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Rural housing market hot spots and footloose in-migrants

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Abstract

This study applies a housing market perspective to hot spots in rural Northern Sweden. Here, the concept of a “hot spot” is defined as a place with rising house prices and in-migration of households with higher than average education and income. Perceptions and performances in these particular housing markets are studied using interviews. Three locations are explored through interviews with “footloose” households. The aim is to explore factors that shape rural housing market hot spots, using narratives from footloose in-migrants. There is a need for greater understanding of the spread and maintenance of hot spots and rural housing markets in regional planning. Also, housing markets in the countryside are more scantily investigated than in urban areas. In an unbalanced housing market, with higher prices and limited supply in the urban areas, hot spots in rural areas are anomalies that do not follow traditional housing market theories. Results show that hot spots are locations with natural beauty to which households moved upon finding employment. Footloose in-migrants are thus discovered to indicate a hot spot development. The hot spot areas have the “extra” natural beauty, cheap housing in combination with a high status, as well as it is a location suitable for commuting. Hot spots have a rare combination of factors sought after by footloose in-migrants.

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Notes

  1. This research is part of the project Hunting for hot spots: Unequal urbanization in the Swedish countryside, financed by FORMAS, a Swedish research council.

  2. Social housing for poor and vulnerable households, households that qualify has low incomes. Public housing is larger and available for all with a more differentiated population. Swedish municipally owned housing is public housing. When the public rental sector is diminishing, the selection of population to the sector is similar to social housing in housing markets where such a housing sector exists.

  3. Gentrification is more readily used in both urban and rural research as a term for the change of an area culturally and population-wise. Often, the negative changes are described. I tend to describe the development of hot spots as something positive, but there are also negative effects that should not be overlooked; for example, articles on rural gentrification have dealt with the breakdown of local traditions and expensive housing, among others (Guimond and Simard 2010).

  4. The areas used are so-called SAMS areas (small area market statistics), formed by municipalities, homogeneous in terms of forms of tenure and largely conforming to named neighborhoods in cities.

  5. According to the lists of in-migrants given by the municipalities, Lögdeå had 206 individuals in 2000–2006, Sandviken had 407 in-movers in the period 2007–2011 (to the areas Östanbyn/Västanbyn and Stensätra), and Tynderö (to the somewhat larger area of Söråker) had 291 in-migrants in 2005–2009.

  6. Fourteen of the Tynderö households that did not meet the requirements were return migrants, eight did not have a university education, some were retired, and another fourteen did not meet one or several of the requirements (such as being within the geographical region of Tynderö), the most important of which was not to come from the large city of Sundsvall nearby.

  7. Grant from FORMAS, no. 2008-5509-12449-34, principal researcher Lena Magnusson Turner, NOVA, Norway.

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  1. Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University, 106 91, Stockholm, Sweden

    Eva K. Andersson

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Andersson, E.K. Rural housing market hot spots and footloose in-migrants. J Hous and the Built Environ 30, 17–37 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-013-9377-y

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