What is it with ferris wheels at the moment? I’ve just returned to Sweden after a holiday back in Melbourne, where the most visible sign of change on the skyline of my native city is a giant wheel. On my return I learn that Gothenburg are planning on building a giant wheel too. Why this obsession with glorified amusement park rides?
Melbourne’s wheel, the Southern Star, cost A$100 million to build. A littler over month after completion it suddenly stopped working. During my visit a delegation of Japanese engineers were flown in who subsequently ruled the wheel inoperable for at least the next six months. Naturally people are asking why, during a world financial crisis, was A$100 million spent on something the city arguably really doesn’t need and doesn’t even work anyway. Well according to their website a “flight” (this is their word for a ride) on the wheel is “…an experience like nothing on earth.” Maybe no one has told them about the taller London Eye. Or the Singapore Flyer. Or the Star of Nanchang, Great Berlin Wheel, and Great Beijing Wheel, as well as a host of other structures all taller than the Southern Star. But the Southern Wheel does have some advantages. For one it is the only permanent observation wheel in the southern hemisphere. And it also has the world’s first LED lighting system. Just in case you’re into that sort of thing. The Southern Star will supposedly attract 1.5 million visitors a year, presumably after they’ve already seen all other wheels mentioned above and still have some change left over to see some more.
Gothenburg’s proposed wheel isn’t quite as grand, coming in at a lazy 60 metres. (The Southern Star is 120 metres, the London Eye 135 metres). But assuming that the whole point of a giant observational ferris wheel is to provide a good view of the surrounding area, Gothenburg’s planned wheel makes even less sense. The truth is Gothenburg is not short of lookout points. What they lack is something to look at. It’s a small compact city with a low-rise skyline. Any elevated spot above a fifth floor usually provides a good view of the city and its surrounds. At present they already have one ferris wheel, which at 25 metres is sufficient for seeing right out to the city’s outskirts. On top of this they also have an 80 metre high skyscraper, and a 116 metre tower each with their own viewing platforms. Considering there is nothing much to see from either of these places other than rooftops, what can a 60 metre ferris wheel possibly add?
According to a poll in the Göteborg Posten, 54% of the public think it’s a great idea. As with the Southern Star the potential pull of tourists is the motivating key. But who are these people who travel large distances just to see ferris wheels? Even Facebook, where fan pages exist for things as banal and irrelevant as duct tape, dried leaves and Bono, lacks any evidence of ferris wheels’ supposed mass appeal. A group called ‘Ferris Wheels are the Greatest Things Ever’ has 53 members while another called “I Love Ferris Wheels” has one. Basically vast sums of money are being spent trying to attract a demographic that doesn’t even exist.
I recently came across this clip from another blog (Daniel Lampinen’s Stockholm 2009, I can highly recommend it.) It’s a report from Fox News about migrants in Rosengård, the famous Miljonprogrammet suburb in Sweden’s third city Malmö. In typical tabloid fashion the report is sensationalist and misleading, yet I still found it quite interesting to watch.
Sweden does have a large migrant population but it is interesting to note that both of my parents, who visited Sweden on separate occasions in 2008, remarked on how homogenous Sweden appeared. As I’ve said countless times in this blog, Sweden is very segregated with the majority of migrants living in satellite towns like Rosengård. Out of sight, out of mind. But tension does seem to be bubbling away and if I’m bold enough to make one prediction about Sweden’s future it is that racial tension will become a big issues in coming years. Already there have been minor riots in Rosengård and reports of a rise in Muslim extremism.
In many ways Sweden reminds me of pre-1996 Australia in that there seems to be a lot of racism and prejudice simmering away, which the media and political establishments don’t want to acknowledge. Like Australia, all it needs is either a Swedish Pauline Hanson (a bigot who can successfully portray themselves as average Joe Public and ‘voice of the silent majority’) or a John Howard (an opportunistic politician not afraid to exploit racism for electoral gain) and suddenly racism will be out in the open, wreaking havoc and tearing the place apart. You heard it here first.
Books about Sweden, in English, aren’t that common and one’s written by English writers are rarer still. There is the odd English translation of a Swedish history book, and plenty of books about Vikings, but I’ve seen very few books about contemporary Swedish politics and society, or much in the way of travel narratives. Until now the most extensive written material I’ve come across from an outsider were the two chapters on Sweden in Bill Bryson’s Neither Here Nor There. So when I heard about Andrew Brown’s Fishing in Utopia, a book written by an English journalist who used to live in Sweden, I was pretty quick to get a copy.
