It is fairly typical to leave home as a twenty-something and rent an apartment alone here in Sweden, but a project in Helsingborg encourages under 25s to share with over 70s. We meet the women pairing up with Swedish pensioners in a bid to beat loneliness
When Wilma Johansson moved 1,500 km south of her hometown to study, she was worried about settling into a new city. But she instantly made the kind of friends who are always eager to lend a hand.
“They usually help with things like putting up mirrors and things on the walls,” she says. “Or if you don’t have something at home – like if you don’t have sugar – you can go and ask.”
If Wilma's mates sound way more practical and organised than the ones you had as a student, it’s because many of them have decades of extra life experience. She lives in a multigenerational co-living space, with spots limited to 18-to-25 year olds – and over 70s. They each have their own apartments, but their rental contracts include a promise to socialise for at least two hours a week, with communal areas including a craft room, a garden and a gym.
Photo: Getty
“It's very safe and you have your neighbours close to you and you know everyone. You don't have to feel so alone,” says Johansson, who is 22. And, although she has mates her own age too, she says her older friends are often more flexible and appreciative of her company.
“With my [younger] friends we often decide ‘can we meet up on Friday and do this thing?’ Now, if I'm at home and I feel like I want to hang out, I can just go outside my room and try to find someone. So it's more spontaneous,” she says.
The project is called Sällbo, a mashup of the Swedish words for companionship – ‘sällskap’ and living ‘bo’. It’s run by Helsingborgshem, a housing company that provides rent-controlled apartments in the seaside city of Helsingborg, and wants to limit social isolation amongst both older and younger locals. Sweden has a higher proportion of single-person households than anywhere else in Europe, and Swedes typically flee the parental nest aged 19, seven years younger than the EU average.
Wilma Johansson, 22, says a living setup such as Sällbo means "you don't have to feel so alone.". Photo: Wilma Johansson
In Sällbo’s multigenerational building, 40 percent of the 58 tenants are under 25 (or were when they moved in) and the rest are over 70. Ten of the apartments are set aside for young migrants who’ve sought asylum in Sweden, with a parallel goal of improving integration alongside loneliness. Around 80% of the current residents moved in right after the project opened in late 2019, and the fact so many have stayed on is proof of its popularity.
“Oh, it's just a paradise!” says Lone Lohsen, an 83-year-old widow who scored a flat there a year ago, after registering her interest soon after it opened. A former teacher, she’s always enjoyed the “positivity” of younger generations. At Sällbo, she’s started teaching one of the young migrants how to play the piano, organises the building’s library and is a big fan of group barbecues during the summer. “It is like a medicine against loneliness… I can’t describe the happiness I feel to be together with the youngsters.”
Hanna Holmqvist, 24, a fellow resident who recently completed her teacher training, says she’s also benefited from getting career advice from Lohsen, alongside several other ex-teachers in the building. “They have a lot of experience and they can tell us stories from when they were younger,” says Hanna. But when it comes to hanging out socially, she says “it doesn’t feel like there is quite that big of an age gap”. “I think what I've learned most is that we are all so much more alike than we are unlike each other.”
For Felicia Feuerstein, a medical student, living amongst pensioners who’ve “seen it all”, helps to calm her nerves. “Maybe you have a test, and they say ‘relax, everything will be alright’,” she says. Getting to know older people whose jobs or relationships didn’t turn out the way they expected, but who have nevertheless enjoyed full lives, has also offered a different perspective. “Maybe you will not have kids, but it will all be alright anyway, or if you want to change to do another [job]... it will be alright.”
Photo: Getty
She says these kinds of conversations feel more meaningful than socialising in her previous student dorm, which revolved around partying. At Sällbo she enjoys baking for her housemates and helping older residents with “technical stuff” like connecting to the Wifi. She also goes running regularly with Holmqvist.
The monthly rent at Sällbo is about the same as for similar rent-controlled flats in the city – between 4,620kr ($439) and 5,850kr ($462) a month. The cleaning of communal areas is included in the fee, helping to avoid classic shared accommodation rows over who’s shirking the vacuuming.
Living in such close proximity to other renters still brings some niggles, says Holmqvist, such as people forgetting to collect clothes from the laundry room, or putting the wrong items in recycling bins. But she says monthly meetings iron out most disputes. “Everyone doesn’t have the same habits, and I think it takes time to learn,” she says. “I think you have to remember that we’re all human.”
Since Sällbo opened, its managers have been inundated with calls and visits from global media, loneliness researchers and housing companies. They recently started working with an innovation lab at nearby Malmö University, to develop tools for other real estate businesses or municipalities looking to launch similar projects.
After three years at Sällbo, Johansson says she has no plans to move on. A few of her mates from elsewhere still “think it’s a bit weird” she’s such a fan of mingling with pensioners, but most enjoy coming to visit. “I still love it. I think it's a really good concept and I think it should be introduced in more places in Sweden and around the world.”