Björksätra is Getting Demolished

Used since 2014 by KTH Accommodation to house international students, 185 of the 276 modular studio apartments had to be evacuated about two years ago when students started noticing suspicious cracks in the walls, floors and ceilings. “I think building number 26 was the worst one. There were cracks in every room and on every wall,” one of the students living there told us in December 2021.

The cracks were investigated and later deemed a structural safety hazard for the students living there. Many were suddenly moved into temporary accommodation in Bromma before being distributed to other available student apartments. For 105 of 185 evacuated students, KTH found accommodation within little more than a week. For some students, however, KTH was unable to find new housing, so they were put in rooms at Elite Hotel Arcadia close to KTH Valhallavägen, probably a very costly solution. It was a long ordeal for some of the affected students, as five of them told us in our interview in OL#2 21/22 “Cracks in the Walls”, also quoted in Realtid.se

With only about 30% of accommodations rented out, the atmosphere in the area is also drastically different. Back in 2021, one student told us of break-ins to the area’s mailbox room, several stolen bikes and instructions not to keep valuables in the apartment. In February 2023, Mitt i wrote about reports of drug trading and graffiti in the area.

The new owner of the accommodation complex, DCL Björksätra AB, will start demolishing many of the apartments. Mitt i quotes them as saying: “Vi har en överenskommelse med kommunen att vi ska avveckla cirka en tredjedel av området under 2024” (in English: “We have an agreement with the municipality that we will decommission about a third of the area in 2024”). DCL Björksätra’s CEO, is expecting that the deconstructed modules will be reused elsewhere. Of the original 276 units, however, only about 68 will be rented out until the eventual end of the housing project in two years.

The area will then instead be used during the construction of a new ice rink for the adjacent Sätra IP, and long-term could become the site for a new primary school, according to Mitt i.