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Then, as if spinning a globe on a desk, the company fixed its attention on a different part of the continent.
接着，犹如在桌上旋转地球仪一样，该公司将注意力转移到了欧洲大陆的另一个地方。
Instead of buying repossessed homes at fire-sale prices, Blackstone would start to buy housing in “tier-one” cities that were home to the “industries of the future”: science, tech and creative fields.
黑石集团并没有以超低价购买二手住房，而是开始在“一线”城市购买住房，这些城市是“未来产业”--科学、技术和创意领域--的发源地。
One of the people who worked on this strategy was James Seppala, the company’s head of real estate in Europe.
参与这一战略的人之一是该公司欧洲房地产主管詹姆斯·斯帕拉。
Seppala grew up in France, attended boarding school in England and studied French and Italian literature at Harvard.
斯帕拉成长于法国，在英国寄宿学校读过书，随后在哈佛学习法国文学和意大利文学。
He also has family from Finland, and was particularly interested in investing in Nordic countries.
他的家人也来自芬兰，对投资北欧国家特别感兴趣。
Stockholm was the first Scandinavian city where Blackstone made a major investment in housing.
斯德哥尔摩(瑞典首都)是黑石集团在房地产领域进行重大投资的首个斯堪的纳维亚城市。
With nationwide rent controls, Sweden was like no other market the company had entered.
与该公司进入的任何其他市场都不同，瑞典在全国范围内实行租金管制。
That might seem offputting for a landlord, but for Blackstone, it was a plus.
对房东来说，这似乎令人不快，但对黑石集团来说，这是一个加分项。
“There is something very safe and stable about investing in regulated markets, because you tend to have more demand than you will have supply,” Seppala told me when we spoke over Zoom.
我与斯帕拉通过Zoom聊天时，他告诉我:“在受监管的市场上投资非常安全、稳定，因为需求往往大于供应。”
“From an investor’s perspective, that’s quite a safe backdrop.”
“从投资者的角度来看，这是一个相当安全的背景。”
In 2016, Blackstone bought a controlling stake in Sweden’s largest real estate firm, which owned 16,000 apartments, most of which were in Stockholm.
2016年，黑石集团收购了瑞典最大房地产公司的控股权，该瑞典房产公司拥有1.6万套公寓，其中大部分公寓位于斯德哥尔摩。
That year, the company renovated more than 1,000 apartments and then raised the rent on them by 42%.
那一年，该公司整修了1,000多套公寓，然后又将租金提高了42%。
Over the following three years, it bought more apartments in Stockholm, and by 2019, it owned 21,000.
在接下来的三年里，该公司在斯德哥尔摩购置了更多的公寓，到2019年，该公司坐拥2.1万套公寓。
Blackstone soon came under fire from the Swedish tenants union, and, in 2018 it changed the name of its Swedish company to Hembla, a friendly, Swedish-sounding name (“Hem” means “home”).
黑石集团很快就遭到了瑞典租户工会的抨击，2018年，该公司将其瑞典公司的名字改为Hembla，这是一个友好的、听起来像瑞典语的名字(“Hem”的意思是“家”)。
In a suburb to the north of the city, a kind of natural experiment unfolded.
在该市北部的一个郊区，一种自然实验展开了。
Blackstone’s Swedish company owned almost half the apartments on one housing estate.
黑石集团的瑞典公司拥有一个住宅区近一半的公寓。
The other half were still owned by the local authority, which made it easy to compare how the two landlords operated.
另一半土地仍归当地政府所有，这使得比较这两个地主的经营方式变得容易。
In a damning report compiled in the summer of 2019, shortly before Blackstone sold its stake in the company, Sweden’s tenants union alleged that the entrances to the Hembla properties were “messy”, “dirty” and “broken”, with holes in the walls and flaking paint.
2019年夏天，也就是在黑石集团出售其在该公司的股份前不久，瑞典租户工会在一份谴责报告中称，Hembla公寓的入口“凌乱”、“肮脏”、“破破烂烂”，墙面坑坑洼洼，油漆剥落。
This degradation, the report concluded, was the result of these apartments having been owned by private landlords for almost a decade, and Blackstone was merely the latest company to have acquired them.
报告得出的结论是，这种退化是这些公寓由私人房东所有近10年导致的，而黑石集团只是最近收购它们的公司而已。
