What broke Sweden? Real estate bust exposes big divide

Paywall :-|

Sweden is broken? That's news to me. Why isn't this in the media?

Real estate can either be a lucrative investment or it can be affordable.

Why are people continuously acting shocked when they realize it can't be both?

And why are elected politicians everywhere continuously shrugging their shoulders as if the housing market is somethin completely outside of their control.

Of course it doesn't. The only way to bring down prices is to build more supply than the demand, but for some reason this elephant in the room is always ignored because always a million reasons come up against it, mostly being just NIMBYsm in disguise.

Keeping a limited supply artificially price capped through regulations, sounds good at first, and will most likely be popular with clueless voters, but it will lead to shortages down the road and only the lucky few with money or connections will be able to afford.

We had that in communism, except ironically, not with housing but with food and goods. Now the west has the opposite problem, everyone has plenty of food and iPhones, but no housing. Have Swedes never learned about this and the functioning of supply/demand in their excellent school system?

A key problem in Sweden -- besides the weird interaction of privatization and legacy over-regulation -- is that the current inflation and rising interest rates break the social contract: a relatively even salary distribution allowed many people to have a solid middle-class life style, recently albeit with never-ending mortgages. Now, the interest rates are too high for these mortgages to be even superficially sustainable, people have less money at hand to pay for them, and there is no political will to relief the working and middle class, which means many will slide down the social ladder. As an immigrant living in Sweden I fear that the country will soon be pretty unattractive to live in for most 'internationals' who have a choice.