Longing for a Home : Young people’s struggles in Stockholm’s second-hand housing market

Abstract: Many young people in the Stockholm metropolitan area struggle with accessing the formal housing market and are therefore relying on short-term, second-hand contracts. By drawing on ten semi-structured interviews this essay explores the second-hand tenant’s ability to feel a sense of belonging towards their home. The tenants are often unable to just be in their home and instead feel they need to conform to the landlord’s ideas of proper behaviour.Through the unequal power relations between landlord and tenant the tenants rarely feel at ease in their home. By using a phenomenological conceptualisation of home, I reason that home loses its ability to anchor a person’s sense self in the world and as a result the tenants become more isolated and detached.