5 ms·

Young people are upset they can't live centrally in the capital for cheap. Same story as everywhere else. Now go forth with the ritual flogging, er, downvoting.

by tpmx 4y ago

Young people are upset they can't live centrally in the capital for cheap. Same story as everywhere else. Now go forth with the ritual flogging, er, downvoting. (I live and work in the countryside of Sweden. I recommend it.)

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Sure, but try dating and building social circles while living in rural areas as a single 20-30 something year old. Of course young people want to live in dense walkable areas where it's easy to find other like minded people. Isn't Swedish population also statistically one of the biggest sufferers of loneliness in the world and also one of the largest consumers of antidepressants? Or was that Finland? I'm not sure.
- tpmx 4y ago
  There are plenty of more affordable, densely walkable city areas in Sweden. Every single city in the country is built this way, from the smallest to the largest. That's not the factor. The factor at play here is that these all these people want to have a cheap apartment in the same 10 km^2 that's designated as the cool place. When that can't happen because of physics, they claim society is breaking down. > Isn't Swedish population also statistically one of the biggest sufferers of loneliness in the world and also one of the largest consumers of antidepressants? No idea, but it sounds a bit like reverberations from Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1960 speech where he said that "sin, nudity, drunkenness and suicide" in Sweden were due to welfare policy excess, which then quite incorrectly caused americans to correlate Sweden with suicide and depression for many decades. At the moment the suicide rate is higher in the US than in Sweden but we're relatively similar in this statistic. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rate-from-suicides-ghe?tab=chart&country=SWE~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rate-from-suicides-...
  - tannhaeuser 4y ago
    > all these people want to have a cheap apartment in the same 10 km^2 that's designated as the cool place. Which, incidentally, is cool because not everyone's living there ;) Don't know about Stockholm, but I guess those places are the same 19th/early 20th century quarters like in every other European city build for renting out to an upward moving middle class and popular exactly because they're meeting the representative needs of their tenants then and now.
    - tpmx 4y ago
      There's nothing special about the buildings - the same kind exist all over the country in large numbers.
      - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        It's not about the buildings themselves, it's about the neighborhood. As always in real estate it's location, location, location.
- AdrianB1 4y ago
  I grew up in a village in the mountains where the closest neighbors were 500m away. At age 14, just before moving, I counted half a dozen attractive females of the same age (plus minus 1 year) in the village, that means 2-3 km away but still very much in reach on foot or by bicycle. I have most of my extended family there and there was no problem dating, marrying and having long term relations. There is a small town 15 km away with cinema, a few restaurants, hospital, the school is in the every village and a high school is 6 km away (one in the town as well), so "country side" does not mean secluded. These days I am working from home partly from there in the summer, Gigabit Internet over Fiber is dirt cheap and reliable and even Amazon Germany delivers there, it takes a week but it works.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >I grew up in a village in the mountains where the closest neighbors were 500m away. At age 14, just before moving, I counted half a dozen attractive females of the same age You are completely moving the goalposts. Read my comment again please. I was talking about the dating market of twenty and thirty year olds, not that of school teenagers. How's the dating scene of single twenty to thirty year olds in your village? All that demographic has moved to big cities to go to universities and become skilled professionals. What's left in villages is older people and children.
    - badpun 4y ago
      If the costs of living in large cities keep rising, maybe the young will learn that the "educated, big city living" will just be a trap and wasted years for a lot of them, and will decide to for a life in their local areas instead? There's plenty of Univerisities in small, local cities as well, so it doesn't mean being condemned to becoming a chimney sweep as well.
      - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        That's very true but there are two problems: 1. Most young aren't so lucky to be born in a small developed city with good universities, jobs and high quality of life, so they can stick around their families, which is why they leave. Look at most of Southern and Eastern Europe. 2. For your idea to work we need to have companies also creating jobs in smaller cities, but the reverse is happening: most companies now exclusively move to the biggest cities where the larges worker pools already are (Berlin, London, Amsterdam, etc) creating a snowball effect. Small cities also have jobs, but they tend to be terrible, body-shop style that suck to work for.

