This article focuses on homelessness among families with children in Sweden, and particularly on the situation of homeless families in Stockholm. The objective is to contribute to the understanding of homelessness by suggesting an intersectional analysis that both includes different levels of analysis – that is, at structural, institutional and household levels – and allows gender, class and migration parameters to be taken into consideration. On the structural level, a restructured housing market in combination with a disman-tling of housing policy has raised the threshold for entering the primary housing market, especially for individuals and families with limited economic resources. In addition to the risk of being discriminated against based on ethnicity, this restructuring has appreciably raised the difficulty of entering the market on a more general level. At the institutional level, local social authorities offer solutions to homelessness that have been developed for more traditional groups of homeless people, namely, single men with alcohol or drug problems; they lack the means to change the structural conditions of the housing market or the distribution of housing, and can only expand the secondary housing market, in which people are at risk of becoming 'trapped' as the gap between the primary and secondary housing markets becomes increasingly large. On the individual/household level, a combination of single motherhood, immigra-tion and limited financial resources clearly increases the risk of homelessness and exclusion from other social arenas.