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Comment by yakshaving_jgt | Hacker News Reader

It is expensive to live there. If you're a programmer, you will live a far more comfortable life living and working in Poland than you would in Sweden, despite how much Swedes tend to look down their nose at the Polish.

I speak from experience.

If you're working a low/zero skill job, you would be far better off in Sweden, although the market is extremely competitive.

Sweden has a major problem with housing, so you can forget renting an apartment in a major city — you will spend roughly 18 years on a waiting list to be able to rent anything in the centre of Gothenburg. This isn't hyperbole.

Just about everyone speaks English. Some younger people actually speak English more correctly than a significant proportion of the English population in England. Unsurprisingly, learning Swedish language and culture helps you blend in. It's not a particularly difficult language anyway.

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> Sweden has a major problem with housing, so you can forget renting an apartment in a major city — you will spend roughly 18 years on a waiting list to be able to rent anything in the centre of Gothenburg. This isn't hyperbole.

You can forget a first hand contract from the municipal housing agencies. Second hand contracts and/or private landlords still work - but watch out for scams.

> you will spend roughly 18 years on a waiting list

last I have read it's 10 years in Stockholm, in Åkersberga (less than an hour north of Stockholm) it would be a few years https://www.armadafast.se/boende/bostadsk%C3%B6/k%C3%B6tider

or you can buy for 2M SEK (200,000 Euro) a nice small house in a suburb and pay the mortgage back over 50 years.

Yeah, it's different wait times for different areas. The 18 year figure I gave was for central Gothenburg, like I said.

Where I was living — in Majorna/Kungsladugård — on average 2,400 people applied to rent each apartment. This was back in 2012. This would be worse now, given the refugee/migrant influx.

> Second hand contracts and/or private landlords still work

Barely. There is a black market for rental contracts in Sweden, which is as far as I'm aware unheard of everywhere else in the world.

Renting "i andra hand" (subletting) is extremely difficult. Want to see how bad the market is? Put a fake apartment up for rent on Blocket to test the response rate. The last time I did this, I had over 300 responses in the first half hour.

Subletting is also time-limited to a year, if I remember correctly (though perhaps some housing associations have different rules on this, and perhaps not).

The people downvoting my original comment which is somewhat critical of Sweden is good reflection of the typical Swedish mentality — borta bra men hemma bäst. There's a reason Sweden is called "China of the North".

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