing whether there is a correlation between the size of the local public housing sector and the rate of overcrowding in the different municipalities. Neither “the free market thesis” nor “the interventionist hypothesis” are strongly supported by the results. The study does demonstrate, however, that it should be possible to expand the empirical test of this controversial and important theoretical question by bringing other aspects of political interventions into the analysis. Most important in this context would be the municipalities' land policy.
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