Part travelogue and part personal memoir, Fishing in Utopia is Brown’s attempt to document the changes Sweden has gone over in the past 30 years and to find out what happened to their famed welfare state, while simultaneously indulging in his love of fishing. Like most expats Brown was lured to Sweden by a spouse. In the late 1970s they married, had a child, and moved into one of the miljonprogrammet suburbs outside of Gothenburg. His first job was working as a labourer in a factory making wooden pallets for Volvo. His only escape from the drudgery of manual labour and lifeless concrete satellite towns was his passion for fishing and writing. Brown later moved back to England but work and his son kept dragging him back to Sweden regularly, and in 2006 he returned to drive the length of the country from Skåne to Norrland.
As Andrew Brown makes quite clear Sweden in the 1970s was a different place from the Sweden of today. With the welfare state in its prime it was a safer and more egalitarian place. Poverty and crime were practically nonexistent and even the Prime Minister lived an ordinary life equivalent of a schoolteacher. But it was also more oppressive and insular with a mood of voluntary conformism making life stifling and restrictive. Brown tells of having to travel 10 miles on a bus to the nearest Systembolaget, and then having to smuggle the empty wine bottle out so as to hide it from the neighbours. Life was completely ruled and regulated by the state and the union movement. Everything was done collectively, for the collective whole, with little room for individuality. “It was the life of a battery salmon: packed into a crowd in the middle of a boundless stretch of water by a cage of netting that you could not see at all. It appeared to be part of the sea.”
By 2006 Brown returns to find a far more open and cosmopolitan society, with trendy bars and gourmet cafes. The country has since been opened up to migrants with one in nine being of non-Swedish heritage. “It is one of the marks of modern Sweden that you cannot fine anywhere so remote that it does not have a Kurdish family running a pizza restaurant.” But in the same space of time many of the shipyards and factories that kept so many Swedes employed have been shut down. The welfare state has been significantly dismantled, state industries have been privatised, and both crime and unemployment have risen rapidly.
The central thesis of Brown’s book seems to be to answer the question of what happened. What are the underlying courses for these changes? Unfortunately Brown doesn’t seem to offer any concrete answers; quite possibly because there aren’t any. It seems Sweden has been opened up and exposed to the outside world, allowing new luxuries and experiences but also exposing them to new perils outside of their control. But is it a case of Sweden reaching out and willingly abandoning their third-way quasi socialism, or have the forces of globalisation invaded and dragged Sweden out of its safe insular naivety? Is the welfare state dead, killed off by an over-feed, under-worked generation with no appreciation of their ancestor’s poverty and hardship? Was the welfare state a concept that could only have worked in Scandinavia in that particular time frame? Or will history show that the past 15 years were just a minor blip in the creation of the most equal and prosperous society on earth? All big questions.
Personally I enjoyed Fishing in Utopia because Andrew Brown’s personal experiences are so recognisable. Anyone who read my earlier blog entries on my time working as a labourer on construction sites will instantly see parallels with Brown’s experiences at the timber factory: The initial exhaustion of manual work, slowly learning enough Swedish to listen in on conversations, lazy and apathetic work colleagues who think manual work is beneath them. We’ve both used the crime novels of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö to educate ourselves on Sweden.
I also share his simultaneous derision and admiration for Swedish society. Like most other expats (including myself) Brown initially derides Sweden’s rigidness and conformity but on returning to Thatcher’s Britain, with an ethos of no-such-thing-as-society, Brown starts to appreciate what Sweden offered. “I had mocked Sweden for failing to live up to its own ideals, but I had always supposed these were ideals that everyone shared. I had not considered the possibility that some people could want a less equal society.” I couldn’t agree more and despite all its faults and odd novelties, there is still a lot to admire Sweden for.
My only real criticism would be Brown’s sections on fishing and fishing equipment that I found so dull and tedious I ended up skimming pages just to get through it. This is because I have no interest in fishing but admittedly anyone with any vague understanding of why sitting by a lake for hours on end with a long piece of string dangling in the water might be entertaining, may think quite differently.
