Housing in Merry Sweden

Unable to deceive themselves about the social charms of the country of their birth, many people take to holding forth on the attractions of other lands. In her book “Europe Re-housed,” Miss Elizabeth Denby reveals herself as being one of these. In a chapter on Sweden she opens up with the following:—”Peaceful, merry, hospitable Sweden with its wooded shores, quiet lakes, houses gay with paint and flowers; well arranged, clean and prosperous towns; summer colonies on the islands; fleets of little boats darting about waterways; friendliness, security, ease and dignity of life—all combining to create an atmosphere of happiness which is not dispelled, however often acquaintance is renewed. Democratic, with no great extremes of riches or poverty to distress the mind; alive, alert, eager, full of fun, its inhabitants seem to be well on the way to attaining full life ” (page 48).

It would be quite easy to quote sources to disprove all this. Funnily enough it is not necessary to look further than “Europe Re-housed.” A few pages later appears the first culprit of a sentence: “Also among the working classes, large young families having least money to spare for rent, necessarily take the cheapest dwellings which are also the smallest or the least healthy.” Miss Denby dismisses this admission with the glib comment that the paradox is European and not peculiar to Sweden. On the same page and with one short illuminating sentence she makes mincemeat of her opening statement that extreme rich or poor do not exist in Sweden—”In cases of extreme poverty the family rent is paid as part of poor relief, in addition to the cash subsistence allowance of at most 5 Sw. Kr. a day per family ” (page 56). Stringing together the two quotations one logically assumes that people exist in gay, merry Sweden who can’t even afford the rent for the smallest, cheapest and least healthy shelter.

That Sweden has its slums is shown by the fact that in 1935 a Commission of Inquiry into slum conditions was appointed and recommended the Government to build special dwellings with at least two rooms and a kitchen with rent rebates for larger families (page 57). What a solution for slums! Out of the frying-pan into the fire.

There are of course those wonder-workers the Building Societies, under various names. One novel feature of these is that the prospective mortgagee instead of putting down the usual hundred pounds or so deposit, contributes this with his own labour. Miss Denby quotes a municipal leaflet which shows that this idea is something more than novel and makes it quite clear that hard labour must be done at the end of the day’s work. “The home-builder has not only to do heavy work, he is in many cases forced to lead a regular camping or settler’s life which, however, is not altogether devoid of the charm of such an existence. This charm is perhaps not quite so apparent to the eager home-builder who rushes out to dig in his plot before the frost has left the ground and the chill April blasts sweep over the still bare fields. Even in May the poetry of the enterprise may not touch him very keenly while trudging around ankle-deep in the wet clay at the bottom of his foundation-pit . . . ” That even this way of paying in toil and on the “never-never” for a roof over one’s head is limited to a certain section of the working-class is revealed with “demand has been so greatly in excess of the possibility of satisfying it, that families with young children and with incomes between 3,000 and 5,000 Sw. Kr. a year have been given preference over the applicants ” (page 74). (5,000 Kr. a year is roughly £5 a week.)

It is true that housing in Sweden compares favourably with the European countries. This is due in the main to the comparatively small and late industrialisation of Sweden. The influx of country people into the cities has not been on the gigantic scale which has occurred in countries like Great Britain or America. However Miss Denby constantly shows the fact of poverty in Sweden and its reflection in the suffering and privation caused by bad or non-existent housing. Like many more comfortably off, intellectual “planners” she usually refers to the existence of poverty coldly and without feeling. The solution is always through technical improvements in the planning of “cheap little homes” for the workers. It is high time that all the workers, Swedish included, realised that they could live in houses they now build for the rich, that is the finest, the most spacious and most attractive in every way. It is high time’ they realised that the great barrier in their way, the great barrier to their enjoyment of all the nice things they make, is the fact that they don’t own the means of producing them, the land, mines, factories and transport systems. For the workers to wipe out this great barrier something far different to Nationalisation is implied. They will have to democratically take over industry and transport and run it for the benefit of society as a whole. They will have to abolish the wages system and achieve the organisation ofi a society in which all things are made for use only, and are freely distributed to all.

PROLLY