The Swedish Housing Market: Structure, Policy Issues and Modeling

Contribution to the Metropolitan Study: 20 -- The project "Nested Dynamics of Metropolitan Processes and Policies" is a collaborative study within the project area Regional Issues at IIASA. The series of contributions is a means of conveying information between the collaborators in the network of the project. This paper reports on a penetrating investigation of the housing market in the Stockholm region. It is based on a sequence of interviews and discussions with various decision makers and managers whose actions form an important market system. The paper examines the details of the system structure with the objective of formulating a reliable model of transactions, regulations, investments, etc. The work on the model itself is currently underway and will also be presented in the near future. The approach undertaken by the authors is original in its careful treatment of such system properties which constitute deviations from a free market. Consequently, the paper provides an already tested guideline for the work on the housing sector in other metropolitan regions in the study. Recently, this type of work has been initiated in several of those regions. It is believed that this work may bring about a new generation of housing sector modeling and a renewal of the pertinent analyses