Brown doesn’t glorify Sweden like so many left-wing progressives: It has its faults and it’s far from utopia. Nor does he demonstrate the outright disdain and ridicule common amongst frustrated expats and right-wing conservatives. Instead he offers a very honest, personal, grounded analysis built upon his own personal experiences. He provides a clear picture of what life was like in Sweden in those early days, and despite the changes the country subsequently goes through, it is a narrative that most expats can still relate to today. Even if he can’t stop talking about a handmade fishing reel he once owned, it was still a great pleasure to read an account from someone who, thirty years ago, conducted a similar journey to my own.
Fishing in Utopia: Sweden and the Future that Disappeared, by Andrew Brown, Granta, London, 2008.
When I first arrived in Sweden, the most off putting sight were the huge lifeless apartment blocks everywhere. Unless you’ve been to Sweden, you’re idea of Swedish housing is most probably the wooden red houses surrounded by forests and lakes. But in reality large mass-produced sterile concrete blocks are far more common. These buildings litter the skyline of every Swedish city and town, often on their outskirts. They can look so similar to old Soviet Union-era satellite towns that one could be forgiven for thinking the iron curtain was actually located 1000 km west of St. Petersburg.
Such suburbs are commonly referred to as Miljonprogrammet suburbs, named after the government initiative that spawned them. In 1965, in an effort to combat an emerging housing shortage, the Social Democrats launched the Miljonprogrammet (Swedish for the Million Programme), with the aim the building over a million new homes within ten years. The new dwellings were designed and built on the principles of cheap, simple, functional living. Much thought was given to providing shared facilities such as laundries, bike sheds and rubbish rooms, as well as public utilities such as parks, churches, libraries, nurseries, schools and hospitals. The new suburbs were designed just as much by sociologists as architects, with the eventual aim of building the ideal environment to breed healthy, comfortable, community-minded citizens, with all their basic needs provided for. The one factor that wasn’t taken into consideration was aesthetics. Housing needed to be built quickly and cheaply thus the grey concrete exteriors and monotonous design.
In Gothenburg typical Miljonprogrammet suburbs include Angered, Hammarkullen and Bergsjön. Other famous Miljonprogrammet suburbs are Rinkeby in Stockholm and Rosengård in Malmö. But the Miljonprogrammet are not limited to the big cities and even the smallest towns can boast their own Miljonprogrammet areas.
They were meant to be the suburbs of the future, and considering how they’ve ended up it’s amusing to look at original artists’ impressions and designs in museums. The sketches might depict something from The Jetsons, but forty years on the Miljonprogrammet suburbs are now synonymous with immigrants, crime, unemployment and social decay.
As I’ve already mentioned last month in another blog entry, Sweden is one of the most racially segregated countries I’ve ever seen, and it is the Miljonprogrammet suburbs that have ended up hosting nearly all the immigrants. In such areas there is barely a blonde hair in sight, yet other suburbs would suggest Sweden is the most culturally homogenous place on earth. Either a suburb is populated exclusively by immigrants, or not at all: the division is that distinct.
Not surprisingly, like any area predominately populated by immigrants, Miljonprogrammet suburbs have a poor reputation amongst the host culture. Listening to some people talk of them you’d think they were talking about Grozny and they are indeed often nicknamed “the ghettos”. The worst perception of them is that they’re full of Swede-hating Islamic extremists planning the next September 11 attack. At the very least they’re populated by welfare cheating foreigners who refuse to integrate. Tabloid media also like to seize on higher crime statistics and portray them as de facto war zones where even the police are too scared to tread.
Old readers may remember Hammarkullen as the location of the very first construction site I worked at, so unlike many Gothernburgers I’ve actually been to a Miljonprogrammet suburb. I was there everyday for nearly a month and from my experiences I can confidently say it really isn’t that bad. It wouldn’t be my first choice when looking for a flat but if it is the worst part of Gothenburg, then Gothenburg has some very comfortable living standards. I’m not so widely travelled that I can claim to have seen the world’s most down trodden but I have seen plenty of suburbs in cities like London, Paris, Glasgow and Belfast, which are significantly worse. Windows are bordered up or broken, barbed wire lines every fence, rubbish is strewn everywhere, everything is falling apart and in decay, junkies are passed out in the gutter, CCTV cameras monitor your every move and large conveys of heavily armed police are ever present. These are all aspects of really run down areas and Hammarkullen has none of them. I found it was clean, well maintained, and so safe kids played in the street unsupervised. Hammerkullen might not be about to win any architectural awards but it isn’t skid row.
