this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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A couple of years ago, my boss' father (who founded the company and still worked there on and off) and I had a chat over lunch. I'm not sure how the topic of house prices came up, but he mentioned that when he and his wife bought their house, a car cost more than a house, so you knew that someone was really well off if they had two cars in the driveway.
I think that's the first time I've actually gotten my mind blown. The idea that a car could cost more than a house just didn't compute, and it still doesn't quite sit with me.
Of course, the general standard of houses decline the further back in time you go, but houses were a lot cheaper back in the days. Below is a figure of housing prices in Norway relative to wages at the time (mirroring the situation almost everywhere in the west):
Factoring in the increased production capabilities over the same period of time, the construction cost of houses are not that much higher. If we designed our communities better and had a better system for utilizing the increased labour power, we could have much more affordable housing and more beautiful and well functioning societies.
Do not let it sit right with you. This future was stolen from you.
Gods, and that's Oslo too. I couldn't imagine even renting there today.
Yeah, it is terrible :-( On average anyone who simply had grandparents living in Oslo has 1 000 000 NOK (about 100 000 USD) higher net worth than those that did not due to this increase.
I can believe that.
I was born in Stockholm to a single mother. Honestly not sure how we could afford to live in that 2½ roomer, I think the rent was about 5k when we moved away back in 2003? Right now I live in a small town and my rent is almost 11k for a 3-roomer. Stockholm isn't even on the radar for me.
When I say Stockholm I also mean Stockholm, not the suburbs; we lived right by Zinken in Södermalm. Like, this is literally the same block and it's 22k. I'm doing quite alright for myself, and my income is around 28k after taxes.
Another thing that really fucks me off is the fact that since a couple of years back we've been urged to not have too large salary increases because that'd contribute to the inflation. Meanwhile, landlords are making more money than they ever have, they're circumventing the established system for negotiating rent increases, and increasing it many times more than done in the past 20 years!
This is a graph, taken from this article on Hem & Hyra, a news outlet operated by the tenants union.
When the bubble popped back in 2009 the rent increases were on average around 3%, there are cases where you only saw about a 1% increase and now we've gotten a 4-5% rent increase two years in a row. Last year my rent increase was on 6%! Sure there are places where it's way worse; my sister's boyfriend got slapped with a spontaneous rent increase of 150%, and she herself got her rent increased from $1200 to $3500 when her landlord sold the duplex; but we have a system in Sweden where this kind of thing shouldn't happen.
The way I see it; if you can't afford to keep the properties, sell them back to the government and let the public landlord deal with them instead.
Wonder when and where. Sounds exceptional, though I ain’t much of an economic historian.
Sweden. He's about 80 now I believe, so if we assume he bought his house around his 30s that'd be around late 60s to early/mid 70s?