[pimmen]

The issue is far more complicated than simply not having de-regulated rents. De-regulating rents would do something, no doubt, but there are so many more reasons why we have astronomically high real estate prices at this moment (and didn't have them just 20-25 years ago).

* We have massive tax cuts and subsidies for home owners. You get to make deductions off your interest rate payments, something that was introduced as an emergency measure in the 90s. We also have effectively no real estate tax, meaning there is no incentive to move out when your kids have moved out and the home is more than you need.

* For a long time, there was no need to even pay the principal of your mortgage. Now there is and it's one of the primary reasons the prices have gone sideways in Sweden for the past year.

* The local governments don't want renters and have gradually been given more and more power to get rid of them. They own a lot of the rentals and especially in Stockholm they have aggresively converted them into apartments that are owned (the common, Swedish system of buying a membership into a home owners organization is a bit hard to translate into an appropriate English term, but it's called "bostadsrätt"). The national government is basically powerless to increase the housing stock, if you go back to the 60s when my grandparents were facing a housing crisis the national government had the power to build one million homes mostly in the bigger cities like Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. They have nowhere close to that power anymore and the local governments have no incentive to solve the problems of low income people in a completely different city who would like to switch cities to get a decent living.

There are more than these too, these are just the first ones that popped into my head.

And all of this is unfortunately hard to change because most Swedes live in homes they own and it's a very common retirement plan. People who are in their 30s, like me, also think that falling interest rates well below inflation is the new normal because they've known anything else throughout their adult lives and thus take larger risks than they should.