I can believe that.

I was born in Stockholm to a single mother. Honestly not sure how we could afford to live in that 2½ roomer, I think the rent was about 5k when we moved away back in 2003? Right now I live in a small town and my rent is almost 11k for a 3-roomer. Stockholm isn't even on the radar for me.

When I say Stockholm I also mean Stockholm, not the suburbs; we lived right by Zinken in Södermalm. Like, this is literally the same block and it's 22k. I'm doing quite alright for myself, and my income is around 28k after taxes.

Another thing that really fucks me off is the fact that since a couple of years back we've been urged to not have too large salary increases because that'd contribute to the inflation. Meanwhile, landlords are making more money than they ever have, they're circumventing the established system for negotiating rent increases, and increasing it many times more than done in the past 20 years!

This is a graph, taken from this article on Hem & Hyra, a news outlet operated by the tenants union.

When the bubble popped back in 2009 the rent increases were on average around 3%, there are cases where you only saw about a 1% increase and now we've gotten a 4-5% rent increase two years in a row. Last year my rent increase was on 6%! Sure there are places where it's way worse; my sister's boyfriend got slapped with a spontaneous rent increase of 150%, and she herself got her rent increased from $1200 to $3500 when her landlord sold the duplex; but we have a system in Sweden where this kind of thing shouldn't happen.

The way I see it; if you can't afford to keep the properties, sell them back to the government and let the public landlord deal with them instead.