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Comment by nivenkos | Hacker News Reader

A more practical solution is housing coops like the BRF system in Sweden. Individual landlordism is mostly banned (there are some company rentals though) - you buy the place you live in, and there are restrictions on renting it out (no more than 2 years in a row, etc.).

It's helped a lot here.

I don't think that social housing is a good solution. It's a complete disaster here in Sweden, with 12+ year waiting times, and massive inequality between those who have those rent-fixed privileged first hand contracts and those stuck in the unregulated wild west of second hand renting. Often resulting in the working poor effectively subsidising wealthier, older people to keep their very cheap flats in the city centre, etc.

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> BRF system in Sweden

To expand on this point, and a similar system in Finland called asumisoikeus:

Municipalities have a pool of housing units. The tenants do not buy the house itself, they buy a right to live in that house, which usually costs about 10% of the price of the house, reimbursed when they move out. They also pay a rent that takes care of the energies and depreciation of the house. Socio-economic status is taken into account when figuring out who's eligible

Now, there are some criticisms of the system, mainly that the rents aren't that much lower than commercial properties. However, it does keep house prices in check. 100m^2 (~1100 sqft) house in the capital region is about 9 years of average take-home income - or 5 years for a couple

The grandparent is a bit unclear in my opinion.

In the BRF system, you literally do not "buy the place you live in", you instead buy the right to live there. The actual ownership of the property is with the BRF.

The word is "bostadsrättsförening" [1] which roughly translates to "living rights association" or something (Wikipedia uses "housing cooperative" so I guess that's the best).

The word "förening" is hard to translate, the closest seems to be "voluntary association" [1], it is a formal collection of people with some common purpose (like managing a house). There are legally various types with varying requirements, and so on.

Edit: spelling, more linkage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_association

It sounds like you are describing a condominium. Is that it?

Basically.

Sweden doesn't have social housing. What you are discussing is called rent control and means that landlords can't decide rents for their properties by themselves. Without rent control you'd get even more segregated cities as many areas would become too expensive for most to live. Landlords and their lobby organizations want rent control abolished though because doubled rents would greatly increase their profits.

The First hand contract inequality is terrible though. Just ban landlordism directly and let people buy their residences.

What of people who can’t or don’t want to afford to buy and maintain a property? Several times in my life I benefited from renting a room, apartment, or house (in college, just after college, after a breakup/move out, moving to a new city with an unstable job).

It would have been a massive financial burden and personal inconvenience if I had to buy/sell every one of those times.

Where would you live if you cannot afford to buy?

I swear some of the policies people on here come up with are so poorly thought out.

Damn all the people who live in a city temporarily then? College students, temp workers etc

The probability of an average person being able to afford to live in a home in a "nice area" is much higher in Sweden and other countries with rent control than in countries without. There is no shortage of homes, there is a shortage of homes that people can afford.

Hardly anyone can get rent control apartments though. The system has failed.

Not true. There are over a million rent-controlled apartments in Sweden.

How many people want those million homes though?

Millions of people live in those homes. That there are more people than apartments available in the most desirable areas is not a system failure.

Has it really helped? I remember talking to a young Swede a while ago, just a few years out of college. He said he bought a flat in Stockholm pretty much as soon as he had a job, and that the price appreciation since has almost outstripped his salary.

Yeah, but my brother lives in Barcelona - and there it's even worse, on lower salaries.

We ended up paying the same price for relatively similar flats, but in BCN that's much harder to achieve, and they are older and need renovation - and there are thousands of AirBnB slumlords buying up everything.

So yeah, the price increases have been a problem (and hit me badly combined with the interest rate increases) but it's still better than most of Western Europe.

Not trying to be too skeptical, but that doesn't exactly sound like it's working too well. I remember charts by the ECB as showing Sweden with the most overpriced real estate in the EU. It might look ok in comparison to Barcelona, but that one's probably only second to Venice as the world's tourism hot spot and has an extreme concentration of AirBnBs, not exactly representative of Western Europe in general.

This really is a fixable problem.

Heavy taxation on NPD (non-primary domicile) housing solves this by itself. It's just that convincing people this is in their best interest will take a lot of effort - not to mention that there's a fairly ubiquitous problem of local politicians being in the pockets of property developers in the areas where these problems are at their worst.

People still believe that their home is a good investment, without any thought given to who's going to buy it from them later or where that person will be getting the financing.

I love housing co-ops as well. If we ended up in a system like that, I'd be thrilled.

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