Reflections from Almedalen 2025 by Edwin Måradson, CSO at NordNest AB

This year in Almedalen, housing wasn’t just a policy issue – it was the issue. Across panels, data presentations, and roundtable debates, a single question kept surfacing in different forms:

“How do we make housing more accessible?”

But underneath that question is a deeper one we’re not always willing to ask:

“what kind of affordability are we actually pursuing – and what’s driving the disconnect between housing need and housing delivery?”

From the outside, it might look like nothing is being built because there’s no demand. But the real story is the opposite: demand exists – but developers can’t make the numbers work.

The Reality: Costs Are Too High to Build – Even When Demand Is There

In one of the week’s most telling sessions, analyst Ted Lindqvist pointed out that Sweden needs over 52,000 new homes per year to meet future needs. Right now, we’re delivering roughly half that.

We are not talking about fringe developments. Even in regions with pressing need – cities with waiting lists, vacancy shortages, and rental strain – project developers still can’t break ground. Why? Because construction costs have risen significantly in the last few years. Material, labour, permitting, risk – all up.

The result is clear: the math no longer works.

If you can’t make the calculations work, you can’t build. And if you can’t build, no policy, tax incentive, or housing benefit will solve the root problem: the supply isn’t coming online.

Rethinking Affordability: It’s Not Just About Ownership

Across the panels, there was a familiar focus on helping more people buy: easing credit, offering start-loans, softening amortization. These tools aim to help people afford homes in a market that’s too tight.

But affordability isn’t only about homeownership. It’s just as much about rental housing—particularly in cities where mobility, labour flow, and social access depend on flexible tenure. And even here, supply is failing. One panelist pointed out that vacant rental units are being returned by social services because they don’t meet need – wrong size, wrong fit, too costly to operate. This isn’t just a market failure – it’s a system misfire.

The Real Cost Problem: Not That Homes Are More Expensive – But That Buyers Can’t Afford Them

It’s easy to say “prices have gone up.” But in truth, market prices for homes haven’t spiked dramatically. The problem is that buyers have less purchasing power, while costs on the production side have increased dramatically.

So we’re now in a double bind:

• Developers can’t build because construction costs are too high.
• Buyers can’t buy or rent because prices feel unaffordable given their financial limits.

We heard in one analysis that a 13% increase in housing prices could result in 20% more housing starts – because developer margins would become viable again. That’s how tight the current margins are.

But here’s the paradox: building cheaper doesn’t automatically mean selling cheaper – unless there are mechanisms (policy, procurement, or pressure) to make that price benefit visible to the buyer or tenant. That’s a wider issue. But on the supply side, we must at least begin by reducing the structural cost barriers to enable more projects to proceed.

Systems Thinking: Start Where the Bottleneck Begins

Affordability cannot just be fixed on the buyer side. If the pipeline remains blocked at the development level, we’re only treating symptoms.

This is where systems thinking becomes practical – not as a policy slogan, but as a delivery method.

• “What if installation systems were configured – not invented – before planning begins?”
• “What if energy performance, smart metering, and environmental compliance were embedded in the structure – not added at the end?”
• “What if project costs could be accurately forecast before design lock-in, giving developers and municipalities confidence to proceed?”

These aren’t hypotheticals. Some platforms already offer this. They turn real estate from a one-off invention into a configurable system – one that reduces waste, builds faster, and aligns with ESG and lifecycle targets.

With lower construction costs, more projects could reach completion. That increases supply, which opens the door to downward price pressure. Not instantly – but structurally, over time.

We Don’t Just Need to Make Housing Easier to Access – We Need to Make It Possible to Deliver

Until we fix the development-side cost structure, every other affordability measure is fighting uphill.

This doesn’t mean abandoning buyer-side support. But it means pairing it with fundamental changes in how we build:

1. Simplifying delivery systems
2. Reducing onsite complexity
3. Aligning planning, installation, and performance from day one

In short: creating homes that don’t cost what they do today to produce. That’s what makes affordability sustainable – not just for households, but for developers, municipalities, and the climate, too.