The story of how Sällbo came into being is fascinating. Does it go to the core of the Swedish mindset— that everyone should be able to live independently for as long as possible, no matter their circumstances?

In Sweden we expect very high standards of living. Almost every municipality in the country has its own public housing company owned by the City Council. Here in Helsingborg, our municipal housing company is called Helsingborgshemand we are expected to find accommodation for every kind of person— not just public housing, but luxury accommodation, aged care accommodation, housing for the disabled, the very elderly, students and so on.

The story of Sällbo actually starts in the 90’s, when we could see that the number of elderly people in Sweden was about to explode. And so we invented the safety home as an option for people over 70 who wanted to stay living independently but were beginning to need a little help. We called them safety homes because they were apartment buildings we had purchased and refurbished to include communal kitchens and living areas. And into each building we put a ‘host,’ someone who is employed full-time to take care of the needs of everyone in the building— from arranging social activities, to preventing residents from becoming isolated, to solving any problems that crop up between residents.   

How popular were these safety homes and did the elderly see them as a much more favourable alternative to aged care?

Safety homes became so in demand we had long waitlists to rent an apartment in one of our buildings. In 2013, we added another apartment complex to our stable— a four-storey building constructed in 1969. Over the next two years we created 51 two-room apartments with shared kitchens, dining and activity rooms on each floor. On the ground floor, we built barbecue areas and a large common room. We called it Sällbo, the Swedish for ‘companionship’ (sällskap) and ‘living’ (bo).  

And then in October 2015, Sweden threw open its borders to refugees from the Syrian crisis. Europe was in chaos. Sweden agreed to take in every person seeking asylum from Syria and Afghanistan, but not even our Government knew how it would house so many desperate people.

So they came to you?

Yes. I had been working as an interpreter during the Balkan Wars and I had learnt much about the terrible isolation experienced by refugees trying to start new lives in new countries. Coincidentally, I had come to Sweden myself from Yugoslavia when I was 18 with no family here and no social stability— so I knew what that felt like. And here in Helsingborg, we had a newly refurbished building with 51 empty apartments. So Helsingborgshem agreed to take in some of the unaccompanied young Syrian and Afghani refugees, most of whom were minors, and mostly boys, often two brothers. They were the eldest sons of families terrified they’d be killed or abducted by the Taliban and so these families told their sons to flee, to find their way to safety somewhere else in the world. Sweden became their lifeline. Most of them had survived very dangerous journeys out of Afghanistan into Iran, or from Syria into Turkey, and then they travelled through Greece and up into Sweden.

How on earth do you keep a bunch of traumatised 15 and 16 year old boys safe in a foreign country where they don’t speak the language and know no-one?

Yes. That was my challenge. So we rented the bottom two floors of the Sällbo apartment building to the refugee boys and the top two floors to the elderly as safety homes. And over the next three years, Sällbo became the biggest ‘support’ home for refugee youngsters in all of Sweden. But there was a worrying problem: those young boys had come to Sweden as a last resort. They were very afraid. They couldn’t sleep at night and so they stayed up late and smoked cigarettes and the fire alarms kept going off. Every second night we’d have to evacuate the building in a suburb populated by a lot of elderly native Swedes and it became a very negative news story. At Helsingborgshem, we also thought it might not be safe for the elderly to live above so many youngsters. You can’t have very frail people being evacuated in the middle of the night. And so the City said to us, ‘For goodness sake, solve this problem,’ and it was dumped in my lap.

Did it feel like an impossible task to create some sort of social stability between two such disparate groups of people?

Everything seems impossible until it’s done. I came up with the idea of putting them together on the same floor, and the City said, ‘No, too dangerous.’ Then I said, ‘Well, not if we have more elderly people than refugees. That way they can get to know those young boys one- on-one. The elderly would feel safer because there’d be someone young and capable on their floor, and the boys would know the old ones would care about their welfare in return.’ I thought that maybe these youngsters would adopt the elderly people on their floor as their new Swedish family. Maybe they’d start to rely on each other? The elderly residents could teach the young ones Swedish and show them how to cook Swedish food, and the boys could help the elderly with chores and teach them how to better use their technology.

And the City of Helsingborg finally agreed to let you try this experiment?

No. (Laughs). They still weren’t convinced. And so I tried again and I told the City: ‘Look. We know the elderly in this country are very alone and lonely and they need people around. They also feel excluded from modern Swedish life and its technology, so they alienate themselves further by staying inside their ‘bubble of old age’. And we have this group of very scared, lonely and alienated young refugees who also feel excluded from Swedish culture and language. These two groups are experiencing the same severe isolation.   

And was the City convinced?

Well, not really (smiles). Everyone said it was too controversial. That it wouldn’t work. That it would quite possibly be a disaster and they couldn’t risk another bad news story. And so I had to make my plan foolproof. I decided the only way to do that was to introduce a third group to the mix: some non-Swedish migrant families who had already assimilated, who were already speaking Swedish and working and sending their kids to school, to show both the elderly and the youngsters that these migrant families now felt ‘Swedish’ -  they were no longer socially excluded or alone. And I also told the City that I would handpick every resident moving into Sällbo— I would interview the candidates personally. And the amazing thing was, people who wanted to be part of this radical new multi-generational living experiment joined a waitlist. A long waitlist! And when that happened I said to the City: ‘OK, I think we’re ready to do this. We’ll give it two years and if it’s not working by then, we’ll quit and pretend it never happened.’ And the City finally gave me the green light and said ‘Off you go. But make it work.’

How difficult was it to choose the ‘right’ people to begin this living experiment?

