Active Land Policy for Social Equity: A Housing Development Toolkit

By Anton Falck, Nathan Greenstein, Joel Persson & Johanna Riehl

Many Swedish municipalities hold social equity goals such as building affordable housing and decreasing segregation, but progress towards these goals is often difficult. To address this, we offer a toolkit with nine tools intended to help municipalities improve social equity through housing development and land policy. The tools cover strategies for land ownership, ways to navigate the land allocation process, and techniques to amplify social equity gains. Social equity goals can be difficult to achieve even when they are widely supported. Although such goals can be approached from many directions, our toolkit focuses on housing development and the policies which govern it. We focus on a subset of tools that our research has indicated as potentially high-impact with respect to social equity. Further, we focus on tools which are permissible within the Swedish/EU legal and professional context, but which do not currently enjoy widespread use.

The tools are targeted towards Swedish municipalities at large, but specific recommendations are given for Järfälla. For any municipality, we call for shifts in mindset towards long- term thinking and towards awareness that equity progress can incur material costs. The toolkit is inspired by our project context in Järfälla, but it applies equally to any Swedish municipality experiencing a gap between its social equity goals and its means to achieve them. Common social equity goals include building affordable housing and reducing spatial segregation, but the toolkit is designed to be flexible enough to serve a broad range of municipal goals. For Järfälla, key recommendations include leasing land to developers rather than selling, imposing specific social equity conditions during allocation, and taking a proactive role in setting the housing development agenda.

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