MANAGER
The housing market in Oslo does not need more liberalisation.
WANT TO CHANGE THE APARTMENT STANDARDS: City councilor Raymond Johansen fronts the proposal, which is a gift package for property developers in the capital. Photo: Lars Eivind Bones / Dagbladet
sea view
Manager: This is an editorial from Dagbladet, and expresses the newspaper’s view. Dagbladet’s political editor is responsible for the editorial.
This weekend the Labor Party decides whether more small, dark and expensive housing will be built in Oslo in the future. If the annual meeting of Oslo Ap decides that they want to change the apartment standard, the opposition is ready to deal with this urgently in the city council. City council leader Raymond Johansen fronts the proposal, which is a gift package for property developers in the capital:
“The apartment standard is changed for a period so that more apartments can be built in the inner city so that the total number of apartments is increased.”
In clearer language, this means that it will be allowed to build very small apartments in large numbers, also in the four districts in the inner city where the norm today sets limits for this.
What bullshit
The apartment standard applies to the districts of St. Hanshaugen, Grünerløkka, Sagene and Gamle Oslo. It states that new apartments must be at least 35 square meters and that apartments of 35 to 50 square meters must not make up more than 35 percent of new homes. The standard also states that 40 per cent of the homes must be more than 80 square metres. It will ensure housing quality and homogeneous demographics in the districts.
Now the real estate industry says that the apartment standard does not work, because there has only been a small increase in families with children in the inner city after the norm was introduced in 2013. The proportion of households with children has increased from 13.6 to 15.1 per cent, but the number of school-age children in the inner city has increased by 7 .8 percent. The developers would rather build more smaller homes for singles, and claim it will lower the high threshold for entering the housing market.
PST was shockingly close
This is a really bad one idea. The apartment standard was introduced ten years later that the Norwegian housing market in 2003 became Europe’s most liberalized. New homes were built smaller and darker than ever before. In 2011, half of new homes in Oslo were smaller than the Housing Bank’s previous minimum requirement of 55 square meters, in the district of Sagene more than six out of ten apartments had one or two rooms. Half of the one-room apartments were under 30 square metres.
Prices exploded at the same time. In 2004, 15 square meter small apartments in the “Living in a box” project at Majorstuen had prices per square meter of over NOK 90,000. It is possible to put cooking facilities and a toilet in such homes, but no one wants to live like that for long. People move as soon as they get the chance, also at a loss. Only the poorest stay, with constantly new neighbors and a housing quality so poor that it can affect health.
That the industry itself will build several small one-room apartments are of course, there is nothing they earn more from. The property developers build as little and as poorly as they are allowed to.
It is a political task to ensure people have light and a minimum of space to turn around. Perhaps especially in old working-class districts.
