Patrik Kronqvist
The two-room apartment on the second floor has wooden floors and high ceilings. Here – in a brick house from 1924 on Runebergsgatan, right in the center of Helsinki – Theo Herold, 29, lives with his partner.
For a few years he studied and worked in Sweden and was forced to move seven times in as many years. When he moved back home to Helsinki in 2022, he got a first-hand contract right away.
– It took a week from when I saw the ad until we had moved all the things in, he says.
The rent is equivalent to SEK 12,500 per month. From the windows, he can wave to his colleagues at Hanken, the Swedish School of Economics.
Theo Herold is doing his doctorate at Hanken – Swedish School of Economics in Helsinki. He had forgotten how easy it was to get a tenancy in Finland.
Photo: Patrik Kronqvist
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Until the 1990s, Finland had regulated rents. Then they had the same problems that the Swedish rental market is still plagued by: long queues, black contracts and housing shortages.
But during the deep 1990s crisis, rents were deregulated. At the time it was politically very controversial. Today, there is no longer any will to re-regulate, even on the political left.
The system works well.
The construction rate is twice as high in Finland as in Sweden, homelessness has decreased by 90 percent and Finnish tenants live larger than Swedish ones.
The difference becomes obvious when you browse a Finnish housing site. There are plenty of vacant rental properties in all districts – also, as I said, in the center of Helsinki. For a Stockholmer, it appears almost like sorcery. But you just have to choose:
A one-room apartment of 21 square meters with a kitchenette, facing south and overlooking a park in the popular district Främre Tölö: SEK 7,400.
A four-room apartment of 92 square meters in the suburb of Gårdsbacka – 20 minutes by Metro to the center: SEK 11,000.
A second apartment of 83 square meters on Norra Kajen with a sea view and stucco roof. Rent: SEK 18,000.
At the time of writing, there are 14 vacant rental properties on Norra Kajen, a kind of Strandvägen in Helsinki.
Photo: Artem Merzlenko
Right now, the market is particularly in favor of tenants. Demand in dense cities has not really recovered after the pandemic and the large-scale construction of recent years. There are 10,000 vacant rental properties in the capital alone. In all of Finland, a total of over 45,000 pieces.
The surplus means that hosts are forced to renovate, sugarcoat with a rent-free month or perhaps a new iPhone, to attract tenants.
This means that rent increases are held back. In Helsinki, it averaged 0.4 percent last year – in practice a reduction, given the high inflation.
The lack of tenure protection, this sacred cow in Sweden, does not seem to be an issue in Finland. This despite the fact that the hosts can terminate the contracts with three to six months’ notice.
The tenants’ protection consists in the fact that there are always other apartments to rent and, according to statistics, Finnish tenants move less often than Swedish ones.
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Helsinki Mayor Juhana Vartiainen has experienced both the Finnish and the Swedish system. During the periods he has worked in Stockholm, he has been forced to buy a condominium. He thinks that the free rental market is an advantage for Helsinki in the fight for talent and manpower.
– For me, buying an apartment in Sweden went well. But when I think of all the low-income earners who move into Stockholm and have to find somewhere to live, then it is better that you also have a rental property market, he says.
There is no free rental on the entire market in Finland. A third of the apartments are owned by municipal housing companies and there the rents are still regulated – and subsidized. In Helsinki, they are on average 40 percent lower than the free rents. But in many cities the rents are the same in both systems, in Pori they are even lower in the private stock.
Unlike in Sweden, public housing is distributed according to need and not strictly according to waiting time – this is one explanation why Finland has been able to combat homelessness so successfully.
Juhana Vartiainen is the mayor of Helsinki. He was a social democrat for nearly 40 years, but was persuaded in 2015 by Alexander Stubb to run for the Samlingspartiet, the sister party of the Swedish Moderates.
Photo: Sakari Roysko
Low-income earners are also entitled to housing allowance, regardless of the type of tenancy they live in. Finland spends about twice as much on such allowances as Sweden in relation to GDP.
When Helsinki plans new neighborhoods, they actively try to mix owner-occupied housing, private rental properties and subsidized apartments to counteract segregation.
– We can’t complain that you built Rinkeby once upon a time to accommodate all Finns who moved to Sweden. But we don’t want such particularly vulnerable areas in Finland, says mayor Juhana Vartiainen.
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Finns are a polite and provident people. But when I discuss housing policy with politicians, journalists and researchers during a few intensive days in Helsinki, many of them do not quite manage to hide that they think we Swedes are crazy for sticking to regulated rents.
They ask questions about Sweden to which I have no good answers:
How can the Swedes accept a system that causes people to queue for 30 years for an apartment in central Stockholm?
What is the justice in young people and immigrants being forced to stand at the back of the housing queue?
The Finns are even more amazed when they hear that several Swedish parties usually go to the polls on being intimidated by market rents, that the Prime Minister was deposed when he was going to introduce free rents in new production and that even today’s bourgeois government has no plans to touch the system.
Finland shows that another world is actually possible.
Patrik Kronqvist is political editor and head of Expressen’s editorial page. Read more of his texts here.
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