Studies on rental housing financialisation have blossomed over the last decade. Studies are often concerned with issues around affordability and displacement, while less focus has been on how financialisation reconfigures the materials of housing, home, and the residential environment by subordinating maintenance to aggressive and unsustainable renovation strategies. We look at the case of Sweden and zoom in on a working-class Stockholm suburb where part of the housing stock is owned by the German, publicly listed real estate company Vonovia. We discuss how national and international regulations remain insufficient in ensuring that every day and structural maintenance is conducted properly by financialised landlords, leaving tenants stuck with delayed and poor-quality repair and replacement work as well as insufficient communication, severely affecting their quality of life. We propose to discuss the concepts of “housing as infrastructure” to account for these complex consequences. 

The paper focuses on an anti-austerity and anti-racist urban movement, emerging from the multiethnic precariat in Sweden's most disadvantaged metropolitan areas. It has catalysed the reinvention of a common space with roots in the labour movement of the late 19th century,The People' House, a meme for contemporary community centres, loaded with hopes of contesting racial stigma and structurally conditioned precarity of citizenship and labour. Scrutinising a specific case, the authors address the ambiguous emplacement of a People's House in a Stockholm wrought by financialisation, polarising processes of segregation, the commodification of welfare institutions and interventions by competing NGO coalitions in a post-political age.