Gothenburg’s housing crisis, a house of cards Sadettin Demirel, Chloé Berogin and Freyan Bosma
The very practical housing issue in the area may well be one of the reasons for rising social tensions, especially in a context of electoral turmoil.
Newcomers to Gothenburg usually have one thing in common: to some extent they all struggled to get accommodation. Whether students or families, foreigners or Swedes, finding a place to live can turn out to be an incredible nightmare. The most significant example is probably the one of so-called first-hand contracts, these contracts you get when you are the official renter of an apartment. Those who want to move to Gothenburg and who hope to easily rent a place are warned early in the process. Rental queue time in Gothenburg has gotten worse in last ten years. “One could get a housing with one year queue time in 2010 and now ideal time to secure first hand contract is 8 years”, Rainer, a landlord said.
The approach of the elections next Sunday made the various parties very visible in the streets, all of a sudden. And although the main focus in international press seems to be the progression of far-right candidates, this question of a housing crisis remains at the center of each party’s plans for the city. All their representatives found these days in Gothenburg, each advocating for their own agenda, agree on this: we need more housing options.
Of course the proposed solutions vary greatly. Following Jennifer Hankins’s words for the Left Party, the priority lies both on “fighting the financial interests which rule this housing business” and on implementing “a ceiling” to avoid too high rents. On the right-wing side of the chessboard both the Moderate Party and Sweden Democrats advocate for more flexibility in the housing market, blaming the current situation on the policies led by the left-wing coalition these past years. Björn Tidland, working for the latter, insists on making it possible for landowners to raise the rents so as to make profit and “build then more housing”, while Nina Miskovsky from the Moderate Party argues the “movement of people from one place to another, freeing some space for others” is what matters. She adds the idea of merit and the fact that “a society can’t work with only people who do nothing, right?”.
But here appears what was lying beyond the common political discourse, including the one on the housing crisis: the tensions created between certain categories of people. The frustration of people who are trying to find accommodation and who end up competing against each other because of a system they did not choose. Who has never heard a complaint about that lady that was given an apartment right away ‘simply’ because she was threatened by her husband, for instance? Or about this refugee family? You pick – we are not short of scapegoats.
Out of such ideas a collective has emerged, Rösta Mer Mänskligt, calling for a “more human vote”. Their message is quite straightforward: when picking for whom you intend to vote, you should try to evaluate the impact it will have on human lives around you. We will have to wait for Sunday to know if their simple and yet not self-evident call was heard by voters.
