A closer look
Stockholm has a rent control system so incredibly broken that the average waiting time for a rent-regulated apartment in the city center is currently over twenty years. If you want a cheap place to live in the Swedish capital, you literally need to put your infant child on a waiting list the exact moment they are born, just so they might have a chance at getting a studio apartment by the time they graduate university. This has spawned a massive, illegal black market for subletting, where desperate people pay extortionate, unregulated prices to actual leaseholders who act like local housing mafia lords. It is a brilliant example of how well-intentioned economic policies designed to help the poor almost always end up creating a dystopian bureaucracy that forces ordinary people to break the law just to have a roof over their heads
