Young Adults and the Stockholm Housing Crisis : Falling Through the Cracks in the Foundation of the Social Welfare State

Sammanfattning: This thesis is an attempt to capture and understand how young people in Stockholm experience the housing market. It explores what housing policy decisions made by government actually do to people ‘on the ground.’ The research asks: How does the housing crisis manifest for young adults living in Stockholm?This study centers around interviews with 27 young people who are living at least part-time in greater Stockholm. All of these informants were between the ages of 23 and 30 (with the exception of one woman who was 32). The three chapters of this thesis are organized the three major social themes: independence vs. co-dependence; privilege and perception of ‘luck’; and discrimination and scamming. The results show clearly that the housing market does not only mean that people need to pay expensive rents or that some live at home with their parents. Rather, most of the informants lived in temporary and often suboptimal living conditions, and some had experienced emotional harm as a result. By focusing on something as personal as one’s home, this investigation led to discussions of such topics such as common understandings of Swedish society, relationship dynamics, and young people’s feelings about being “adult.”