by tpmx 4y ago

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

Sure, but try dating and building social circles while living in rural areas as a single 20-30 something year old. Of course young people want to live in dense walkable areas where it's easy to find other like minded people. Isn't Swedish population also statistically one of the biggest sufferers of loneliness in the world and also one of the largest consumers of antidepressants? Or was that Finland? I'm not sure.

tpmx 4y ago
There are plenty of more affordable, densely walkable city areas in Sweden. Every single city in the country is built this way, from the smallest to the largest. That's not the factor. The factor at play here is that these all these people want to have a cheap apartment in the same 10 km^2 that's designated as the cool place. When that can't happen because of physics, they claim society is breaking down. > Isn't Swedish population also statistically one of the biggest sufferers of loneliness in the world and also one of the largest consumers of antidepressants? No idea, but it sounds a bit like reverberations from Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1960 speech where he said that "sin, nudity, drunkenness and suicide" in Sweden were due to welfare policy excess, which then quite incorrectly caused americans to correlate Sweden with suicide and depression for many decades. At the moment the suicide rate is higher in the US than in Sweden but we're relatively similar in this statistic. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rate-from-suicides-ghe?tab=chart&country=SWE~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rate-from-suicides-...
- tannhaeuser 4y ago
  > all these people want to have a cheap apartment in the same 10 km^2 that's designated as the cool place. Which, incidentally, is cool because not everyone's living there ;) Don't know about Stockholm, but I guess those places are the same 19th/early 20th century quarters like in every other European city build for renting out to an upward moving middle class and popular exactly because they're meeting the representative needs of their tenants then and now.
  - tpmx 4y ago
    There's nothing special about the buildings - the same kind exist all over the country in large numbers.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      It's not about the buildings themselves, it's about the neighborhood. As always in real estate it's location, location, location.
AdrianB1 4y ago
I grew up in a village in the mountains where the closest neighbors were 500m away. At age 14, just before moving, I counted half a dozen attractive females of the same age (plus minus 1 year) in the village, that means 2-3 km away but still very much in reach on foot or by bicycle. I have most of my extended family there and there was no problem dating, marrying and having long term relations. There is a small town 15 km away with cinema, a few restaurants, hospital, the school is in the every village and a high school is 6 km away (one in the town as well), so "country side" does not mean secluded. These days I am working from home partly from there in the summer, Gigabit Internet over Fiber is dirt cheap and reliable and even Amazon Germany delivers there, it takes a week but it works.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >I grew up in a village in the mountains where the closest neighbors were 500m away. At age 14, just before moving, I counted half a dozen attractive females of the same age You are completely moving the goalposts. Read my comment again please. I was talking about the dating market of twenty and thirty year olds, not that of school teenagers. How's the dating scene of single twenty to thirty year olds in your village? All that demographic has moved to big cities to go to universities and become skilled professionals. What's left in villages is older people and children.
  - badpun 4y ago
    If the costs of living in large cities keep rising, maybe the young will learn that the "educated, big city living" will just be a trap and wasted years for a lot of them, and will decide to for a life in their local areas instead? There's plenty of Univerisities in small, local cities as well, so it doesn't mean being condemned to becoming a chimney sweep as well.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      That's very true but there are two problems: 1. Most young aren't so lucky to be born in a small developed city with good universities, jobs and high quality of life, so they can stick around their families, which is why they leave. Look at most of Southern and Eastern Europe. 2. For your idea to work we need to have companies also creating jobs in smaller cities, but the reverse is happening: most companies now exclusively move to the biggest cities where the larges worker pools already are (Berlin, London, Amsterdam, etc) creating a snowball effect. Small cities also have jobs, but they tend to be terrible, body-shop style that suck to work for.