Finland has slashed homelessness; the rest of Europe is failing • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by roenxi » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 11:10 PM UTC

deadbunny wrote: post #235

throwawayboise wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then take them out of society. Same as any other person who persistently refuses to obey laws.

From the GP: > Otherwise, it just ends up in a slippery slope that creates a sinkhole of billions of dollars in costs to the economy, at the expense of others. So given that is it better to try and help them reintegrate with society or do we just lock them up and forget about them? Or worse?

There are people out there who, end of the day, are going to do things the people in charge don't like. There are 3 options:

  - Tolerate the behaviour
  - Remove their freedom
  - Kill them

Even if the plan is to try to persuade them to behave differently, that still has to be done while either tolerating misbehaviour or removing their ability to misbehave.

The line between tolerance and removing freedoms has to be drawn somewhere. This question of yours isn't helpful to the debate - the only way to push the conversation forward is to proactively say where you want the line drawn. All that this question will do is discover that the line is drawn arbitrarily and has uncomfortable edge cases. But that is a property of any legal boundary. Nobody has yet been able to draw a line that isn't arbitrary.

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

#252

Post by Jochim » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 11:13 PM UTC

eznzt wrote: post #228

malcolmhere wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many shelters in the US are run be religious organizations and discriminate against gay people, too. This is particularly a problem because LGBTQ make up a sizeable chunk of homeless youth (think: kids getting kicked out by parents).

What is your source for that? Also, how do those shelters know the guy is gay? They have gaydars at the entrance?

You really can't imagine why a person kicked out by their religious parents for being gay would be apprehensive about entering a homeless shelter operated by that same religious group?

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

#253

Post by ihsw » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 11:19 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #231

eindiran wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use other metrics (eg the NHIP count[0]), but they point to the same thing. Under the NHIP count metric, SF is doing better than most metropolitan areas in the US, but even with huge spending on the problem, the number of homeless people continues to rise year after year. The per-capita count of number of successfully sheltered homeless people in SF (per city resident) is the highest in the country, but even…

I wonder if any of the factor is that affordable housing in SF is extremely difficult to find? Especially if you don't have access to a vehicle for commutes and have to find housing in an area well served by public transit?

Giving people unlimited housing, medicine, food, and clothing doesn't make them into responsible adults.

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

#254

Post by eznzt » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 11:19 PM UTC

Jochim wrote: post #252

eznzt wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your source for that? Also, how do those shelters know the guy is gay? They have gaydars at the entrance?

You really can't imagine why a person kicked out by their religious parents for being gay would be apprehensive about entering a homeless shelter operated by that same religious group?

That would be quite the coincidence... and also assumes there is only one shelter with free beds.

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

#255

Post by e40 » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 11:20 PM UTC

refurb wrote: post #242

e40 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In-patient services for mental health were decimated in the 80's. Reagan cut the funding and cities were flooded with homeless + mentally ill people. I was at UC Berkeley at the time this happened. There were so many seriously mentally ill folks on the street. It was sad.

This is about as inaccurate a take as one could possibly imagine and is a great example of seeing the world through political bias. Reagan did not lead the charge. The ACLU was actively involved in shutting down inpatient psychiatric facilities because of the abuse that was occurring.[1] With the advent of antipsychotics, our-patient treatment became an option and was regarded as more humane. [1] https://www.aclu.org…

The news media, at the time, said it was due to federal funding being cut, and Reagan was in charge.

I don't doubt there are liberty issues with institutions, though.

EDIT:

Here's a good summary:

https://www.kqed.org/news/11209729/did-the-emptying-of-menta...

Now I remember: pushed the funding from federal to state responsibility, which caused many states to empty out the institutions.

And where do you think many of those people ended up? Berkeley, CA. Because they were sometimes put on buses there, and sometimes it was just the most friendly place to be.

