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Given a place to live, Finland’s homeless were better able to deal with problems

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Re: Given a place to live, Finland’s homeless were better able to deal with problems

#61

Post by tallanvor »

01100011 wrote: post #33

Does Finland have a problem with Mexican cartel meth and fentanyl being dumped by the truckloads into its communities? To be clear, there are many types of homeless in the US. But the ones that get the most attention and seem to cause the most problems are those pushed into mental illness by drug use. And, yes, drug use does not always cause mental illness and many mentally ill are not on drugs, but as those of us wi…

Plenty of drugs are still making it to Scandinavia. I can't speak for Finland specifically, but in the past couple of months over 1600kg of cocaine was found in Oslo and over 100kg were found in western Norway. So yes, drugs are readily available here. There was also an article several years ago that estimated Norway was the 5th cheapest country for drugs compared to average wages.

https://www.newsinenglish.no/2023/04/17/more-cocaine-seized-... https://www.newsinenglish.no/2023/04/18/more-cocaine-seized-... https://www.lifeinnorway.net/norway-surges-in-world-vice-ind...

Re: Given a place to live, Finland’s homeless were better able to deal with problems

#62

Post by rocketbop »

bilqis wrote: post #46
mjevans wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That won't magically make enough housing appear on the market. Many of the major cities where jobs can be found have a chronic shortage of housing, at all levels of value. We need to build housing like there's a WAR effort, like there's an actual battle against homelessness by building enough homes for everyone who wants to live in an area. NIMBY and 'sense of character' are the major issues that prevent this, along…

This won’t happen under current state of capitalistic systems. No-one will fund this for sole purpose of public good.

It seems like this is true, and depressingly short term thinking on the part of governments. Social housing can be an asset for the state, and if not profitable at least less costly in the long term than current piecemeal approaches.

Re: Given a place to live, Finland’s homeless were better able to deal with problems

#63

Post by bcherny »

01100011 wrote: post #33

Does Finland have a problem with Mexican cartel meth and fentanyl being dumped by the truckloads into its communities? To be clear, there are many types of homeless in the US. But the ones that get the most attention and seem to cause the most problems are those pushed into mental illness by drug use. And, yes, drug use does not always cause mental illness and many mentally ill are not on drugs, but as those of us wi…

Homelessness in the US is driven by cost of housing, not by drugs or mental illness [0].

[0] https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/everything-you-think-you-k...

Re: Given a place to live, Finland’s homeless were better able to deal with problems

#64

Post by 27fingies »

bboygravity wrote: post #3

If you're literally homeless in Finland you would die during winter season? Could that be a contributing factor to the "success"?

This is an article from a Toronto newspaper. Toronto gets just as cold as, if not colder than helsinki in the winter.

Re: Given a place to live, Finland’s homeless were better able to deal with problems

#65

Post by bandrami »

it's interesting that Americans all seem to assume the US has a horrible homelessness problem when it actually has a pretty low homelessness rate by OECD standards (and for that matter Finland got the idea from a US municipal program). It's like half the UK rate and a third of the German rate, and thats even with the US using a broader definition of "homeless" than UK or DE.

Re: Given a place to live, Finland’s homeless were better able to deal with problems

#66

Post by sharkbird2 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #19

I lived in Finland for a while. Being homeless in that country is pretty hard core in the winter. Which is a reason that sheltering people there is not a nice to have; you either shelter them or you collect their dead bodies in the morning. It's that simple. Places like Helsinki never had a large community of homeless people to begin with (natural selection). But it has plenty of social issues of course. Alcoholism i…

I find it fascinating how the higher-cost and therefore counter-intuitive alternative, can sometimes be the better choice, due to long-term secondary effects that doesn't show up on said paper.

Reminds me of the value of developing your own advanced projects, which is a huge cost (and risk) for a country or a company, but which can pay off big time in the long run through developing advanced marketable industry, exportable competence and just creating lots of jobs.

Re: Given a place to live, Finland’s homeless were better able to deal with problems

#67

Post by negidius »

bilqis wrote: post #46
mjevans wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That won't magically make enough housing appear on the market. Many of the major cities where jobs can be found have a chronic shortage of housing, at all levels of value. We need to build housing like there's a WAR effort, like there's an actual battle against homelessness by building enough homes for everyone who wants to live in an area. NIMBY and 'sense of character' are the major issues that prevent this, along…

This won’t happen under current state of capitalistic systems. No-one will fund this for sole purpose of public good.

There are a plenty of people who want to build more housing, and they would make a lot of money doing that if it wasn't illegal. The problem is not capitalism, it's statism.

Re: Given a place to live, Finland’s homeless were better able to deal with problems

#68

Post by TMWNN »

misja111 wrote: post #35
TMWNN wrote: post #16

The city of San Francisco spends $70,000 annually per homeless person! https://abc7news.com/sf-homeless-plan-housing-all-san-franci... > The homeless there are homeless because severe mental and addiction issues cause them to reject help, not because resources aren't available.

Also they can remain homeless because of the climate. In Finland they would simply freeze to death.

> Also they can remain homeless because of the climate.

Weather is part of the reason, but not the most important one. If it were, San Diego would have a worse homeless problem than San Francisco.

The most important difference is that the city of San Diego spends one third as much as San Francisco per homeless person. ($46.8 million in city spending[1] for an estimated 1900 homeless.[2])

San Francisco has an enormous homeless-industrial complex that uses every virtue-signaling, heart-tugging propaganda tool at its disposal to increase the flow of money thrown into its bottomless maw, despite no metric ever improving one bit whatsoever.

[1] https://www.lajollalight.com/news/story/2023-04-15/san-diego...>

[2] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-02-07/downtown...> [3]

[3] The count is only of the homeless in downtown San Diego. While presumably most homeless San Diegans are there, just as there are very few San Franciscans living on the sidewalk in Pac Heights, the point is that a larger number would mean that much less spending per homeless person in the city as a whole, and that much more glaring a discrepancy between the two cities.

Re: Given a place to live, Finland’s homeless were better able to deal with problems

#69

Post by dazc »

emodendroket wrote: post #49
jillesvangurp wrote: post #19

I lived in Finland for a while. Being homeless in that country is pretty hard core in the winter. Which is a reason that sheltering people there is not a nice to have; you either shelter them or you collect their dead bodies in the morning. It's that simple. Places like Helsinki never had a large community of homeless people to begin with (natural selection). But it has plenty of social issues of course. Alcoholism i…

> I lived in Finland for a while. Being homeless in that country is pretty hard core in the winter. Which is a reason that sheltering people there is not a nice to have; you either shelter them or you collect their dead bodies in the morning. It's that simple. Unfortunately there are any number of people who would be happy with option B in this scenario.

'Unfortunately there are any number of people who would be happy with option B in this scenario.'

Since we are going on personal beliefs rather than hard facts, I suspect is number is very low.

Re: Given a place to live, Finland’s homeless were better able to deal with problems

#70

Post by genocidicbunny »

6nf wrote: post #4
bboygravity wrote: post #3

If you're literally homeless in Finland you would die during winter season? Could that be a contributing factor to the "success"?

Is this not true in many US cities too?

This is true for many US cities, but by far not all of them, and probably not even the majority. Places like SF, Los Angeles, Houston, Miami..etc, have very mild winters that are relatively easier to deal with if you're homeless.

I do question that it's largely the winter weather responsible. Even in places like Chicago, where the winter does get cold enough to quickly kill, there is still a large homeless population, so the weather alone isn't all that's at work. And similarly, Murmansk and Arkhangelsk are also very northerly cities with some serious winter weather, and there were plenty of homeless there too.

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