Bostadsförsörjning för nyanlända

Sammanfattning: During the last 10 years approximately one million people have applied for asylum in Sweden and 163 000 only during the big stream of immigrants in 2015. This put a huge pressure on the Swedish management of immigrants and the housing for this group of people. The 1st of March 2016 the Swedish Government introduced a law where the Swedish municipalities are obligated to receive a certain number of immigrants. With this master thesis, the authors study housing for immigrants both historically and in modern time. Through a series of methods, the authors also enlighten the issues connected to housing for immigrants and proposals for improvements. The responsibility of housing for immigrants is divided between the Swedish Migration Agency, the Swedish Public Employment Service and the County Administrative Boards. The Swedish Migration Agency’s mission is to receive immigrants at arrival and provide temporary housing during the asylum period. At the end of the asylum period in the cases where the asylum seekers received residence permits, the immigrants are assigned to different counties and then to the municipalities of the county depending on labor conditions, population size, total amount of received refugees and the extent of asylum seekers in the municipality. During the period of this study, the municipalities of Sweden were asked to participate in a survey. The survey provided answers on how municipalities have been working with housing for immigrants since 2015, which problems they have been experiencing and proposals for improvement. The most common problems were the lack of tenancies and the fact that a couple of municipalities have a problem with residents moving away due to a lack of attractiveness and geographical location. Public housing is an important key for succeeding with housing for immigrants. It is obvious that municipalities without public housing have larger difficulties with providing housing for this group of people. Another part of the study consisted in observing the extent of discrimination in the Swedish rental market. The method used was an experiment made on Blocket.se where four fictitious characters with different ethnicities and gender applied for rental objects within the Swedish borders. The result indicated that de foreign man got 33 % less response than the Swedish woman. Therefore, it is safe to say that the responsibility of housing for immigrants should not be put in the hands of the immigrants since ethnical discrimination exists in the rental housing market. The authors of this report believe that expanding the housing stock by building new houses is one of the most important proposals for improvement because of the increasing population. However, it is important to build in the right way and for different groups of people by alternative pricing and forms of tenure. If this work, moving chains can be stimulated as well as counteracting segregation. It is also of importance that the existing property stock is being used in the most efficient way, because building new houses can be very time consuming. It is also a long term working progress with attracting more municipalities in order to receive a more geographically distribution of refugees and counteract residents moving away from municipalities after the establishment period. It is significant that immigrants are seen as a population category only during the establishment period who thereafter have the same needs and recourses as the rest of the population. We want to clarify that we are very impressed with the work the Swedish municipalities put into housing for refugees. With the given conditions every municipality have done their best considering their competences.