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

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

#161

Post by laserlight » Fri, May 05, 2023, 9:17 AM UTC

zztop44 wrote: post #131

chii wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> also cold in many places in the US ... so people die all the time there too. The cold climate locations in the US does not have homeless during the winter, because they move away to warmer climates. There's no warmer climate to be in for Finland.

Helsinki winter isn’t much colder than DC or New York, both of which have large year-round homeless populations.

This got me curious, so I compared [0]. To summarize, Helsinki's high tracks NYC's low. Helsinki is 6 -- 8 C (10 -- 14 F) colder than NYC in January -- February.

[0] https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/91632~23912/Comparison-of...

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

#162

Post by exDM69 » Fri, May 05, 2023, 9:18 AM UTC

eesmith wrote: post #157

exDM69 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren't that many homeless killed by the harsh winter any more (or in decades). There were in the 1950s. > This is clearly not so, because the source I gave shows long-term homeless people in Finland, who survived winter using "tent villages and huts". The source you gave is an Australian magazine, and what was said in it was not accurate. There were indeed "tent villages and huts" during that time, but they wer…

> but they were 1) there only in the summer 2) predominantly transient people that were a part of a human trafficking scheme from southern Europe. Thank you for the correction. That doesn't change the fact there were still long-term homeless people, contrary to bboygravity's proposition " If you're literally homeless in Finland you would die during winter season? Could that be a contributing factor to the "success"?'

> That doesn't change the fact there were still long-term homeless people, contrary to bboygravity's proposition " If you're literally homeless in Finland you would die during winter season? Could that be a contributing factor to the "success"?'

No, it is not.

There are emergency shelters and homeless people take advantage of any warm space they can. At most a few people die of exposure during the winter months (say 1-2 people per year, it makes the news when it happens). The ones who survive the winter in shelters will remain homeless next year.

The reduction in the number homeless is primarily driven by the "housing first" scheme described in the article. The homeless are given supported housing and social work, in that order. Because the other way around (try to "help" first) did not have good results.

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

#163

Post by genocidicbunny » Fri, May 05, 2023, 9:30 AM UTC

jxramos wrote: post #160

chii wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> also cold in many places in the US ... so people die all the time there too. The cold climate locations in the US does not have homeless during the winter, because they move away to warmer climates. There's no warmer climate to be in for Finland.

I used to see homeless sleeping in the doorway/building entrances in DC in the evenings while it was snowing outside. It terrified me. They had a few blankets and would huddle up.

I was in Chicago on a pretty very cold night one time (it was sitting around 0F that evening) and it was horrifying to see how many homeless people were still outside despite that cold.

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

#164

Post by eloisant » Fri, May 05, 2023, 9:30 AM UTC

maccard wrote: post #111

ricardobayes wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> if the owner reports it in the first 72 hours So I could literally go away for a long weekend and come back and be homeless? That's _way_ too short!

Talking about France that has a similar law: no, that only works for unused homes.

Let's say you have an empty secondary home that you don't use, don't rent, etc. Maybe you're trying to sell it, or maybe you just don't care because you have the money and you're sitting on it until you maybe take the time to renovate it or put it on the market.

That's where a squatter can be considered "living" there even if it's unlawful. That doesn't mean he owns the house now, or that he can't be evicted - just that the police won't kick him out without a court order. The court order can take some time and in any case nobody can be evicted during winter.

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

#165

Post by m000 » Fri, May 05, 2023, 9:48 AM UTC

redeeman wrote: post #142

ekianjo wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would create some incentive for property owners to invest and rent out buildings, or otherwise sell them cheaply. Property is property, you should be free to do what you want with them. Otherwise it's not property. It's like saying "you have a car, you need to use it everyday, otherwise we can justify people borrowing your car when they need one". Also, rent controls, aren't they a thing in some parts of Germany…

to my sibling comment, so what you're saying is, mob rule? this is probably defacto how it is, but it does not make it right. Nobody else has any rights to what I own, and I dont have rights to them. this kind of thinking that the "society" can just set rules that violates other people is a sick and disgusting development, this form of communist cancer has to be destroyed.

> Nobody else has any rights to what I own

Nobody else, except perhaps your local HOA [1]. So much about your "property". /s

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrizmAo17Os

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

#166

Post by vidarh » Fri, May 05, 2023, 9:53 AM UTC

ddoolin wrote: post #21

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…

Just IMO, many Americans probably don't think homeless people deserve free housing, because they have (the taxpayers) have to pay for their own housing and also contribute to homeless housing via taxes. "Fuck you got mine" is real here. Just see the nauseating argument against discharging student loans.

