Students Jump Housing Queue - If They Move to Gang-Hit Suburbs

GOTHENBURG - Young students in Sweden's second-largest city are being allowed to skip the regular housing queue and get permanent first-hand leases - on one condition: they move into neighbourhoods that police classify as "vulnerable" or "especially vulnerable". So far, 91 students have signed up.

A new student in Gothenburg can now move into a 46-square-metre, two-room flat for 5,586 kronor (about $520) a month and, after just two years of study, take over the apartment on a permanent lease, Göteborgs-Posten reports. The catch is the location: the flats are in the city's immigrant-dominated suburbs such as Bergsjön, Biskopsgården, Hjällbo and Hammarkullen.

The municipal housing giant Framtiden has been ordered by the city's Social Democrat-led coalition to set aside 150 apartments in these areas for students during 2026. In a city where ordinary residents often wait many years for a rental contract, that is a significant shortcut.

"They will get to jump the queue"

When the plan was first reported last winter, Jonas Attenius, the Social Democrat who chairs Gothenburg's city executive board, did not try to hide that people who had queued for years would be overtaken.

"That's right, they will get to jump the queue," Attenius told public broadcaster SVT, adding that the aim was to bring a well-educated group into the areas to mix the population.

Jörgen Fogelklou, who leads the Sweden Democrats in Gothenburg, has attacked the scheme for putting the regular queue system out of play to push a political project.

"You can't have a system like that where people go ahead in the queue. It will be seen as unfair," Fogelklou said.

Part of a national push

The Gothenburg fast lane is not a one-off local experiment. Attenius was elected last year to the Social Democrats' national executive committee and, together with MP Lawen Redar, helped shape the party's new integration programme, which singles out housing policy as a tool for mixing native Swedes and migrants.

"Yes, that we need to mix the population over time. I usually say 'in a generation'. This is long-term," Attenius said when the line was adopted.

Samnytt has previously reported on similar thinking elsewhere in the party. In the summer, a leading Social Democrat in Borlänge said in an interview that forced residential mixing would happen sooner or later. Critics point out that research offers little support for the idea that engineered housing mixes solve the deep problems of parallel societies and crime.

In Sandviken, north of Stockholm, the same logic was applied to schoolchildren: local politicians moved Swedish pupils from a well-functioning school to a struggling, immigrant-dominated one, with the stated aim of breaking segregation. Parents who protested were brushed aside.