Future challenges
Demography
There are just over nine million inhabitants in Sweden today and the average age of the population is constantly increasing. During the next ten years the number of people over 65 years old is expected to increase by around 300000; an increase of almost fifty percent. This development affects the housing market in different ways. The aging population of today is healthier than previous generations and might well demand different housing solutions to those currently on offer.
There have also been enormous fluctuations in the birth rate over the last twenty years or so and the baby boomers from the beginning of the 1990s will soon be looking for their own places to live. A large need will soon arise for relatively cheap, small apartments for this particular group, and this is a challenge that the housing market will face in the near future.
Regional imbalances
There has been an increase in the number of municipalities that are experiencing a shortage of housing lately, while the number of municipalities that are in balance remains more or less unchanged. A significantly fewer number of municipalities now report that they have a surplus of housing on the market. The public housing companies operate on markets with both a shortage and surplus of housing.
During the past few years the number of available rental apartments in the public housing companies has been at the same level of about 1.5 percent.
Migration
National migration trends change slowly and today people in Sweden move on average 10-11 times in a lifetime. Young people, between 19 and 23, usually move to a larger, usually urban municipality because they want better access to studies or work, the winners in this case being the big cities and those municipalities with universities/institutes of higher education. Between the ages of 24 and 28, the trend for this group is to then leave the university/higher education municipalities and gravitate towards the big cities. On entering their 30s, couples with children move out of the big cities to smaller municipalities of a more suburban character.
The municipal areas and the municipalities with universities/higher education in many cases face the problem of lack of housing which could threaten the region’s continued growth. Other regions still face the expensive problem of empty dwellings.
International migration resulted in a surplus of just over 27 000 persons in 2005, which was more than the year before but less than the years prior to that. Many immigrants live in housing areas owned by municipal companies. The companies face the complex problems and possibilities of segregation and integration.
