> But there are other considerations at play, too, aren't there? Oh god, yes. The housing crisis is extremely complicated, what we see now in Sweden is the res

> But there are other considerations at play, too, aren't there? Oh god, yes. The housing crisis is extremely complicated, what we see now in Sweden is the result of a perfect storm. In the 90s Sweden had a surplus of houses from the 80s building craze and municipalities completely stopped building rentals. The municipalities in Sweden are extremely strong too and have a monopoly on what gets built on their land, and they don't want rentals they want expensive homes because expensive homes are inhabited by people paying good income taxes. So, they never took those plans for building new housing complexes off the shelves till very recently (but the municipalities still want expensive homes, especially in the bed communities outside Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö). We've also had the start of the fourth baby boom very recently, that's put a lot of strain on our housing market. The kids from the third baby boom in the early 90s grew up to move out and they started getting their own babies. This is what happened in the mid to late 60s too with the people from the first baby boom during WWII grew up and Sweden launched the million program to cope (which the national government can't do this time with the current laws in place, it's up to the municipalities alone to predict this and solve it and they failed or didn't want to solve it). In Sweden getting building permits is a very time consuming ordeal and can cost a lot in legal fees. Building in Stockholm is about twice the price of building in Berlin and will take about twice as long to negotiate with the local regulators. We've had record immigration to the cities in recent years, some from foreign migrants but by far most of it has been internal migrants (since during most of this crisis municipalities could just say no to refugees and cite the housing crisis as a reason for it, which the big cities have taken advantage of multiple times. I grew up in one of the wealthiest parts of Sweden just outside Gothenburg, they've taken in a few hundred refugees since 2008 while tens of thousands of people have moved in from other parts of Sweden). This is also consistent with our previous history; in the 90s we had a very large immigration of refugees but the housing prices still took a dive. And finally, this is just how Swedish culture has evolved and it's happened faster than we've had time to react. Compared to the rest of Europe, Sweden has an unusual amount of people living alone. We move out very early from our parents and divorce is uncomplicated here which instantly creates new demand for housing; where there was previously only demand for one home, now there is a demand for two.