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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

#91

Post by ekianjo »

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…

> That's definitely something other countries can learn from.

Other countries with totally different problems and different reasons for homelessness will learn what from that exactly?

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

#92

Post by ekianjo »

ricardobayes wrote: post #88
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…

Spain also has relatively few homeless, at least compared to some other European countries. They have made it "de facto" legal to break in to an empty, unused home. If you squat a home, proceedings can take years to get you out of there. The only way to get an express eviction is if the owner reports it in the first 72 hours of people moving in. So no wonder you see bars on every single house window and alarms.

> They have made it "de facto" legal to break in to an empty, unused home. If you squat a home, proceedings can take years to get you out of there.

Same for France

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

#93

Post by ekianjo »

pavlov wrote: post #8

This Guardian story gives more detail on how the program works: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle... Common objections to applying this policy elsewhere seem to be “We’re bigger than Finland” and “We’re not ethnically homogenous like Finland.” On the first point, 5M people isn’t really that small. It’s roughly the median population of an American state. On the second point, well… It does so…

If your country has 5M, it means your largest city is fairly small, or cannot compare with the cities that have 10M inhabitants alone. Scale creates totally different problems, I'd thought that people on HN understood that kind of things.

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

#94

Post by usernew »

pavlov wrote: post #8

This Guardian story gives more detail on how the program works: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle... Common objections to applying this policy elsewhere seem to be “We’re bigger than Finland” and “We’re not ethnically homogenous like Finland.” On the first point, 5M people isn’t really that small. It’s roughly the median population of an American state. On the second point, well… It does so…

[flagged]

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

#95

Post by anon-3988 »

dcow wrote: post #77
ojbyrne wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 The article is from a Canadian newspaper. It is from Toronto, which, for Canada, has relatively mild winters. But it’s still Canada.

that country refers to Finland from the GP's previous sentence.

root comment was saying that Finland have to have this policy otherwise people would literally die on the streets due to the extreme cold weather. the child commenter reminds root that the article is written by a Toronto paper, which is also a very cold place any yet does not have quite the same policy (I think Canada do have homeless shelters?)

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

#96

Post by ekianjo »

exDM69 wrote: post #50
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…

Yes, most of the homelessness in Finland is driven by substance abuse and mental illness too. It's mostly alcohol, amphetamines (meth included), buprenorfine and benzos from Eastern European organized crime and fentanyl is not as common, but the landscape is similar.

if you don't have fentanyl you have no clue what the problem is.

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

#97

Post by exDM69 »

misja111 wrote: post #84
mach1ne wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m Finnish and this is not my understanding. Finland has a specific policy that every time a new neighbourhood is constructed, a percentage of those houses are allocated for the municipal government, who then rent them for these less fortunate folk. This means that the problems aren’t concentrated but distributed. It’s part of the larger ideology of equality in Finland, which is that the extremes in both good and ba…

Thanks, I didn't know that. I'm not Finnish but have stayed in the Helsinki area a lot. There were certain area's in e.g. Tikkurila and Jakomaeki which were pretty bad, and Finnish people told me it was because many alcoholics lived there in state housing. So I supposed that state housing was concentrated in certain area's.

That is a different matter.

Municipalities own a significant amount of housing available for rent. These are available for anyone but there are societal reasons why someone might be preferred (e.g. single mother), while others are in the queue.

These are not the housing units given to the homeless. They are run by organizations and charities together in collaboration with municipal social workers. There are two or three houses like this in Helsinki.

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

#98

Post by ekianjo »

bcherny wrote: post #63
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...

There's not just one type of homeless person.

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

#99

Post by deanc »

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…

This is a nuanced issue and I agree with what you wrote. I live in Finland. Some additional thoughts:

- The scale of social problems in the US is on a whole other level. More people requires bigger solutions.

- The state vs government system in the US means it's every state for themselves when solving social issues. This is seen in states actively shipping homeless people to warmer climate states in order to make their problems go away.

- As you point out, homeless people die in the winter. It's also cold in many places in the US, and hot in others - so people die all the time there too.

- As a society Finland has a robust social security system, the society is built on it - and the idea of equality (Hint: its not, but it's not bad at all either compared to other countries). The amount of Americans I've seen arguing against free healthcare as they don't want to pay for it just blows my mind, I would imagine you'd go into a similar situation if the government raised taxes to "fix the homeless problem". "Well i'm not homeless, why should i pay for these people's problems" etc. (Not my view, just predicting how it will go).

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

#100

Post by ben_bai »

EiZei wrote: post #10
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"?

Freezing to death is so unspeakably painful so that you will do anything to avoid that, in the olden days homeless people would sleep in hidden maintenance spaces or near heat exhaust vents in the most extreme cases. Dying of cold is so rare that it does not even warrant it's own category in causes of death statistics here but you could argue some of the drug/alcohol deaths might cover that.

> Freezing to death is so unspeakably painful so that you will do anything to avoid that

Unfortunately not, it's cold but you can endure it, and it'll make you apathetic, and then it's over.

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