"De går in som en maffia" : En studie om bostadsmarknaden i Järva 1995-2025

Sweden is a country of a highly racialized, fast-growing inequality. Against a background of marketization and financialization processes in the Swedish rental housing market, these patterns reflect in housing inequality and housing precarity, as a representation of societal fragmentation and an institutional power imbalance between tenant and landlord. International corporations have specifically targeted rental stock in marginalized Swedish areas to extract profit from a “rent-gap” during the last decade, and this thesis aims to build on the body of literature that repoliticizes this phenomenon and housing inequality in general as part of a dysfunctional housing system. It does so in a local study of Järva, a district in the outskirts of Stockholm, by contrasting the political discourse of housing in local projects with local narratives on housing. I argue that the political discourse utilizes territorial stigmatization and othering to detach itself from the effects of housing inequality and thereby consolidate it, whilst actively pursuing policies which reinforce it. Local actors understand the dominant narrative as a pretext for the continuation of economic extraction, against a background of a financialized and marketized rental sector.