A straitjacket and a clown hat when the government shocks the rents

Last week, DN reported from a decommissioned laboratory in Uppsala: “Now it’s just empty, ready to be rented out to someone else”, you can read. “We couldn’t afford to keep it,” explains a professor of limnology (the study of inland waters and the things that live in them).

Large rent increases have affected universities and colleges. Adjusted grants do not cover more expensive premises costs. This means that you are forced to do things like stop using certain premises, deprioritize physical education, cut back on the offer.

The state-funded universities rent most of their premises from the state, through the company Akademiska hus. And Akademiska hus is required to act “market-wise” to deliver the surplus to the owner – the state.

The same problem affects the cultural sector. This summer, several cultural institutions raised the alarm that they were forced to cut back on operations in order to pay the rent – not least to the Norwegian Property Agency. The National Museum had to close one more day a week in 2023. The wind symphonies were forced to move from the Musical Quarter.

Like many other things which governs economic conditions in Sweden today, this strange scheme was created during the pseudo-marketing bonanza of the 1990s. Shortly after the right-wing election victory in 1991, the Bildt government put forward a bill to separate state real estate management from the actual use of premises and land and to corporatize as far as possible.

The watchwords are things like “separate profit units”, “pure ownership” and “market-based return requirement”. A few years later, the design was enforced which is basically the one we have now. many new buildings for public activities – were closed down.Instead, the Statens fætiketsverk, the company Vasakronan (which was sold out in 2008), and Akademiska hus AB arose.

Under this arrangement, state activities – such as universities or courts – do not own their own premises. Some such premises have been sold to be rented back. At the same time, the remaining state ownership must be managed as if it were commercial.

We saw an effect of this in connection with the crisis for the property company SBB, started by ex-social democrat Ilija Batljan. When higher interest rates caused the company’s pyramid scheme-like business idea to encounter problems, it became a reminder that the ownership of, for example, police stations and regiments could now end up in more obviously unsuitable hands.

More concretely, this will be another chronic pressure for all public activities, without the downgrading being transparent. Neither university education nor the performing arts can be conducted with the same quality if they are pushed into standardized office premises, digitized or turned up in pace.

The fundamental problem with this 90s construction is that it counteracts that social benefit be organized forward. The very idea that public businesses should be able to have appropriate premises for what they do – that there is a profit precisely in lifting the value of this out of commercial price formation – is declared illegal.

It is a central aspect of neoliberalism: That the fantasy of market prices as an all-encompassing control mechanism forced with the help of the state, also where such markets are clearly not natural or reasonable.

Both the cultural and higher education sectors are in need of crisis support. But we must also have a broader mobilization and planning to throw off the neoliberal combination of straitjacket and clown hat of the 1990s.