In Stockholm's suburbs, unemployment stokes unrest

Behind the well-kept lawns and flowerbeds of Husby, the immigrant-heavy Stockholm suburb where riots have raged for five straight nights, unemployment is fuelling despair among the young residents.
Nearly a week of unrest across the Swedish capital has raised questions about the assimilation of immigrants, who dominate low-income neighbourhoods in the main cities and make up about 15 per cent of the total population.
Husby's brightly coloured concrete apartment blocks look much like they did when they were built in the mid-seventies, albeit a tad more grimy and with satellite dishes now dotting the facades.
Husby has followed a trajectory similar to many other large-scale developments of Sweden's controversial "million homes programme", named after the number of affordable dwellings it aimed to produce in just 10 years.

Although the social democratic government did succeed in creating more affordable housing by the mid-seventies, little else went to plan.
Almost immediately after they were completed, the homogenous, often high-rise developments were marred by crime and social alienation, and were accused of exacerbating the very problems they were meant to solve.

Middle-class Swedes moved out, and when the country in the past decade welcomed hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia, among others, the apartments they were allocated were often in areas like Husby.
Housing segregation is often named as one of the reasons it takes the average immigrant to Sweden years, not months, to find work. Even among the second generation, many say they rarely make it to a job interview.

Sweden's government has earned praise for its handling of the economy, but the country is plagued by one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Europe.
Daniel, 24-year-old social worker from Husby, said finding a job after graduating from high school turned out to be harder then he thought, and that the suburb's bad reputation may have been an impediment for him.
"Unfortunately I've only got jobs when I said I lived in (nearby and less notorious suburbs) Akalla and Kista. I don't know if it's got anything to do with that but it's a funny coincidence," he said.
"There is a lot of anger towards the police and there's a lot of anger towards the politicians. A lot of things are in the air," he said.