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Transaction costs, responsive housing supply, rent controls, tenant protection, and access to credit affect residential mobility – these different parts of housing policy are included in what has been defined as housing regimes, which embrace regulations, laws, norms, and ideology as well as economic factors. In this chapter, we investigate how these regimes change by using institutional theories of path dependence. We use Sweden as an example and study three Swedish housing market reforms during the past decades that may have affected residential mobility, each related to one of the main institutional pillars of housing provision: tenure legislation, taxation, and finance. More precisely, we study the development of the rental regulation since the late 1960s, the tax reform in 1991, and the new reforms on mortgages since 2010. What caused these reforms? What were the main mechanisms behind them, and why did they occur at the time they did? We argue, besides affecting residential mobility, these reforms have the common feature of including interesting elements of path dependence and forming critical junctures that have led the development on to a new path. Institutions of tenure legislation, housing finance, and taxation are often claimed to have effects on residential mobility. Although they are seldom designed with the explicit aim of supporting (or counteracting) residential mobility, they may sometimes do so as more or less unintended consequences.

This chapter gives an overall description of how Japan has coped with COVID-19 pandemics. Under COVID-19 pandemics, many smaller communities tended to suffer less, or even survive better with small and modest adaptive approaches to transform themselves, than most larger cities and metropolitan regions. The cases of Tottori Prefecture and the town of Chizu are highlighted, and illustrations are made to explain how small and modest adaptive approaches have worked relatively well here. Some reasons have been examined such as good political leadership based on the former lessons learned from the previous coronavirus threats which Tottori Prefecture scarcely avoided in 2009 when South Korea suffered from them. The Town of Chizu has demonstrated well how the previous efforts to adaptively enhance community’s coping capacity called SMART Governance have worked effectively under the new persistent disruptive stressor (PDS), i.e. COVID-10 pandemics.

Concerning migration on a national level, two phenomena emerge: people migrating from one region to another and people moving from the countryside to the cities. The geographical shift of the population between regions in a country is a slow process. In Sweden, only a few percent of the population migrate yearly. Nevertheless, migration has caused and still causes considerable redistribution of the population toward the metropolitan regions in Sweden. This section will emphasize general trends in population concentration through urbanization and migration in Sweden and compare these trends with changes in other countries.