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Hey, I live there! Emigrated from the good old US of A two years ago. I want to point out one upstream reason why this is possible which isn't really talked ab
by hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
Hey, I live there! Emigrated from the good old US of A two years ago.
I want to point out one upstream reason why this is possible which isn't really talked about enough: On the margin, Finland has been better at providing actual numbers of rental units than any of the major cities I lived in in the US (Boston, NYC, Chicago).
I live in one of those hundred-story virtually unadorned 'concrete suburbs' on the edge of town and the fact my rent is closer to 10% than 50% of my income is astonishing to me. I paid more for a single subletted room in the States than I ever have for rent here. Astonishing, and I hope to fight tooth and nail to keep the housing and especially apartment supply healthy in the years to come.
N.B.: Rent in Helsinki is still kind of nuts for now, partly because it's the first stop for most of us foreigners. I don't live there, pretty much for that reason: A 10% increase in take home pay doesn't mean anything is it's eaten twice over by rent. But if you can learn Finnish well enough to live and work elsewhere, the laws of supply and demand suddenly tilt much more in your favor. steeples hands
- CyberDildonics 3y agoYou live in a hundred story building?
- jandrewrogers 3y agoI assume they meant a hundred units. The tallest buildings in Finland don't even reach 40 stories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_Finland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_F...
- weberer 3y agoWhere do you live? I'm paying much more in Helsinki for a 1 bedroom apartment than I ever did in Philadelphia.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoA tiny town in Pirkanmaa; previous to that, an even tinier town in Pohjois-Pohjanmaa. God bless tiny towns and remote work.
- usr1106 3y ago> Hey, I live there! Emigrated from the good old US of A two years ago. Welcome to the club. I am another of the historically very few foreigners in Finland (it's going up a bit recently, but still low compared to many other countries.) So please watch out for the changes announced by the new far-right government: You might be expelled if you happen to lose your job and do not find a new one within 3 months. And finding a new job without being fluent in Finnish can be tough (although slightly easier in the high-tech sector). If you want to pass the citizenship language test consider doing it in Swedish. Unless your mother tongue is Estonian the learning effort will only be a little fraction of that for Finnish. Of course knowing Swedish in daily life has only very limited benefit. Well, nobody knows. Maybe the government has fallen on its racism scandals before they manage to get anything changed. But the signs are not positive.