Uninteresting rants about unregulated rents
The regulation of rents in Sweden has long been the subject of lively debate. Often, the debate is driven by economists who start from the premise that the current system doesn't work and that we should therefore somehow deregulate and introduce unregulated rents set by the free market. It's worth noting that economists are quite alone in their never-ending flow of op-ed rants. The major private landlords appear oddly uninterested in the discussion. The silence can partly be explained by their interest in not appearing too miserly as it risks their relationship with tenants, which is often already strained. But there are three other important economic reasons, most people aren't aware of.
Firstly, there is essentially already free rent setting in new construction, but the system isn't called market rent (marknadshyra) but presumptive rents (presumtionshyra). Rents in newly built houses are now so high that the houses suffer from high turnover of residents and sometimes it's even difficult to find tenants at all. Rents of over 16,000 SEK per month for a smal 4-room apartment require relatively high incomes from two people. The problem is that the target group who can afford such rent can also afford to buy an apartment, often resulting in a lower monthly cost. Therefore, the incomes from new construction are essentially already maximized; there's no more money to make for the landlords.
Secondly, there have long been ways to increase rents to new built levels even in older apartment buildings. Many landlords have a system in place to renovate apartments according to a predetermined template that is considered to raise the standard. If they replace an old vinyl floor in a bathroom with a new one, it's counted as maintenance and is to be included in the rent. If they instead lay tiles, it's considered a standard improvement and you get a rent increase. The price, function, and lifespan can be exactly the same. Renovations are, of course, only done once a tenant has moved out, to avoid headlines about raised rents. The template includes things like spotlights in the ceiling, fully tiled bathrooms, and oak parquet flooring. It may sound fancy but in fact there is basically no cheaper flooring as three strip wood flooring and no cheaper bathroom wall cladding than 15x15 cm white tiles. This system results in perfectly functional bathrooms, kitchens, and floors being ripped out and replaced with budget-standard products of varying quality in renovations that few desire. It's sad both for the environment and for anyone who would rather have money left after paying rent than four spotlights in the bathroom ceiling.
Thirdly, it's not always the rental income in actual money that a landlord primarily aims for, at least not the big players. Instead, they aim for the presumptive rental income, i.e., the maximum theoretical income. These presumptive incomes determine the property's value in the eyes of the bank, which in turn determines how much the property can be mortgaged. All property companies rely on loans to acquire new properties, maintain the old ones, and build new ones. Increased turnover and stock price are also often tied to bonus systems and the like for the corporate management. A property with high rents can be mortgaged more than one with low rents. This partly explains the eagerness to renovate older apartments and is the most important explanation for why retail spaces can remain empty for years. The occupancy rate is of course to be considered when valuing a property, but in practice that can be hard to judge. And no property owner is willing to lower the rent to meet demand if it lowers the value of the property!
The debate about unregulated rents is uninteresting because the system already entirely aligns with the interests of the landlords. The debate misleads us from the important question of what we politically want with the housing question. As a tenant, the goal is obviously reasonable rents, good quality, and a generous supply of apartments. As a landlord, the goal is often the opposite. From a socio-economic standpoint, it is clear that politicians should work in the interests of tenants. High rents and housing shortages inhibit both growth and economic dynamism, drives unreasonable indebtedness among those who instead attempt to buy a home and creates an enormous transfer of wealth from the poorest part of the population to the landlords and bank-owners. Not to mention a lot of human anxiety and resignation. It’s time to wrestle the debate about housing policy from the hands of economists and instead focus on what kind of society we want to have, and work towards that. We can start by restoring the municipal housing companies to their public service mission, removing the system of presumptive rents, stopping the meaningless standardised upgrades, and providing municipal credits to housing cooperatives. It’s not hard, we’ve done it before.
Run to the gun
Recently, the proposal to use the military for police duties was again brought to the table. It stands clear that many cities in Sweden have problems with crime and the occasional extreme gang violence. But you don't cure the headache by shooting yourself in the head, to use a somewhat unsavoury analogy in this context. There are many reasons why we should let the police do their job, while investing massively in children and education in affected areas, and let the military stay in their barracks. One of them has to do with urban life.
