The Finnish housing market has been booming, especially in 2021, despite the economic effects of the Covid pandemic, daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat (HS) writes.
As a result, house prices rose nearly 4 percent nationwide, while demand inflated price tags in the capital by 5.5 percent. This is the sharpest growth observed by Statistics Finland in 10 years, HS reports.
Certain Helsinki areas such as Kaartinkaupunki and Itä-Pakila saw prices grow by a whopping 18 percent, with the average price per square metre in the former having grown by a staggering 1,459 euros.
The paper adds that Kalasatama, where the average price per square meter inflated by 999 euros, is set to become one of the most popular, hence also expensive, areas in the capital.
"It's been said that Kalasatama will become Helsinki's new city centre," Jukka Rantanen, real estate agent from SP-koti, told HS.
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Hospitality first hit by restrictions, now labour shortages
A popular café in Ylöjärvi, near Tampere, has found itself in the dire position of having to close its doors, not due to a lack of customers, but a lack of employees, Tampere based Aamulehti reports.
The café owner, Johanna Koivu, decided to submit her termination of her contract with the city, after her fruitless search for an extra pair of hands and exhaustingly long work days took their toll on her family of four.
"My spouse and I just cannot be [at the café] all the time anymore, we have two small children," Koivu told the paper.
Koivu is far from alone in this situation. Hospitality industry lobby group MaRa estimates that some 10,000 workers have left the sector as a result of the pandemic. In reality, the figure could be much higher, Aamulehti writes.
This comes as Helsingin Sanomat (HS) publish a poll on the fairness of pandemic restrictions, which found that 64 percent of people in the country thought that restrictions impacted certain sectors significantly more than others.
As for the timing of the lifting of restaurant restrictions on 1 March, some 36 percent of HS readers thought the timing was right while 27 expressed that this should have been done earlier.
South bracing for 'snow chaos'
Despite the rapidly melting snow, winter is still far from over and the south is set to be hit particularly bad on Monday, Swedish-speaking daily Hufvudstadsbladet reports.
Celebrations for the ice-hockey team's Olympic gold may be disrupted by a storm that will see strong gusts of up to 21 metres per second and up to 30 centimetres of snow.
The Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) has also warned drivers that visibility will be near zero in roads along the south coast.
"I would recommend a stay-at-home or remote work day, where possible, for all people in the south on Monday," Foreca meteorologist Markus Mäntykannas told tabloid Ilta-Sanomat, who also reported on the story.