More so than "fuck you got mine", my impression is that a lot of it comes down to at some level believing in "karma" or the Just World fallacy. That is, the notion that you get what you deserve somehow. Even if you don't consciously say it, if you deep down has some troubling sense that someone homeless must either be lazy or otherwise have done something to deserve the situation they're in even when there's no direct causal link, it's easy to think that they either don't deserve the help and/or will mess up even if you bother. It then becomes a lot easier to do the bare minimum to try to prevent homeless from being a nuisance to others even when helping them properly might be cheaper and better overall.

A lot of social dysfunction makes a lot more sense if you assume a large chunk of people actually do go around thinking that both good and bad outcomes must have been earned somehow and so are deserved whether or not you can establish a causal link.

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

#167

Post by vidarh » Fri, May 05, 2023, 10:02 AM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #93

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.

Then highlight what kind of magical new problems it creates where the solution does not also scale (e.g. sure, you need more funding, but the number of taxpayers to pay for it scales at the same or similar rate). The "US is too big" argument gets used for everything the US struggles with, even with things that are easily subdivided. It's a lazy argument.

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

#168

Post by vidarh » Fri, May 05, 2023, 10:06 AM UTC

silisili wrote: post #90

kstenerud wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any solution not currently being employed couldn't work because the local issues are different in some nebulous way, and it would require careful study before making a hasty move, and there are all these special cases that are different, and it just couldn't work so we should give up because nothing will ever work even if it has worked elsewhere, and just club them all to death instead.

This is so dismissive. We have to admit and analyze the reasons for homelessness before we attempt a solution. Sometimes, people who do everything right end up homeless due to illness, rising rents, death in the family, or any multitude of reasons. If we gave these people free housing and resources, they'd likely bounce back and be fine. If we mix in folks who are drugged out beyond belief, who are violent, who have…

Is the shirtless guy with a machete going to be less dangerous when sleeping on the streets? Are the neighbours not going to complain, and the crime going to be lower because he doesn't have a fixed address where he can get sleep, and where authorities can follow him up?

> It's time to admit some people either aren't worth helping, or at least can't be helped in the way that others can.

Even if that was the case, the experience from Finland is that giving homeless people housing reduces the cost to society, so even if that is the case providing housing is still worthwhile even from a purely selfish point of view of taxpayers wanting to reduce the impact on themselves.

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

#169

Post by piva00 » Fri, May 05, 2023, 10:07 AM UTC

sremani wrote: post #112

deanc wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

>> The scale of social problems in the US is on a whole other level. True. Just for some comparison, if Finland was a metropolitan in US, it would be ranked 10th. Above Phoenix metro and Below Atlanta Metro. I understand the good intentions of people trying to show case 'Scandinavian countries' as a model. They miss many things including Scale.

Scale... Isn't the USA supposedly federalised states? So each state has a small enough scale to solve its issues, with an added benefit that countries in the EU don't have as easily: a federal government that can work to provide funding, coordination and national-level programs to solve the issues. The closest to that coordination is at the EU level itself which is much more complex and less powerful than the federal government of the USA.

I really dislike when American exceptionalism gets to the point of brushing away any kind of role model that could be used as an inspiration to be adapted to American needs as "it won't work because we are different". Guess what, every nation and society is different. Learn from others what worked, adapt to your local needs, that's how progress works.

The USA has the largest economy in the world, there's plenty of money that other countries lack for solving social issues. The main issue is allocation, American society does not think that solving social issues is worthy enough so you don't invest in it. After experiencing all the side-effects of such negligence them comes the exceptionalism excuse, that the scale is different, that X, Y or Z are hard because of A, B, C, so on and so forth.

It's just an excuse, a lame one at that. Yeah, Nordic countries don't have a large population, as a whole there's around 28 million people across the Nordics (Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland), with around US$ 1.8T of GDP. Texas in the USA has 29 million people with US$1.8T GDP in a much smaller area than all the Nordics combined, with better weather, why the fuck can't Texas be like the Nordics then?

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

#170

Post by vidarh » Fri, May 05, 2023, 10:09 AM UTC

moomoo11 wrote: post #126

Are the homeless in Finland hooked on fentanyl and various other hard drugs? Is half of their homeless population suffering from mental illness (stemming from and made worse by the psychosis from the hard drug use)? Do they have an illegal immigration problem? Is there a perverse incentive for politicians and their families to profit off suffering? The situation in the US imo is not at all equatable to most of the wo…

The point of the Finnish experience, and plenty of evidence from elsewhere, is that you're far more likely to address drug abuse (yes, the Nordic countries also have drug problems) and other problems once people are housed.

The US exceptionalism is almost always a cop-out. For a country that is supposedly so advanced, a shockingly high proportion of Americans seem convinced you can't possibly solve anything.