For me the most disturbing aspect of Hammerkullen and Angered is their location as they are quite visibly isolated and cut off from the rest of Gothenburg. When you take the tram from town you actually leave the city as you travel through large industrial areas and forests, without making any stops for a good 10 minutes before finally arriving. Coupled with the fact that its populated exclusively by immigrants, and you’ve created a real sense that this an out-of-sight, out-mind-dumping ground for non-Swedes.
Anyone opposed to migration to Sweden will point to areas like Hammarkullen as proof of their convictions. Higher unemployment and crime, the argument goes, are caused by immigrants who don’t want to work and/or are more inclined to commit crime, while the deep segregation comes down to immigrants’ refusal to integrate. Now I don’t want to get up on my soap box (but I will anyway) but there are some glaring problems with such arguments, not least of all the assumption that immigrants choice to live in Miljonprogrammet suburbs, or that they’re even given a choice. Half the students in my SFI class live in places like Angered or Hammarkullen and I’m yet to meet one who does so by preference. I’ve already been through the perils of the Swedish housing market so I won’t do so again here, but suffice to say that finding a rental property isn’t easy for anyone. If you’re a immigrant, especially one that doesn’t have a job or speak much Swedish, it’s harder still.
I’m yet to see the city where newly arrived immigrants are allowed to move straight into prime real estate. Due to its location and relatively lower living standards compared to the rest of the city, its plain delusional to believe people choice to live in Hammarkullen rather then Örgyte (a wealthy part of Gothenburg). But as one of my classmates said recently, “I need to live somewhere, I can’t sleep on the streets.”
As for integration if you want migrants to integrate it is hardly conducive to force them all to live together in the same suburb on the city’s outskirts, physically detached from the rest of society.
It is easy to look at the Miljonprogrammet housing and see it as a giant ugly mistake. But in the end the Social Democrats did succeed in reaching their aim of creating over a million new homes. (Considering the Swedish tendency to be exact with figures, if the programme had fallen short I wouldn’t put it pass them to rename it the 957,200 programme instead.) Considering Sweden’s population at the time was only seven million (today it is nine million) creating a million homes in only ten years is quite an achievement. The living standards they offered have since been surpassed but at the time they did represent a significant improvement.
The Miljonprogrammet suburbs have also spawned a life and culture of their own. For one they’ve given birth to their own dialect of Swedish, popularly known as Rinkeby Swedish after the Miljonprogrammet suburb of Stockholm. (Rinkeby Swedish is basically Swedish mixed with terms and pronunciations from Middle-Eastern, African and Latin American languages.) Miljonprogrammet suburbs have also produced a host of contemporary Swedish musicians, filmmakers, artists and athletes. Internationally the most famous Miljonprogrammet citizen is Inter Milan footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic who grew up in the means streets of Malmö’s Rosengård.
Given their reputations as ghettos it’s hardly surprising that the Miljonprogrammet has given birth to Sweden’s hip-hop scene. The Latin Kings, one of Sweden’s first commercial successful hip hop acts, became renowned in the 1990s for writing lyrics that were not only in Swedish (until then all Swedish hip hop was in English) but in Rinkeby Swedish. As you can see from this film clip, Miljonprogrammet buildings are a prominent feature and life in the Miljonprogrammet is pretty integral to their image.
Since the 90s The Latin Kings have lost a fair bit of street cred as their front man, the ludicrously named Dogge Doggelito, is now more famous of his segments on lifestyle programs and advertisements for supermarkets (pictured right). It doesn’t help that he dresses like a real-life Ali G without the satire. However the legacy of intertwining hip-hop culture with the Miljonprogrammet continues. Rather then feel ashamed or stigmatised by the hyperbole surrounding the Miljonprogrammet suburbs, hip-hops artists have co-opted it and even glorified it for their own ends. (There are even white middle-class Swedish hip-hop artists have to pretend to be from the Miljonprogrammet.) Below is a more contemporary example, and one more local to Gothenburg. The music isn’t anything special but the clip gives you a good idea of what a Miljonprogrammet suburb looks like.
