In 1965 the Riksdag resolved to build a million dwellings in ten years for a population of under eight million — about a quarter of the national stock. Delivery rested on state housing loans, municipal land banking supported by expropriation and the 1967 pre-emption act, municipal housing companies and heavily industrialised concrete construction, with crane-track logic producing long parallel slabs on cleared peripheral sites. About 1,006,000 dwellings were completed by 1974, roughly a third of them single-family houses.
The most ambitious per-capita housing programme in the West ended Sweden's housing shortage outright, then produced peripheral estates with vacancies by the late 1970s that later became the country's segregated immigrant districts. It remains the canonical case for both the capacity and the social limits of welfare-state mass housing, and the reason Nordic planning turned towards municipal land policy, smaller-scale infill and renewal.
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