For almost a hundred years, Sweden has had a very clear division of the monopoly of violence into two branches, the Police and the Military. In simple terms, the police must maintain order within the country (read the cities) and the military abroad (read Russia). There are three very good arguments for this strict division: historical experience (google Ådalen 1931), practical reasons (training and equipment) and ideology (do we really want a militarised society).
In addition to this, a slightly overlooked argument is that the presence of the military would have a very negative impact on the city in general as a creative and life-affirming phenomenon. Not in the sense that it would physically damage the city, we are - despite the headlines - not at war. But military presence would definitely damage the image of the city and how we live and experience it. Vibrant, inviting and creative cities are fundamentally built on trust, non-violence and respect. This is so that you can live freely and happily close to people you do not know.
The mere presence of soldiers in the city means that trust is broken and you should feel afraid. When was the last time you saw a soldier in a city and had the feeling that you were in a peaceful and safe community? The soldiers per se also possess a much greater capacity for violence than policemen, as helmets and machine guns indicate. Proximity to violence generally increases in a city with a military presence. Anyone who has been in contact with an adrenaline-fuelled policeman at a football match, in a messy queue at a club or in a demonstration knows how it feels when societal respect is broken and the limits of freedom become very clear. The military, due to the lack of education and experience of both soldiers and officers in this area, has an even greater probability of not showing respect in critical situations. This also means that trust in the military in general will diminish over time, especially among certain groups that already have a negative view of society's institutions.
Trust and well-functioning institutions take a long time to build but can be demolished in an instant. As architects, we try to make the physical space of our cities vibrant, safe and beautiful, but that work is both almost impossible and irrelevant in a city full of scared, nervous and suspicious people.
The Swedish military, at its best, is a popularly rooted and very important and competent force that deters hostile nations and organisations from attacking. We should not risk this with ill-conceived moves that put urban life in our cities at risk.
t’hempted by concrete
At the Form/Designcenter in Malmö, an exhibition about a sustainable house project in the countryside in Halland was on display in the summer of 2023. It is a poetic and nice little exhibition, well worth a visit. The construction is relatively innovative and has received research grants because of this. The main reason is that it is built from the material Hampakalk, which has come relatively recently to Sweden. The material appears fantastic. It consists largely of hemp fibre and limestone, is rot-resistant and non-combustible, carbon dioxide neutral, contributes to a pleasant indoor climate, and can be shaped and adapted to the users will.
However, there are two important questions, that make a lot of difference, not being answered here. First of all, what is the reason for this material not being the most used in the construction industry today? And secondly, how sustainable is this material compared to other sustainable building techniques?
To answer the first question, we can look at a very similar product that has been manufactured for decades, what is colloquially called Träullit (after the manufacturer of the same name). Träullit has almost exactly the same properties as Hampakalk, the difference is that it uses wood wool instead of hemp. Although hemp grows faster than spruce, which is used for wood wool, it is also grown on land that arguably should instead be used for food production. But why has not Träullit made any significant success as a construction material over the years? There is of course a good reason, and that is the poor load-bearing capacity. You have to build a wood or steel construction that supports the material and takes the weight of the roof, even in small buildings. And if you have to do that, there is little to no reason why you shouldn't build an ordinary studded wall with less messy and simple off-the-shelf materials. Or just a lightweight concrete block wall if it is a homogenous wall you are looking for.
The second question is partly answered by translating Hampakalk into English. In English, it has the somewhat more correct and revealing name of Hempcrete. Namely, it is a variant of concrete (which is made of gravel, water and cement), where the gravel has been replaced by hemp. Something that all architects should know by now is that the manufacturing of cement generates huge amounts of carbon dioxide in itself, there is no way around it with today's technology. To make cement the limestone is heated to over 1000 degrees (almost always with fossil energy), and enormous amounts of carbon dioxide are released that had been bound in the limestone itself. For every kilogram of cement produced, 0.9 kilograms of carbon dioxide are released. Mixing hemp into the concrete to compensate for its emissions looks a lot like greenwashing, not much better than offsetting carbon dioxide by planting trees in a far away land. Naming it Hampakalk and never mentioning the word cement is exceedingly misleading.