UPDATE: It has since been brought to my attention that the fifth picture in this blog entry, of the pink flats by the cliffs, isn't a miljonet suburb at all. It's from the island of Lidingö, one of the more posher areas of Stockholm. But I suppose the fact that it can be mistaken for a miljonet suburb is reflective of the egalitarian nature of Swedish housing.
The other week I had this dream. Basically I’m in a large room with all my friends and family…and for some reason Mick Jagger is there too. Naturally everyone in the room is asking about life in Sweden and the topic of language comes up. Someone (I can’t remember who exactly) asks if I can speak Swedish yet. I reply by saying something like “Not really but I’m learning, and I’m slowly getting there”. Then Mick Jagger starts laughing and shouts at me “What do you mean? You hardly speak any Swedish!’ To illustrate his point he then bombards with a tirade of Swedish and I can only respond with a blank vacant stare. “See? He doesn’t understand anything,” he shouts to everyone in the room. He then proceeds to ridicule and humiliate me in front of everyone I know.
When I woke up I didn’t need to delve too deeply into psychoanalysis theories to interpret what this dream meant (except for maybe the Mick Jagger part. That confuses me; I don’t even like the Rolling Stones.) Subconsciously I feel guilty and ashamed that after 18 months I still don’t speak or understand enough Swedish to confidently say, “Yes, I speak Swedish!” or more accurately “Ja! Jag pratar Svenska!”
The common retort from native English speakers living in Sweden is to bemoan the lack of opportunity to practice. This is in fact true and the majority of Swedes will switch straight to English without blinking an eyelid if they detect just the slightest accent. It doesn’t help either that all my friends are English speakers, as are my work colleagues. And now that she’s back in Sweden A is more concerned about the possibility she might forget how to speak English than how much progress I make in learning Swedish (and I also suspect she enjoys having her own language and being able to talk without me being able to understand.) So I’m only speaking English at home too.
However while I’m in process of deflecting blame and absolving myself of any responsibility for my poor linguistic skills, I would also like to point an accusing finger at SFI.
SFI (Swedish for Immigrants) is the government-funded program designed to, as the name suggests, provide free Swedish lessons to immigrants. Two evenings a week, for close to a year now, I’ve been going to such classes. Having paid good money for a beginner’s course in Melbourne I was pretty rapt when I learnt that my visa entitled me to learn here for free. But unfortunately, like a lot of initiatives from the Swedish welfare state, the ideal doesn’t match up to the reality and SFI has a pretty poor reputation.
The most common complaint I hear is the quality of the teachers. The few people I have meet who have been happy with their SFI education are adamant that it came down to having a good teacher. But such people are in the minority. One of my work colleagues has a teacher so bad that currently the whole class are officially boycotting classes until she is replaced. According to my colleague lessons don’t get any more taxing then passing a ball around the room and saying “Hello, My name is …” in Swedish when the ball lands in your lap.
I’m pleased to say my teacher isn’t quite as apathetic but she’s no Mr Chips either. She’ll typically turn up 20-30 minutes late. Half way through our 2 hour lesson she’ll stop for a 30 minute coffee break, and it is not unusual for her to let us all go early either. And that’s when she turns up. Often she’ll let us into the computer room and let us play around with Swedish educational computer programmes. Although I don’t complain too much when this happens because I often end up learning more then I would if our teacher ran her usual lesson.
As far as I can tell there is no standardised curriculum or class plan. Teachers are given textbooks and learning aides but beyond that it seems they’re free to run the class anyway they like, hence the inconsistency in standards between classes. My teacher chooses to move through things at a comically slow pace, and through class exercises that are as helpful and stimulating as dot-to-dot puzzles are to an aspiring artist.
One of her favourite tasks involves handing out cards with pictures of various fruit and vegetables, and corresponding cards with their names in Swedish. We then take it in turns, in pairs, to match the words with the pictures. It isn’t until everyone in the class has done it 50 times over that our teacher is convinced we understand and we’re ready to move onto something else. We can spend weeks working on things that I’ve managed to pick up within the first half hour.
The last class I attended we went though adjectives. Basically an adjective can be slightly different depending on the category of word it is being applied to, and whether it is singular or plural. When we first covered this in a class last month, I had it down pat by the end of the lesson. Not because I’m a fast learner (quite the opposite when it comes to languages) but because it just isn’t that hard. A month later we’re still on adjectives, and I’m getting a good idea how Bill Murray felt in Groundhog Day.