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

#256

Post by shuckles » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 11:23 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #73

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. Austin city council removed a ban on camping in public in 2019. The pitch was that it "decriminalized homelessness". Austin is still a liberal city, but revocation of the ban is now widely reviled given the tents and trash that have grown everywhere, without doing anything really to help homeless people. There is an initiative on the ballot…

San Francisco has passed many bans like this, and the results speak for themselves. Legal prohibitions are quite separate from what will be enforced.

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

#257

Post by porb121 » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 11:26 PM UTC

itake wrote: post #66

Synaesthesia wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be pretty elementary to solve homelessness, as Finland has shown. There's also no reason we can't have full employment. The Soviet Union had it.

I’ve lived in LA, SF, and Boulder. Most of the homeless in these cities are not interested in being apart of society. They are perfectly happy with their lifestyle of mental health and drug addictions. Yes, there is a minority of homeless struggling to rejoin society, but the (pardon verbiage) worst people have no interest or empathy for society.

> Most of the homeless in these cities are not interested in being apart of society

maybe they are not interested in being a part of our society because of how our society is organized, and if we changed our societal structure, they would be more willing or able to participate.

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

#258

Post by shuckles » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 11:30 PM UTC

offtop5 wrote: post #46

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…

I'll say this as someone who's been evicted twice, the number one reason the vast majority of people end up homeless is because they don't have money. This can happen for a small array of reasons, let's say you're in a bad marriage and your spouse leaves. You simply can't make the rent anymore, you're now homeless. 19 years old, and you're getting into really bad fights with your parents, you're now homeless. Develop…

In California, you have: Social Security, re-entry services provided by the CCDR, EBT, Medicaid, cash through county assistance programs, and a large number of non profit providers of aid.

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

#259

Post by shuckles » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 11:32 PM UTC

Joeri wrote: post #50

Housing first is an approach conceived in the U.S. but for political reasons not as widely adopted as it should be. 99pi did a fascinating podcast series about the homelessness problem in oakland and how housing first fits into the picture. My preconceived notions of why people are homeless were definitely upended. https://99percentinvisible.org/need/

Santa Clara County recently did a random assignment intervention to offer chronically homeless people free housing. There was no measurable difference in health outcomes (in fact, those provided housing died at higher rates). I am not convinced the housing first is as great as its proponents claim it is, though it does have an intuitive appeal (by definition, it’s the solution to homelessness! But what if homelessness is a symptom, not the disease?).

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

#260

Post by hypertele-Xii » Mon, Jan 25, 2021, 11:36 PM UTC

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…

There is another category of homelessness rarely brought up: Finland is having a tiny crisis over moldy buildings. There are apparently people aggregating in tent villages who are unable to enter almost any building. Like, hyper-allergic to mold.

Construction techniques changed after the '60s to make buildings more airtight, cheaper of course, and built quickly; Moisture was often sealed within structures (from rain or snow) because it costs money to wait for things to dry (especially in winter). This has resulted in catastrophic instances of entire brand-new apartment buildings collapsing in value. Then there's that one particular fungi that loves growing under those plastic carpets that were popular (cheap..). I've personally lived in multiple moldy buildings. Frequent eye and ear infections, strange irritability and headaches, etc. My whole neighborhood was just renovated because they found microbes, since these houses were built quick and cheap.

In my city there are not less than two public libraries where the architect thought it a good idea to put a water fountain inside the interior. One was shut off because it leaked water into the building; the other still runs to this day. Misty moisture among paper books. Yikes.

Recent cost-cutting measures of public schools shutting down their air circulation systems for the night have raised concerns over the air quality exposed on children. Teachers and nurses infamously suffer chronically from related issues since they spend most their time within these buildings.

And the worst part is perhaps that owners of buildings and apartments don't want air quality inspections because they'd have to pay for the damn repairs. People get stuck in moving spirals where they have to get quickly out of their moldy homes only to move into another one. I personally know one person whose business failed leaving her with $100k in debt because she got super ill and the doctors couldn't officially acknowledge that mold was the problem.