Narrating Homeownership : Media Discourse and Lived Experiences of Mortgaged Homeownership in Sweden

In the housing literature, Sweden is often portrayed as a so-called “cost-rental” society associated with tenure neutrality, where rental housing should be an attractive alternative – and not just a step in the way – to homeownership. A large and well-developed rental sector has traditionally made it possible for young adults to leave their family home at a relatively young age. However, this logic has been clearly disrupted as rental housing has become harder to access and homeownership has been favoured by incremental ideological political shifts and fiscal policy encouraging homeownership. As more households – also young ones – are steered into homeownership, Sweden has become one of the most mortgage-indebted nations in the OECD. This working paper on homeownership and mortgagization takes on the question of mortgaged indebtedness in discourse and practice. The working paper is the joint product of two different studies written as part of the research internship in the project “Financialisation of everyday life. Intersectional perspectives on housing and labor precarity” at Malmö university, led by Chiara Valli. In the first section, Neil Dunne presents a discourse analysis on how homeownership has been discussed in the largest newspapers in Sweden over the last decades, while Greta Cattabriga and Nathan O’Néill in the second section discuss perceptions and lived experiences of mortgaged homeownership on the basis of interviews with young adults. Put together, the two studies contribute with significant additions to the discussion about whether Sweden is moving towards a homeownership society and what the potential consequences are for young adults.