NO PLACE LIKE HOME

Abstract

In the past ten years, the amount of migrants that have travelled to Sweden to make it their new home has increased at a geometric rate. Whilst the number of those searching for housing has increased, the amount of new construction or available housing has not managed to meet this need. Sweden has the largest homeless or precarious housing population in the Nordics. Immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees are often excluded from an equal chance at tenured housing that their Swedish peers have access to. The second largest city in Sweden is considered to be one of the most segregated in Europe due to these housing practices against immigrants. The question is, what further complexities and barriers are faced by these immigrants, due to layers of marginalisation? In order to seek the answers to this question, I have held both a focus group and one on one serial interviews with immigrants who have been in Sweden for less than a decade. These immigrants came from a variety of diverse backgrounds, from ethnicity, to race, to gender, to religion, to disability status. I have broken down the housing crisis as it stands, and discussed intersectionality as an analytical tool in order to contextualise the results of the interviews. The results were codified through Adams (2015) and Creswell’s (2014) conceptual framework for approaches to interviews, and then recorded accordingly. The results demonstrated that the barriers were mutually built, and that many immigrants experienced them based upon multi-identity affiliation, and thereby unique oppressions that must be considered in order to fully address a solution.