There is an emergent field of writings on financialized landlords' undertaking of apartment renovations as an investment strategy and its effect on housing inequalities. Seldom do these studies contextualize these tendencies within countries' specific housing policy traditions. Therefore, through a qualitative case study in a neighbourhood in Sweden, this paper aims to uncover how private landlords undertake renovations as an investment strategy and its effect on tenants and, in turn, on the hybrid character of a universal housing system. It finds that renovations enable landlords to extract value from the built environment while tenants experience rising rents, a lack of information, poor property maintenance, and apprehension. Hence, I argue that renovations represent an investment strategy that serves to undermine the traditional social right to housing within a universal housing policy context. The paper thus furthers knowledge on how the situatedness of financialization tendencies entails their translation through and transformation of housing systems. 'gentrification-by-upgrading strategy' implemented by financialized landlords in Toronto, Canada. The present paper focuses on a smaller neighbourhood to uncover how renovations are carried out and how they affect tenants. Additionally, the paper understands such investment strategies as indicative of how financialization processes

Public housing has been one of the primary tools mobilized in Sweden historically to fulfil citizens' right to housing. However, the nominally universal character of public housing in the Swedish context has increasingly been circumvented through processes of segregation, residualisation, gentrification and displacement. Furthermore, previous housing research points to the neoliberal shift of Sweden's housing politics since the early 1990s, encompassing the deregulation of public housing at the national level. Focusing on the example of public housing, this paper argues for a multiscalar and nuanced understanding of housing neoliberalisation in Sweden, by investigating the change of public housing locally. The political landscape of public housing in different localities has been transformed as a result of interacting trajectories of spatial restructuring, financialisation and ideological reconstruction. The paper examines this "conjunctural" transformation empirically through a case study of public housing in the city of Malmö.

Tenants in Sweden increasingly face rising rents and displacement due to decades of ongoing housing deregulation. In this text, we explore different manifestations of these injustices, and reflect upon consequences and responses as they crystalize locally. By visiting the three cities of Stockholm, Malmö and Uppsala, we highlight three different examples of how tenants respond and formulate protests vis-a-vis privatization through tenure conversion (Stockholm), gentrification spurred by private rental actors (Malmö) and battles over green space and displacement in the rental housing stock (Uppsala). These vignettes exemplify how policy changes play out in different local settings and illustrate how resistance manifests itself on the ground.

This paper uncovers the local state's complex intersections with the market and its multifaceted relations with the public through an in-depth qualitative case study of municipal housing privatization and urban renewal in one of the heartlands of the Swedish welfare state project, Rosengård in Malmö, Sweden. Drawing on the political-economic literature, I argue that housing privatization is entangled with complex interrelations among the (municipal) local state, the market, and the public and that an exploration of these relations reveals contemporary features of the local state. Hence, this investigation highlights the local state's motivation for privatization, the remaking of a market in a place where the market is believed to have failed, and the powers the local state retains. Additionally, the paper elucidates how the function of public assets changes due to privatization and considers tenants’ and residents’ worries, criticism, and concerns about municipal interventions. Subsequently, by grounding these findings in the historical function of municipalities in Sweden, the study contributes new knowledge on the local state in a deepened neoliberalized and financialized urban landscape.