Rent-controlled apartments can be sublet legally with almost no markup. Bought apartments can be sublet legally to a market rate [0].
I'm guessing that the guy in the article is in a sublet owned apartment.
Regardless, sub-letting of rent-controlled apartments is very strictly controlled and is essentially "banned". But of course it's quite tricky/expensive to enforce.
(My, in Sweden very unpopular, opinion is that subletting is the last thing that gives young people some kind of chance to mobility. Especially those whose's parents can't buy them an apartment. If all forms of subletting were banned, I would have had no chance to live in Stockholm).
The reality is that Stockholm geographically challenged. The major pieces of available land is the city airport and areas of parkland. The city airport has been given a lease until 2040. The areas of parkland is a national park.
The housing market is one the most important markets in Sweden. Anything that significantly lowers the value of real estate will be political suicide. Meaning that in the current market there can't be any solution that actually delivers affordable housing.
There is also little will from the voters to accept measure that would stabilize the market long terms like removing the mortgage interest deduction, introduce an actual real estate tax or regulating lending similar to other countries.
All this means that it's very unlikely that there will ever be even a relatively affordable market in Stockholm. Which will end up being disastrous when the cost of rent is also among the biggest single cost in the knowledge economy. For companies you can argue that the increase in housing cost will be offset by the larger available workforce but you can't say the same for public services.
Past or future deregulation isn't going to solve this. On the contrary it is what prevents a correction. The natural thing to do when something becomes too expensive is look for alternatives. In the housing market this means moving somewhere else. But as companies can attract those good or privileged enough to Stockholm anyways they don't have to move. So the average person doesn't have much of a choice but to move there themselves. Which in turn makes Stockholm even more attractive.
The paradox is that most any improvement of the Stockholm housing market will there make the situation worse long term. So the solution has to be not to cater for this market but to improve the market somewhere else instead. Unfortunately this also unlikely.
A pet "dictator for one day" idea of mine is to simply move the capital to something like Linköping! Has an airport, enormous amounts of farm land that can just be built on etc, less than 2 hours away from Stockholm by train.
Make Stockholm like NYC and Linköping as DC. If all government headquarters (and related functions) were forced to move, it would certainly take hundreds of thousands of people with them (including family members etc).
Brasília but on Östgötaslätten :-).
https://www.fastighetsvarlden.se/notiser/flera-myndigheter-t...
You wouldn't have to move the government though just companies. This is a major part of creating the problem from the beginning. Because as you probably know many of the industrial companies where distributed to other locations like Linköping, Trollhättan, Karlskrona and so forth. As those companies and the industry general has shifted to no longer need things like manufacturing facilities everyone ends up in Stockholm. It's a paradox that when you can work from anywhere it also means everyone can work from the same place.
Of course if a larger company would move outside of Stockholm that places would soon face the same problem even quicker as it's smaller. But if it happened to many different places there might be a shoot. Unfortunately you would have the same issue that many people would have to undermine their immediate interest for it to happen. But at least it would be technically possible. Stockholm has probably gone so far that it is socially and technically impossible as the economic consequences of an effective solution might be unpredictable.
What percentage of the population owns the house they live in (or has a mortgage)?
39,8 % Single-family home
20,7 % Co-op apartment
= 60,5%
28,4 % Rental apartment
Rather, voters choose between one option, thinly veiled as two chooses, set by monied interests and corralled by media barons.
If they are going to have a rent control law, then allowing the person to sublet that on for a profit then you basically dont have rent control at all (except for the lucky / honest minority).
You are almost there to why regulations, however well intentioned, rarely work to their expectations versus the alternatives :)
What doesnt work is what passes for regulation or legislation these days, written by some moron, that politicians attach to whatever bill or budget that is certain to pass. They barely reach the threshold of 'well intentioned' and would more charitably be described as vitue signaling or just spin.
You get to stand infront of the microphone and parrot off the 'This is a Win for the voters' but rarely has anyone read, understood or debated what is now a binding law or regulation, along with its unintended and at times intended consequences.
But inevitably, there exists a timeline where the regulation becomes antiquated and outdated. It no longer serves its purpose, and it actually becomes the very barrier to progress. And in my time being alive, I've rarely seen politicians act quickly to improve regulations to serve a current need. More often than not, they grandstand over the value of the regulation, and pass laws that increase the bureaucratic reach of the regulatory arm. They effectively become rubber stamping desks.
If anything there’s lack of enforcement of existing regulation.
You're right that if it was the cheapest way of getting property then tenants probably wouldn't report. But if the whole thing is making property more expensive then I definitely would.
Recently on Reddit there were some screenshots of a ground-floor 'studio' flat that was entered through a window. It didn't have a door and was still quite expensive. That's illegal according to UK rules, and lots of people on Reddit happily reported it.
That gives the tenant an automatic incentive to report the person who sublet it to them.
The problem (based in my massive experience of reading one article) seems to be that there are a lot of rent-controlled apartments, but they end users aren't getting the benefit of that low rent controlled price. Instead some private citizens are getting to collect free profit for subletting.
If you make subletting a rent-controlled property illegal, then the people who are living in them are unaffected, and the people who aren't living in them will have to give up their rent-control contract freeing up the property for others.