Words by Katie Puckett
Johan Edstav is a Green Party politician in one of the world’s most sustainable countries. So why does he want to build a new city over this field?
We are standing in a big empty field on the outskirts of Uppsala, Sweden’s fourth city. The snowy expanse is broken only by trees, and the occasional farm building or steeply pitched house. But Johan Esdstav sees something else.
“This is the south part of the new city, there might be housing or shops here. The new tram will go somewhere along here,” he makes a sweeping gesture, drawing a track along the field boundary, “and in that direction there.” He squints further into the distance: “Down over the stream, 3 or 4km away, will be the new station. But I can’t show you that because there’s no road there now.”
If Edstav has a good imagination, he needs one. It’s his job to identify potential sites for new cities and then strike deals with local municipalities to make it happen, trading infrastructure investment for large-scale housebuilding. Sweden is one of Europe’s fastest growing economies, but it’s seriously constrained by a lack of affordable housing: the National Board of Housing, Building and Planning says that it needs to build approximately 600,000 homes by 2025. In 2017, 255 out of 290 municipalities reported a housing shortage. The situation is most acute in the Stockholm region, which has a population of 2.3 million and 606,105 languishing on the waiting list for a rent-controlled apartment.
Sweden’s housing crisis may be extreme but it’s not alone. Like many other countries, it is struggling to balance city prosperity with affordability, help an ageing population to downsize, and decarbonize its economy. What sets Sweden apart is that this small country of barely 10 million has welcomed more refugees per capita than any other in Europe. In 2015, at the peak of the European migrant crisis, more than 160,000 people arrived seeking asylum. Sweden’s immigration policy is justifiably a source of national pride, but it has also raised questions about how so many newcomers can be integrated — or even housed. The challenge for the government is not only to increase a paltry rate of housebuilding, but to plan new developments to bring people together in more cohesive, better functioning communities. The Nordic countries already lead the world in environmental sustainability; now Sweden is seeking to isolate the DNA of the more complex and much less explored social dimension.
Man for a crisis
This is why a Green Party county councillor appointed by a Green Party housing minister is making plans to build housing on greenfield sites, albeit close to major cities. “We have too few houses in the parts of Sweden that are growing, so the most important thing is to build more,” says Edstav. “If we build more, the queue for rental houses will be shorter.” The field we are standing in is farmland, but it’s not the best, he stresses: “We should take care of the farmland that’s very good, not only in Sweden but in every country. But some of this part, I think we can build on.”
Since coming to power in 2014, the left-of-centre coalition government has succeeded in increasing Sweden’s very sluggish housing construction with the biggest state investment for 20 years. But it’s still nowhere near the target level and piecemeal development just isn’t going to cut it. In November 2016, the government appointed Edstav to think bigger, as national coordinator of a programme to build sustainable cities from scratch. So far, he has secured agreements from four municipalities for seven new areas, about 100,000 homes in total. Uppsala, where Edstav has been a member of the county council for 14 years, has agreed to build 33,000 homes, which could see its population of 220,000 rise by almost half. It will benefit from two new train lines to Stockholm and a new station serving the southern development area.
What makes Edstav’s job harder is that he’ll be trying to steer development at a third remove. Contrary to its image as a “socialist utopia”, Sweden has no social housing. In its egalitarian model, everyone is entitled to the same, which is provided by the market but heavily regulated by the state.
“In many of these areas — not only in Sweden — there are owner-occupied houses in one part and rental houses in another, with a forest in between. The people never meet”
This is why so little has been built since the financial crisis of the early 1990s. Central government sets regulations and standards, but it’s down to the municipalities to ensure that there is enough housing for the local population, or to exercise a veto on new schemes. It is private developers that must come up with viable schemes and deliver them, with the help of Europe’s most expensive construction industry.
Of 45 municipalities Edstav visited, he has made deals with four, though he thinks another five or 10 may follow. What about the rest? “Some of the politicians said ‘we don’t want to build here now, we don’t need to grow’. It’s not so much right wing, it’s more a conservative way of thinking. ‘We shouldn’t be too fast, we don’t need the state to come here’, things like that. If they don’t want it, that’s okay, it’s up to them.”
Markets respond to demand from those who are willing and able to pay. Sweden’s bigger problem is housing for those who can’t: young people and immigrants. Proposed solutions to the housing crisis are often characterized as “more market” or “less market”: the state should lift the burden of regulation, or start building itself. “I don’t think it’s so much about that, thmane discussion has been too simple. Neither of them are fully right. It’s necessary to have some regulation about rents, or there will be areas where people without high salaries can’t move in at all. If you don’t have any regulation, you have a society where politicians and planners don’t have much say and I don’t think that is a good society. But if you have too much regulation on construction, what type of building, how you should build and rents, you will stop development at all. You need to balance it.”
Is Sweden’s utopian reputation fair? “I think we are misunderstood. In many areas we are the most unregulated country in the world.” Sweden is the only European country with no laws on when shops can open, he adds, and its financial regulations are much lighter.