Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Finland has slashed homelessness; the rest of Europe is failing

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 360 posts

Re: Finland has slashed homelessness; the rest of Europe is failing

#161

Post by porb121 »

adaisadais wrote: post #13

Homelessness does not beget homelessness. It is most important to note that. Our society is so focused at solving the primary symptoms without ever diving deeper into the root cause of things like this (looking at you Sf). To experience homelessness one must have first experienced a reason to now be homeless. In modern western society we have many failsafes that prevent people from becoming totally dislodged from a p…

> In modern western society we have many failsafes that prevent people from becoming totally dislodged from a place of shelter.

the US has much weaker social safety nets, and the ones it does have are often conditional on applications or proof of work.

to say solving homelessness is almost impossible when US homelessness is orders of magnitude worse than countries like Finland's is nonsensical

Re: Finland has slashed homelessness; the rest of Europe is failing

#162

Post by nickff »

usr1106 wrote: post #115
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit of a jump. I mean I get that you dislike advertising and I agree with you, but equating it to begging is reaching and diluting the discussion with your issue is adding confusion.

Where is the difference? Businesses charge more than what their costs are, the rest is their profit. Beggars request more than what they deliver, everything is their profit. Still beggars seem to succeed worse. I have no problem with that, but there is no reason to "declare" their business model illegal. If you buy an Apple product you bought a status symbol. If you give to a beggar you bought a warm feeling, that it…

That depends on how you define 'costs'. You seem to be narrowing a business' costs to COGS (cost of goods sold), and disregarding marketing and financing costs which may be critical to reaching or maintaining an economy of scale.

Re: Finland has slashed homelessness; the rest of Europe is failing

#163

Post by porb121 »

jswizzy wrote: post #3

Anyone who thinks that just giving the homeless shelter fixes the problem doesn't understand the problem to begin with.

There is outstanding evidence that giving the homeless shelter does in fact fix the problem.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H9oD3zeBPua7r5wFoHVrMZmmiqK...

Re: Finland has slashed homelessness; the rest of Europe is failing

#164

Post by devoutsalsa »

reedf1 wrote: post #17

It all comes back to a concept as freshman as it gets - Maslow's hierarchy of needs. How are you supposed to get out of any societal freefall without shelter?

One of the hardest things for me when I was in financial free fall was how little my friends could understand or help. They didn't understand that I literally had no where to go, and that me asking for a place to crash wasn't me simply wanting to visit at the last minute. My friends also weren't rich, so even if I could have stayed with them, it's not like they had a spare bedroom or guest cottage in which I could stay for a while. Oddly enough, the people who did let me stay with them were folks that were themselves nearly broke and/or recently homeless, all of whom I had only recently met. They understood that if I was asking them for a place to crash, that I really needed a place to stay. The kindness of strangers really saved my butt in 2009.

Re: Finland has slashed homelessness; the rest of Europe is failing

#165

Post by ido »

Nimitz14 wrote: post #156
ido wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in the German speaking countries the word Gypsy ("Zigeuner" in German) is considered a racial slur similarly (if not quite as strongly) ill-considered in usage as N*gger is in English. There aren't a lot of Romani in the US, which I think is why Americans aren't aware this is a word you should avoid (but I'm pretty sure it is also considered a slur in English in Britain and Ireland).

Lol that's not true.

Which part? I've lived in Vienna and then Berlin since 2005 and have heard multiple times that you should say Roma & Sinti because Zigeuner is a slur.

In the press, literature and academia you will generally not find the term Zigeuner in referring to the people (but again Roma or Roma & Sinti) if it was written in the last 20+ years.

Re: Finland has slashed homelessness; the rest of Europe is failing

#166

Post by gamblor956 »

burntoutfire wrote: post #10
austincheney wrote: post #7

The city of Austin, TX could be a case study of what not to do. I was remotely employed to company with offices in Austin in 2014-2015 and it was awesome to visit and walk around down town. I always had a blast. I visited Austin in 2019 and there were homeless people EVERYWHERE. Every green space and nearly every street corner seemed to be littered with homeless people. The difference crystal clear. Something in the…

> Something in the handling of the homeless problem had failed in that city. Or, the homeless are recent migrants from other areas? At least where i live, the homeless all congregate in biggest wealthiest cities, because it's easier to beg, their presence blends in more and also local communities are more atomized so they don't fight off the homeless as hard as in smaller places. I've heard a story of one homeless gu…

Austin is becoming what LA used to be (and in the winter, still is) for the Midwest: the place for cities to send their homeless to so they don't have to spend money on them.

Re: Finland has slashed homelessness; the rest of Europe is failing

#167

Post by gamblor956 »

jseliger wrote: post #68
austincheney wrote: post #7

The city of Austin, TX could be a case study of what not to do. I was remotely employed to company with offices in Austin in 2014-2015 and it was awesome to visit and walk around down town. I always had a blast. I visited Austin in 2019 and there were homeless people EVERYWHERE. Every green space and nearly every street corner seemed to be littered with homeless people. The difference crystal clear. Something in the…

Most American cities will do absolutely anything to reduce homelessness except build more housing: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en... California cities are probably the worst offenders: https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-... , but even Austin is underbuilding relative to demand.

One of the very liberal reporters at the LA Times did a series of articles on the homeless crisis in LA a year or two ago.

He actually had difficulty finding a homeless person who was from Southern California. Nearly all of the homeless were from other states or other countries.

It's not California's failure so much as it is that the rest of the nation is using California to warehouse their homeless so they can feel smug about not caring for their own citizens.

Re: Finland has slashed homelessness; the rest of Europe is failing

#168

Post by pbhjpbhj »

mewpmewp2 wrote: post #114
Cloudef wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those people are given help, but if they refuse that, there's nothing you can really do. People are only forced if they start being dangerous to other people.

You could try to prevent people from reaching such state in the first place, for future occurrences.

And still allow them the civil liberties expected in a democracy? I'm honestly not sure that's possible. Self-destruction seems almost like a human right.

Re: Finland has slashed homelessness; the rest of Europe is failing

#169

Post by 1024core »

Cloudef wrote: post #6

Note that the "homeless" people in Finland are mainly people who refuse to accept support from the social welfare, this is because they prefer to get drunk instead of spending it on food and rent. The social welfare eventually suggests a different system for such people: pay the rent for them and give a special card that can be used for anything except alcohol and cigarette. If the people keep refusing that other opt…

> Such people are very rare in Finland in reality however,

Given the severity of Finnish winters, I'm not surprised.

Try a similar approach in, say, Hawaii or the Bahamas, and see how many homeless you'll see roaming around.

Re: Finland has slashed homelessness; the rest of Europe is failing

#170

Post by pretendscholar »

asdff wrote: post #150

Finland has 5.5M people and about 5 thousand homeless. Los Angeles county has 10.5M people and estimates are nearing 100,000 homeless. The situation is an order of magnitude different in Los Angeles, even by West Coast standards, and what works in Findland is unlikely to scale anywhere else, much less a place like the U.S. which has the bare minimum of a social safety net compared to the rest of the developed world.

Why wouldn't scale help los angeles tackle the same problem?
Post reply on HN