Building beyond profit: the history and potential future of non-profit construction companies

When housing construction slows down due to diminished profit margins while the actual need for housing increases, people might raise the question: is residential construction best left to the capitalist market? What about introducing other ownership structures not dependent on sustained and rising profits? These are the same questions we raise in this paper, which examines Sweden’s long and prominent history of alternative ownership structures in the residential construction sector, including the rise and fall of public and large-scale union-owned construction companies in the twentieth century. After these vanished in the 1990s, the dominant approach to the recurrent problems in the sector has been limited to demand-side interventions and deregulation. This paper draws on the Swedish house building history to tackle the question of whether construction companies with alternative ownership structures and relationships to profit should – and could – be reintroduced into the sector.