Another problem with SFI, which I’m sure adds to teachers’ apathy, are the large class sizes and lack of resources. Due to a large influx of immigrants there is a long waiting list to enrol, and the SFI schools obviously can’t cope. At the start of every semester my class will typically have 30-40 students. After three or four weeks this will drop down to 20, but then it won’t be long before another 20 students from the waiting list are rushed in.
The running joke amongst expats is that you can pass SFI without learning a single word of Swedish. A lot of people I know say they’ve passed two levels of SFI when on every occasion they’ve had a test they’ve been convinced they had failed. Because of the high demand, it’s suspected that students are passed just to churn them out and ease the workload.
So there you are Mick, an educated cosmopolitan population combined with an under funded education program, and I’m left speaking Swedish at the level of a 2 year-old.
Maybe I should take a leaf out of the Steve McLaren School of learning languages. For those not in the know, Steve McClaren is an English football manager who recently accepted a job coaching FC Twente in Holland. Below is a video of him being interviewed by a Dutch journalist. Despite the fact she speaks excellent English, McClaren does his best to pass himself off as a native Dutchman. Obviously he can’t speak Dutch, so he does the next best thing…
…He speaks English with a Dutch accent. I like the way he needs to pause and think before he says long words or add in phrases like ‘it is like…how you say...” thus adding further to the impression that English is his second language. Swedish people often make such pauses, but it’s because they’re thinking of the Swedish word in their mind and need a moment to search through their English vocabulary to find its equivalent. Seeing as McClaren is speaking his native tongue, it makes you wonder what’s going through his mind when he stops and pauses.
To be fair I do have a friend who, when stuck for a Swedish work, will resort to using the English word but in a Swenglish accent. But he can often get away with it because Swedish people do in fact talk this way: add in an English phrase in Swenglish midsentence while talking Swedish. Although even he wouldn’t try and do it for a whole conversation!
My apologies for another long absence between blog entries. This time my excuse is that I’ve been moving flats. However I’m settled now and back to the blog with a load of material on the Swedish housing market.
Like a lot of things in Sweden, finding a place to rent isn’t easy. In part this is because of a shortage of housing that seems to be affecting a lot of places. But it is also compounded by the Swedish fixation on rules and regulations, and closer analysis of the situation once again reveals sticky fingerprints from the meddling hands of the Social Democrats.
In our last flat we were living on what is called a second-hand lease, aka we were renting off someone who in turn was renting off the original owners. This is quite common in Sweden. In fact getting hold of a first hand lease where you’re renting directly off the owners, is exceptionally difficult and often involves being on a waiting list for years. Second-hand leases are significantly easier to obtain, but by no means easy. Demand is so high that if you place an ad for a vacant flat you’ll get half of Gothenburg banging on your door. It is generally accepted in Sweden that if you want to find a place to live, you need contacts. Don’t bother with advertisements or agencies, just tell all your friends to tell their friends and hopefully someone will get back to you. This is basically how we found our new flat.
Because first-hand leases are so sought after when one manages to finally get one they loath to give it up even if they have no real desire to ever live there again. This is exactly the situation A and me found ourselves in with our flat. Our landlady rented it out because she no longer wanted to live there. But we did. We were quite happy there and would have been happy to continue living there. However the rules governing second leases means that after 18 months our landlady had to either move back into her flat or give up her first hand contract. Thus we were forced to leave while she’ll move into a flat she doesn’t want to live in. All this just to keep a first hand contract! This is quite common. Anyone in Sweden can retell similar stories and just about everyone I know who rents second-hand is renting off someone who has no intention or desire to live there in the foreseeable future but refuses to give up their contract. We’ve heard from our neighbours that our landlady was hardly ever home when she rented it, and the flat next to us is also empty. Meanwhile Gothenburg is in the midst of a housing shortage.
It’s a bizarre and crazy situation and I’ve spent the last month asking every Swede I know why this is. After all a first hand contract is basically the only way people rent property in the rest of the world and holding one is no big achievement. They’re better than second hand contracts as it gives you more long-term stability. Second-hand contract by contrast means you’ll have to move in 6-12 months. But otherwise there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly special about first hand contracts other than their rarity thus starting a vicious circle. No one wants to give them up about their hard to obtain, so they become hard to obtain because no one is willing to give theirs up. This seems to be the common explanation from expats but there has to be more to it than that.
