The construction of homelessness as a social problem is a part of the policymaking amongst politicians when planning and regulating interventions and supply that best suit the public. This responsibility has been bestowed upon the Swedish municipalities as there is no official national homelessness policy. The purpose of this essay is therefore to analyze how municipalities construct homelessness on a policy level. This will be done through at thematic analysis of Stockholm and Umeås action plans against homelessness. In this analysis it becomes evident that the municipalites does not see structural issues that are connected to the housing market as their responsibility, instead people who are structurally homeless are expected to solve their housing situation by themselves.

The purpose of this study is to examine Malmö Municipality’s strategies regarding counteracting social and structural homelessness, by describing and comparing the strategic differences between the two categories. We will do this mainly by performing a problem-based policy analysis of three municipal documents regarding the city’s homelessness problem. We will also be performing a theoretical analysis based on Ian Gough’s marxist analysis of the welfare state and institutional theory, respectively. Through our analysis on the municipal policy we have found that structural homelessness is a problem that is prioritized in comparison to social homelessness. This is because of a large increase in the structurally homeless population during the past decade. However, the problem of social homelessness has far more concrete measures to counteract it. This is found through our theoretical analysis to be due to several factors. One of these factors is that structural homelessness is more deeply entwined with the housing market, which affects the difficulty with creating appropriate measures. Another factor is path dependency, which means that structural homlessness as a newer problem affects the municipality’s ability to apply drastic measures. Our conclusion is that Malmö municipality prioritizes solving the problem of social homelessness through concrete measures, even though structural homelessness is seen as a larger problem. This is because of the complex nature of structural homelessness and the difficulty in applying the correct measures.

Studien syftar till att undersöka hur yrkesverksamma inom socialtjänsten och stadsmissionen i Umeå identifierar och arbetar med social och strukturell hemlöshet.    Studiens empiri bestod av fyra semistrukturerade intervjuer med två yrkesverksamma inom Umeå socialtjänst och två yrkesverksamma inom Umeå stadsmission. Samtliga intervjuer genomfördes digitalt via Teams. Sedan transkriberades intervjuerna och analyserades med hjälp av en konventionell innehållsanalys. Resultatet tolkades med teorierna gräsrotsbyråkrat och social konstruktion av målgrupper. Studiens resultat visar på att yrkesverksamma inom socialtjänsten och stadsmissionen identifierar social och strukturell hemlöshet utifrån vilka resurser individer kan beviljas från välfärdsstaten. Vidare beskrivs hur det finns utmaningar kopplat till social och strukturell hemlöshet där grundproblematiken bottnar i bostadsbristen i Umeå.