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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

#351

Post by mapt »

caturopath wrote: post #345
munificent wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Integrating counselling and medical doctoring is a strange idea Why? It doesn't seem any different to me than surgery + physical therapy for a non-brain-oriented medical problem.

Right, and a surgeon doesn't serve as your physical therapist just like the psychiatrist doesn't serve as your talk therapist. They're different roles, even though they're both addressing the same part of your health.

Under the US system, the surgeon has to press the patient to learn what operation they're going to perform, because the physical therapist / primary care doc / specialist doc isn't paid to communicate with the surgeon, but they're willing to guess the operation if the patient doesn't take great notes.

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

#352

Post by mapt »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #248
giantg2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only do they tend to select larger cities, but also warmer cities. You mostly hear about the homeless population in places like San Francisco, Oahu, Austin, etc. If you're homeless, you might as well go to a place where you're less likely to freeze to death. Although there are some homeless in places likes Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, etc. Not to mention some cities will give them money if they take a bus to another…

Is there any data that homeless people "select" expensive cities? There's a lot of evidence that expensive cities create homeless people [1, 2, 3]. [1] https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/14/18131047/homelessne... [2] https://archive.curbed.com/2016/8/26/12652130/homelessness-e... [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-06/why-is-ho...

Anecdata from long-term-homeless youth in particular suggest they're moderately mobile, and that they maintain three criteria: Liveable climate, how abusive the city is or isn't towards homeless people, and the presence of upper middle class residents & tourists to panhandle

People, particularly families, who are briefly homeless until they get the next apartment or who are on the short-list for assistance, are less mobile. There are a lot of homeless people who have a job, have a car, but just can't make it work at the moment as far as housing.

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

#353

Post by asdff »

pretendscholar wrote: post #170
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?

Every rail project they've built in the last 30 years has been some sort of unique boondoggle. All the billions in homeless funding to date has been squandered on things like housing units that cost nearly half a million dollars each. There is no competence in local governance here except in finding some unique graft to milk before the FBI eventually raids your office. Even if the problems were on the same scale here, costs would be enormous due to the inefficiency and insistence on using for profit contractors with public works.

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

#354

Post by asdff »

porb121 wrote: post #160
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.

what works in Finland (giving people housing) definitely works in Los Angeles - LA was the subject of a recent research paper demonstrating the massive success of such a program https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H9oD3zeBPua7r5wFoHVrMZmmiqK...

Giving people housing helps those homeless who have the wherewithal to go forth and build a life from that point. That population of homeless are rarely chronically homeless. The most visible source of homeless, the chronically homeless population accounting for the most deaths, the most crime, the most in need of resources, are the drug addicted and mentally ill. The solution is not to create more sober housing that will be turned down by addicts or people who aren't in the right state of mind who believe they really do have a better life living on the sidewalk. The solution is to create mental health facilities and drug treatment centers, and to remove people off the street by offering a choice of going to seek treatment at one of these places, or jail. Living in subhuman conditions on the street shouldn't even be an option

It's embarrassing to me that LA county is putting up port a potties underneath freeway overpasses and patting themselves on the back for their "lofty" goal of 10,000 shelter units in 10 years, when they should instead be building hospitals and long term psychiatric wards if money were to actually be spent on doing the most good towards the people impacted by this public health crisis on our sidewalks.

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

#355

Post by gamblor956 »

WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #319
gamblor956 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Someone moves to California and later becomes homeless - is evidence of what?

No, it's not "someone moves to CA and later becomes homeless."

It's someone becomes homeless and their home city doesn't want to pay to deal with it, so they buy them a $5 bus ticket to LA.

Steve Lopez, the journalist I was referring to, interviewed a group of homeless living in Hollywood in one of his articles. All of the individuals were homeless prior to coming to LA, and almost all of them had been sent here.

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

#356

Post by e40 »

burlesona wrote: post #303
e40 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yeah, well, that's great. But I read many articles about police departments in other states putting homeless people on a bus for the Bay Area. That's is not cool of them. It overwhelmed the social services in the Bay Area.

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

#357

Post by e40 »

refurb wrote: post #291
e40 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The institutions were being emptied out because organizations like the ACLU brought cases to court to have them emptied. People were being held against their will in conditions that were causing a stir in the media. It was regarded as a human rights issue that they not be confined unless there was no other option. Hence the shift to outpatient care in the community. Pining it all on Reagan’s cuts is grossly inaccurat…

You seem to have an axe to grind. What you say is not supported by the evidence. It's definitely true in some cases, but not the main reason for the changes.

See the NPR article I link to, and many others.

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

#358

Post by blub »

kaybe wrote: post #341
blub wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Western European countries seem to be completely incompetent at deporting people. Illegal immigrants, terrorists, criminals, they fail to deport almost everyone.

I don't think you can simply deport EU member citizens from a EU state. From what I can understand at first glance it is only possible when the citizen has been sentenced for a heavy crime. edit: Of course Geneva is not in the EU, but in many aspects the situation is similar.

They (we) can't even deport non-EU citizens!

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

#359

Post by Supermancho »

flagrant wrote: post #102
Supermancho wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's cloaked hatred. Homelessness causes suffering which is usually self-treated with substance abuse. This is not a hateful commentary. I'm not sure how a blanket characterization equates to "hate", when it's a lazy attribution due to indifference. Maybe disdain is the appropriate term.

It ascribes a characterisation to homeless people (that they would prefer to get drunk than have a home) that there is simply no evidence for. The comment blames homeless people for their own destitution purely based on the commenter's preconceived bias against homeless people.

> It ascribes a characterisation to homeless people that there is simply no evidence for

Except for the evidence there is. https://www.addictioncenter.com/addiction/homelessness/

Homelessness causes suffering, which is usually self-treated with substance abuse/use, depending on how you want to play with numbers. Fair enough? That's normal human behavior.

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

#360

Post by burlesona »

thehappypm wrote: post #339
burlesona wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most meaningful comparison is CSA: NY is 22.5M LA is 18.7M https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area

I think many people prefer the MSA definition over the CSA, CSA feels like a bit of a stretch in many of its definitions. Are San Jose and San Francisco one entity, or two? CSA says one, MSA says two.

Having lived and worked in the Bay Area I would definitely say they are one entity socially and economically. It was not unusual to have people live in San Jose and commute to SF, nor vice versa.

By contrast, Sacramento was clearly not part of that unit, even though it isn’t _that_ much further away. There’s a notable gap between the cities, and the cross-commute rate was near zero. (Emphatically NOT zero, there were some people who commuted in from Sacramento, but those were rare, and I never heard of anyone commuting the other way).

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