Well, I made it a bit harder for myself in the selection process because I thought, ‘Why not choose people who are the most different from each other: different in age, education, social status, personality, attitude, work, life experience. That had never been done before— we dared to throw the most different kinds of people together and say, ‘Hey – we have faith in you to make this work.’ We asked the same three questions to every person during their final interview:  

Why do you want to come here?
What are your expectations?
What are you ready to give back?

In interviews that went for over an hour in some cases, people gave us the most interesting answers. And so in 2019, we chose our 51 residents: 60-percent elderly and 40-percent refugee. We selected 31 people aged over 70 and 20 people who were refugees and migrants. Of those, half  were young boys who’d come to Sweden as unaccompanied minors and were now aged between 18-25. And the other half were migrants— with or without families— who’d established themselves in Swedish society and had learned to speak good Swedish. And across all the 51 new residents of Sällbo, we ticked every kind of subset: we selected couples, young families, singles, extroverts, introverts, people working, people studying, elderly people from former safety houses, elderly people who moved to Sällbo from their lifelong home…

And everyone at Sällbo has exactly the same amenities?

Yes. And let’s talk about that. In Sweden we have a saying ‘alike children play best.’ We knew at Sällbo, everyone had to be equal. Don’t forget some of the elderly had come from big homes of more than 300m2 in the best part of town and some of the refugees had come from poverty — single rooms in family billet arrangements. Suddenly, everyone was living in very small 2-bedroom apartments with large common spaces. Sällbo threw together people who would never normally meet in real life: rich and poor, young and old, educated and non-educated, all living in very close quarters.  That’s why it was so important to have lots of big spaces for communal living in the building. And why everyone in the building needed to agree on what they wanted to have in those communal living areas because they were going to spend a lot of time together there.  

And you also made rules about how much time per week they needed to spend together?

Yes. We got even bolder! How do you encourage people to socialise? Just because you’re living in the same building doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to become friends, right? And so we said, ‘We want you to sign a contract agreeing to spend at least two hours a week with your neighbours. We won’t police it, but we expect you to eat a meal together, or watch tv together, or have a BBQ together. And during those couple of hours you spend together, you can also decide what you need and want in this building.’ And the first thing everyone wanted was a pool. The second thing was a bowling hall. And the third was a spa. And the host— the person we employed full-time to make sure everything was working properly and harmoniously for everyone living at Sällbo— the host said to them, ‘Well, Helsingborgshem can’t foot the bill for all these things, so how much more rent are you prepared to pay to get them? And suddenly, the pool became a yoga room and the bowling hall became a foosball table. (we laugh).

Has there been any resistance from residents about having to spend that communal time together each week? 

Well, that is the marvellous thing about this housing experiment— the residents say the socialising is the best part of living at Sällbo. In the last four years, 99-percent of the residents have socialised far more than the required two hours a week, but we still have one person who keeps to himself. He is the grump, but he’s not an isolated grump or a lonely grump. He’s just a grump. And he is the result of how extreme I was in selecting tenants. This was an experiment and no experiment is 100-percent successful, but 99-percent is pretty good. And everyone in the building has taken this grump as a ‘challenge’, to see who can get him to come out of his shell (laughs).

So you have created a democracy in miniature. And in this democracy, who decides on the rules for how everyone can live?

We at Helsingborgshem have imposed three basic rules: no pets and no smoking in the common areas, and an agreement on how late can you watch telly in the common room. All the other rules are made by the residents at a monthly meeting, where the occupants of each of the 51 apartments, whether a couple or a single person— get one vote per apartment. If you are away for work or on holiday on the night of the monthly meeting, you get someone else to vote on your behalf.

And what about the host? How do you choose the host?

The host is in the house every day, but not all day — she has an office on the ground floor. Even though she doesn’t live there, she is always part of the group and everyone respects her opinion. Her role is to moderate. If there is conflict, she will mediate. I decided early on to have a woman as host. Part of my reasoning was that the youngsters might like having a host who felt a bit like a ‘mother figure’, seeing their mothers were far, far away. And because many of the youngsters had been quick to adopt the elderly gents in the building as ‘father’ figures so I didn’t need to worry about having a male mentor as a host.

It's been four years now since Sällbo opened its doors. What’s been the attrition rate?

Well so far, no-one has hated it, but some have found it too difficult to manage. So in the last four years, seven of the elderly have left the house and two have died. Four of the elderly residents moved out because their children went to live elsewhere and they followed them. And one man decided to leave Sällbo because he was sick. He said, ‘I know I could stay here and everyone would be so kind to me but I would feel like a burden and I should give someone else a chance.’

Among the youngsters – some have left to go to schools in other cities or have moved out to take jobs far away or to get married. We now have the first baby born at Sällbo! And we still have a waitlist. Those who are not successful apply again and again because they understand they might not be the right fit for the current group of residents but they might be perfect when some of the dynamics change.

You must feel relieved that your incredibly bold and revolutionary experiment is such a success story; not only have you created the housing model of the future but a cure for loneliness all at the same time?

It’s been a real social experiment (smiles), and of course it’s being studied very closely by countries all around the world. I like to spend about four hours a week in the building, just exploring how things are going, checking on the group dynamic, talking to the host about who’s doing what. We advertise any vacancies on our website. We currently have 20 people on the waitlist. I have a Swedish lady from the Cote d’Azur who’s so desperate to live at Sällbo she calls me once a month to check if there’s any movement. She has the income to afford an apartment but who knows if she’ll be the right fit? I hope that we have opened peoples’ eyes: that the elderly have learnt that refugees from other countries are not to be feared. This is my ultimate goal: to see social cohesion between different generations and different cultures living under the one roof. This is the answer to the loneliness experienced by the over 70s and the under 25s. Sällbo is proof this new way of living is the future.