This book outlines the last fifty years of Swedish housing policy and land use planning, including the achievements as well as the failures in providing affordable and high quality housing for the whole population.

While several sectors in the economy have been deregulated, the Swedish housing market remains distorted, hindering an optimal matching of supply and demand. In the rental market the rent setting framework with its focus on cost-based rents in the public sector prevents a price response, leading to long queues in some regions and vacancies in others. Many Swedes that would have preferred otherwise are driven into the owner-occupied segment, where prices are increasing strongly, and rising above an estimated fundamental value. The supply of new dwellings is made more difficult by an uncompetitive construction industry, coupled with cumbersome planning regulations and few incentives for municipalities to issue more land. On the fiscal side, real estate taxes are below neutral levels, implying an indirect subsidy to housing. This paper presents a review of the recent steps to abolish real estate taxes and also proposes comprehensive reform of regulations in the rental housing sector. This paper relates to the OECD Economic Survey of Sweden 2007 (www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/sweden).

Originally published in 1978, this book analyses three main approaches to national housing policy in the 20th Century in Sweden, the UK and USA. It reviews policy developments and considers the impact of policy on the housing conditions and costs of different sections of the community. A major theme is that British and American governments, contrary to their stated objectives, have actually increased housing inequality by allowing homeowners tax concessions which are more generous than the housing welfare programmes available to tenants. The political pressures which produced this outcome in Britain and the USA, but a quite different and more egalitarian outcome in Sweden, are carefully discussed. Throughout the book, policy making is regarded as involving trade-offs between what is politically feasible and what is operationally feasible. This framework enables readers to view policy making from the perspective of politicians and civil servants as they react to diverse demands and pressures and seek to devise housing programmes which embody incentives to which housing financiers builders and consumers will respond.