Before a share a stunning article about the housing situation in Stockholm I want to restate the point I made yesterday: Even if housing was free, an entitlement guaranteed to every person or family, if there isn’t enough, high prices will be replaced with rationing. In other words, what drives housing access issues isn’t greed or even necessarily population growth; when there are more people that want housing than there is housing available prices go up either in the form of money or being forced to wait until a unit becomes available. An article looking at the “insanely difficult to find housing in Stockholm” validates my point. First, remember, Stockholm has the very system of rent control and government mandates that some people in Seattle dream of having here.

Here are two, short paragraphs that should make anyone think twice or three times:

The average waiting time to be eligible for a rental apartment in Stockholm was nine years in 2016. The average waiting times are 14 and 16 years in attractive central neighborhoods like Kungsholmen and Södermalm, respectively.

It’s normal practice in Stockholm that parents register their newborns in the rental queue, so that they have a chance of their own flat once they graduate high school.

Not enough. How about some visuals.

Why is getting worse?

The waiting line for rental apartments (including student housing) grew with eight percent, or almost 40,000 people, during 2016. This stands in stark contrast to Stockholm Housing Agency’s ability to cater to this skyrocketing demand Last year, only some 12,000 people got their apartments through the agency, albeit a new record.

It’s a simple answer: production of new units is not keeping up with the demand. Again, price in money isn’t the issue, but the price of waiting is “skyrocketing.”

Here’s a graph showing average wait times:

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) recommends in it’s report that Stockholm, “ease rental regulations to incentivise housing supply, mobility and better utilisation of the housing stock, while maintaining tenant protection against abuse.”

Let me put part of  that recommendation in bold: Ease rental regulations to incentivise housing supply!

This is not the Rental Housing Association saying this, or builders or developers from somewhere around the corner. This is coming from Europe about what most people around here consider to be a socialist paradise. Well, it isn’t and slicing the pie thinner and thinner doesn’t work whether housing is run by the government or by a market economy. The message is the same, always: build more housing, of all kinds, in more places, for all levels of income.