Housing Mix, Social Mix, and Social Opportunities

Will housing mix create social mix, and will social mix create social opportunity? This question is central in American and European urban debates. In Europe, however, there is a big gap between the political debates and actions regarding these issues and empirical research. In an effort to partly fill this gap, the authors critically evaluated the question above, applying a large-scale longitudinal Swedish data set covering the period 1991 to 1999 and available at the individual level for the entire population. The first part of the article reviews the various policies that are used in different European countries. The second part addresses the empirical analysis.