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Finland has slashed homelessness; the rest of Europe is failing

economist.com

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

#301

Post by lefrenchy »

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.

Provide evidence it won’t scale?

That kind of defeatist attitude won’t help either. You can’t create a systemic problem like this and then just shrug and say “it’s gotten too big we can’t stop it now”.

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

#302

Post by leetcrew »

croissants wrote: post #290
danielheath wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of reasons. A short list includes: * Shelters not allowing pets - many would rather remain homeless than give up their dog * Shelters not allowing drugs * Social services officers looking too much like cops (many homeless have had bad enough experiences with cops to keep them away from anyone cop-like) * Spending on 'discomfort' measures (eg deliberately-hostile architecture to discourage people from being homel…

> However, "free therapy" is a wildly unpopular suggestion in the USA. This is strange. I'd guess that free therapy, or at least government-subsidized mental health initiatives, would be pretty popular on the left. That leaves me with the right. But therapy doesn't really seem like something that's easy to get jealous about. Are people going to get mad at articles about "therapy queens" that see a dozen therapists pe…

I wouldn't resent destitute/at-risk people from receiving free therapy, especially if it lessened the tax bill that I will eventually pay anyway, but it's not hard to see why better off people might be irritated by this. therapy usually costs somewhere in the range of $60-120/hr, and it can be quite difficult to find a good fit that is in-network. I get paid decently, but if I went to therapy four times a month, that would already be my largest budget category after rent.

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

#303

Post by burlesona »

e40 wrote: post #255
refurb wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Just FWIW the bus runs the other way: https://hsh.sfgov.org/services/problem-solving/homeward-boun...

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

#304

Post by burlesona »

giantg2 wrote: post #186
thehappypm wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per capita? NYC is 2x larger than any other city.

LA/Los Angeles county (what the prior link uses) is a little larger than NYC, 10 million vs 8 million respectively. I would also be interested in per capita per city. Even more so for aggregates of cold vs warm cities overall.

There is no comparison. LA county is the majority of the LA metro, while NYC is the minority.

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

#305

Post by burlesona »

giantg2 wrote: post #186
thehappypm wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Per capita? NYC is 2x larger than any other city.

LA/Los Angeles county (what the prior link uses) is a little larger than NYC, 10 million vs 8 million respectively. I would also be interested in per capita per city. Even more so for aggregates of cold vs warm cities overall.

The most meaningful comparison is CSA:

NY is 22.5M

LA is 18.7M

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area

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

#306

Post by _wp3r »

stevecalifornia wrote: post #238
klondike_ wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inpatient mental hospitals used to be in every state. They housed not only the mentally ill but also the chronically homeless and other outcasts. As the advent of antipsychotics and antidepressants reduced their population, these hospitals were an obvious target for budget cuts throughout the 80s and 90s. They money for the community health centers that were supposed to replace them never materialized, and thousands…

I would add that you are missing a major component for why mental hospitals went away-- public opinion changed. The public was made aware of abuses and such abuses were also dramatized in One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest. There was pressure to shut these down. Separately, I will add that we need these hospitals back desperately. I don't know who will sign up for this tough job, but we need a place for the mentally ill…

Pennhurst and Bridgewater State Hospitals and the resulting exposes on these facilities were the start of the abandonment of most state run mental health services and facilities.

Search for "Suffer the Children" from 1968, by NBC10. added: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YG33HvIKOgQ&feature=emb_logo

added: Also search "Titicut Follies" for temporal context

Those calls to action lead to defunding and closing of many facilities on mass regardless of the services they provided or the conditions. From orphanages up to mental health institutions.

That period was followed up by a small influential group of individuals that lobbied very hard to have state schools for the handicapped and severe development delays closed in preference of services provided by local schools culminating in Title 1, which was eventually federally mandated regardless of the level of care and support a child might need.

Both of these large changes led to significant changes in the cultural acceptance of institutionalization of any individual young or old, even to the detriment of those individuals in some cases.

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

#307

Post by wombatpm »

There is also the matter of weather. Finland is cold. When I lived in Minneapolis the number of homeless people was staggeringly small compared to Chicago which was nothing compared to San Francisco. All the jokes about the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco aside, -20 degree temperatures at night (no windchill bs) will force even the craziest of homeless to seek shelter. Eventually they get help of somesort

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

#308

Post by ausbah »

barbacoa wrote: post #213
vkou wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think homeless people are choosing to sleep rough, rather than stay in shelters?

I imagine numerous cities have been spending countless millions on studies and consultants to figure out an answer to that one. Personally, it's the lifestyle they choose. They make little micro houses out of rubbish and tarps equipped with couches and mattresses. They make comical signs such as "need money for booze" for laughs and get free food from charities or shelters. There are some that have no where else to g…

I doubt the mentally ill or addiction-riddled choose to be homeless because it's a "hip trendy easy going lifestyle"

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

#309

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #264
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're aware that, according to official statistics, homelessness is higher per capita in Australia than in California or the US as a whole. I'm open to the idea that this might be due to definitional or measurement problems, but you've gotta explain what those problems are, not just assert that they must exist. The obvious alternative explanation is that Americans might simply be less tolerant of meas…

sorry, but HN isn't a great medium for long technical posts :) The basic issue is that Australia naive measurements and numbers carry a three tier definition of homelessness: at the lowest level you have what we call "sleeping rough" which is probably the concept closest to what most people and Americans think of as "homeless". But the Australian definition also includes the likes of insecure accommodation and inappr…

That makes sense. I'm gonna have to dig into the exact definitions at some point, but I agree HN comments aren't a great place to really get into that.

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

#310

Post by bzbarsky »

jupiter90000 wrote: post #199
SaintGhurka wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add some missing details on this, in 2018/19 the city council passed some ordinances that removed the criminality of some homeless activities. Specifically, they made it explicitly legal to camp in most public spaces (excluding parks) and they permit panhandling, sitting and sleeping on public sidewalks. So there's a lot of "campsites" downtown. A lot of tents, or just people in sleeping bags on the sidewalk. A lo…

Any ideas why it seems like tech hotspots start passing laws like this? I'm thinking of San Francisco, Seattle, and Austin. I feel like there is some correlation, but I do not know what it is. My perspective is that maybe it seems more compassionate to not outlaw street camping, but I do not see how it is helpful to anyone including the ones on the street to allow this to continue.

I'm not sure about the "tech hotspot" angle, but https://www.econlib.org/homeless-camping-in-austin-a-modest-... while somewhat satirical may well have a point about the "why"...
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