Hemp is a fantastic material that has the potential to play an important role in the building industry´s transformation away from fossil fuels. Hemp fibre is a potent insulation material that makes buildings into proper carbon sinks combined with a wood structure. Hempcrete though, is probably a dead end, a fairly low-quality construction material that has overstated its role in the fight against climate change.
the construction con: constructing a construction crisis
The housing minister from Kristdemokraterna recently invited several industry players to a round table discussion on the crisis in new housing construction. Construction has fallen by half in just one year. I truly hope they had a nice fika, because this is probably all action we will see from the government. This is because the construction industry's crisis is entirely due to the deliberately pursued economic policy from the government via the Riksbank.
The problem is inflation, which has been alarmingly high due to a weak Swedish krona, foreign electricity (gas) prices and high prices in international shipping. The unwillingness of politicians to address these problems forces the Riksbank to act, and interest rate increases are the Riksbank's only weapon. Now, when the price in electricity and shipping is back to normal, studies from the ECB show the inflation is lingering due to companies raising their profit margins instead of lowering prices is . Unfortunately, the Riksbank interest rate weapon fails to get its teeth into those things causing the inflation, making the remaining argument for raising interest rates very weak.The only way the Riksbank's contuined interest rate increases can reduce inflation today is by slowing down the economy and thereby making us all a little poorer. The idea is that companies will be forced to lower their prices when we can no longer afford to buy their goods and services. This is an extremely painful and ineffective way to lower inflation, and it is not entirely certain that it will even work. A more people-friendly approach could have been to regulate the pricing of energy as in Spain and Portugal or putting a price cap on food like in France. And in practice, as every economist knows, the first thing that happens when interest rates are raised is that construction decreases and unemployment in the construction sector increases.
The construction industry is thus sacrificed in a conscious economic policy that leads to poorer citizens, more expensive and fewer buildings and fired architects. But every cloud has a silver lining. Since the construction industry accounts for 20% of Sweden's greenhouse emissions, we can hopefully see a reduction in emissions from the sector in the coming years. Maybe this is the only way to hit the breaks on our concrete and steel-loving industry, and we architects must in any case retrain ourselves as restorers, remodelers and self-builders. 
Noticing the disappearance of notice
Noticed that?
It is peculiar to be so sure of something's existence, so absolute in the knowledge that they not only are here but that you can close your eyes and picture their placement, only to find that they are not. I am talking about something that exists to be noticed, or at least to facilitate the act of noticing. Something that most of us will have walked past countless times in our life. Something we all became so accustomed to noticing that we stopped noticing them. The humble notice board has been removed from our lives so silently that we never even stopped to notice. Did you notice this?
This is a defence of the notice board, a physical manifestation of community, of pausing, of a reluctance to rush.
In a recent act of attempted Guerilla Marketing, we went out searching for notice boards to pin our marketing posters. After first stopping at a small supermarket we confidently strolled to the entrance to find the notice board that had forever and shall forever, we assumed, be there. You know the one that carries a widely disparate array of notices. A piano teacher, a removal van, a lost cat, or a flea market coming to town.
One could assume that notice boards are yet another casualty of the digital age, the analogue nature of pin-in-paper-in-board falling to the wayside with the convenience of a social media post that can reach a wider audience and include more information. In fact, as we drove with increasing desperation in the search for a notice board we questioned why we didn't invest the same time in building our social networks. We had, after all, spent hours perfecting the digital poster and posting online would have taken us seconds. Perhaps, instead of sitting in a depressed Burger King on the outskirts of town with a stack of vagabond posters with nowhere to go, we’d be sat in our studio watching the likes and digital engagement rolling in and feeling the serotonin rushing our brains.
We want to return to the time of pins, magnets and tape. Where things are not permanent, and the collective action of choreographic arrangement means that your poster may be removed or covered tomorrow. Why does the information for a local book fair here in Southern Sweden need to be held for eternity in a server in Luleå 1400 km away? It doesn’t. We want to see the return of the notice board to public spaces, and most importantly, we want no one to notice.