A big feature of the Swedish housing market is the strict government control over rents instead of a free market allowing you to charge whatever you want. There are rules that dictate exactly what you can charge governed mainly by the properties size and attributes. If you’re renting second hand you cannot charge more then what you’re paying unless the flat is furnished in which case you add no more than 10%. Location isn’t a big factor so a 2 bedroom flat will cost the same regardless of its location in the city. If it’s an inner city or in an outer suburb, assuming their of similar size and standard they’ll be the same rent. For Melbournians it would be like renting a flat right by the Yarra River in Southbank for the same price as a flat in the most decrepit industrial areas of North Sunshine. Or for Sydneysiders, renting a house in Kirribilli for the same as a house in Redfern.
This ensures rents stay low and affordable, and thus landlords cannot exploit the housing shortage by charging extortionate rents such as they’re currently doing in Sydney and Melbourne. Consequently investing in property isn’t the money-spinner it is in other countries and far fewer rental properties are owned by private individuals. Furthermore there are plenty of rules that restrict what you can deal with a property once you buy it. I’m lead to believe that when you buy a flat in Sweden you’re not really buying a flat (and this is one of those situations that starts to verge into Communism) but you’re buying the right to live there indefinitely rent-free. But the flat is still owned by the co-op that own the whole building thus you’re still subject to their rules and restrictions.
Most apartment blocks are owned by government agencies or private corporations. The upside of all these rules is that rents stay relatively low. The downside is that the rental market is a lot smaller and finding a rental property becomes a lot harder. From what I gather it has become more difficult in recent years because currently many of these agencies are encouraging tenants to buy their properties outright. If you already own the first hand contract than you can buy it at a discounted rate, sometimes up to 30% cheaper. One theory I’ve heard is that people are hanging onto their leases in the hope that they’ll be offered the chance to buy it at a bargain basement price thus allowing them to immediately resell it on the free market and pocket the difference.
The idea behind equality in rents regardless of location is to prevent rich-poor divides developing in Swedish cities, as no one will be priced out of a certain area. While there is definitely still some sort of economic divide (plenty of landlords and housing agencies factor in an applicant’s income when choosing tenants) to some extent it has worked as most Swedish cities seem to lack obscenely wealthy suburbs and desperately poor ghettos. However as few people find rental properties the traditional way and instead you rely on contacts, newly arrived migrants are significantly disadvantages and this has caused large ethnic ghettos to emerge in the outer suburbs. As migrants typically don’t have a large network of contacts to rely on, they’re often forced to take the first property offered to them, which is most likely to be in the one of the less desirable locations.
For all it’s ideals and good intentions the Social Democratic housing policy for rental properties has contributed to making Sweden an exceptional racially segregated city which I can envisage as being a major social problem in the coming years. But this is a whole other topic and one for a whole new blog entry. (Possibly one I’ll have written by next week).
However looking around me in my new flat I can’t really complain too much. Right now I live in a newly renovated flat, fully furnished with all the modern conveniences such as dishwasher and central heating, in a very central location (only four tram stops to the centre of town.) Despite my struggle to find a secure or fulfilling job, I cannot complain about my living standards, which are quite possibly the highest I've had since moving out of home. If I were to move back to Melbourne today a flat of this standard and location would be right out of my price range and I cannot envisage myself living like this in Australia for at least a good number of years. But thanks to the Social Democrats even a student and a minimum wage earner can afford to live like inner city yuppies.
Following on from my most recent blog entries I was surprised to find an article in the Guardian Weekly a couple of weeks ago essentially making a similar point about the Nordic welfare states (albeit far more articulately). You can read the article here.
What is it with ferris wheels at the moment? I’ve just returned to Sweden after a holiday back in Melbourne, where the most visible sign of change on the skyline of my native city is a giant wheel. On my return I learn that Gothenburg are planning on building a giant wheel too. Why this obsession with glorified amusement park rides?
have one ferris wheel, which at 25 metres is sufficient for seeing right out to the city’s outskirts. On top of this they also have an 80 metre high skyscraper, and a 116 metre tower each with their own viewing platforms. Considering there is nothing much to see from either of these places other than rooftops, what can a 60 metre ferris wheel possibly add?
