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Comment by tegeek | Hacker News Reader

You can find these single-person 2nd hand rentals 15 minutes metro distance from city. I wrote this from a point where you can start working as soon as possible and with assumption you are willing to commute 15-20 minutes one way from office to your residence.

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Fair!

I guess I am too blinded by the prices in and around the central parts of Stockholm. :)

Remember that 15-20 minutes doesn't get you very far out though. The figures still seem low to me, and to call it easy to find such places seems to come from an alternative reality.

Again I would like to say that I'm telling from a single person point of view. Who wants to start job as soon as possible and wouldn't mind getting any reasonable rental.

I've 5 examples (1 including me.) who found a reasonable place to live for that money around Stockholm area.

Depends on whether you mean 20mins on a bus/commuter train or 20min commute door-to-door. 20min on bus/commuter train easily cuts rents down by a lot, but such a commute is likely 40min in total if you include walking to the bus/train and walking from the train to the office. 5k is really low and likely only gets you a room or a small 1 room apt at the outskirts of the 20min commute.

Btw. I made an experiment that shows approximate commute times on weeekday morning (including walks to stations but no walk from Sthlm Central Station). http://commutemap.azurewebsites.net/

Edit: note the green "islands" of 20minute commute that extend along the commuter train lines.

If you're willing to deal with short (less than 6 month), not always entirely landlord approved, contracts and can move out on short notice then finding a place isn't too hard. If you want to stay put for a year and have a fully legal contract then it obviously gets a lot harder and more expensive.

I don't know if this is a cultural thing (I"m an American living and renting in Boston), but I figured the default would be people wanting "a fully legal contract" with a lease of a year or so, not looking to move every three months from illegal sublet to illegal sublet.

More precisely, when I see rents quoted for most cities, I tend to assume that people are quoting rents for standard, legal rentals, not quoting the cheapest rent possible for an illegal sublet.

Edit: I should add I'm not implying anyone in this thread is doing anything odd or misleading or anything, just that it's opening my eyes to how different rentals are over there. Thanks for that.

My wife is 25 years old and has been on the queue since she was born. We think that when we move to Stockholm we will be able to get a decent place. This is what they mean when they say "long waits in the queue for housing"...

Yeah, it's definitely a situation that wouldn't have occurred to me from my background. Around here, you mostly just look around craigslist or get a real estate agent and in a couple of weeks can find a nice, legal rental that meets your needs. I'm sorry to hear the situation is so different there and hope it improves at some point.

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