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

#191

Post by danaris » Fri, May 05, 2023, 12:51 PM 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…

Do you know why people end up "drugged out"?

In a great many cases, it's because they lost hope, and the drugs were the only thing that let them escape from their pain and despair.

There's a good amount of scientific evidence that drug addiction is harder to fall into, and vastly easier to break out of, when people have a support system. This includes having a place to live.

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

#192

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 05, 2023, 12:51 PM UTC

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #108

usernew wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Here, have a fun read. This is what happens literally every time it's tried. https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/homeless-hotels- ... The difference is the Finnish scheme is getting people into their own homes, fairly well distributed across society - not beds in hostels/shelters or low quality apartments in sink estates.

[deleted]

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

#193

Post by jimnotgym » Fri, May 05, 2023, 12:52 PM 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.

So the difference is really that Finland is further along the path of civilisation?

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

#194

Post by danaris » Fri, May 05, 2023, 12:53 PM UTC

dazc wrote: post #83

bcherny wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Well I became homeless when my landlord decided he needed to sell up and gave me notice to leave (much more than legally required, I should add). He eventually sold the house at auction for a sum 3 times smaller than I currently have sitting in a bank account. This was over ten years ago and, obviously, house prices have increased a lot and I eventually got back on my feet but, the point is that you can find yourself…

Sounds to me like the reason you became homeless was exactly because of housing prices, like the parent said.

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

#195

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 05, 2023, 12:57 PM UTC

sph wrote: post #86

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…

No, Finland isn't waging a ridiculous War on Drugs, doesn't have long ties between its three letter agencies and sponsoring drug lords in the more tropical neighbours, nor a broken and corrupted police, justiciary and political system. The drug issue in the USA is not the problem. It is just a symptom of a more systemic and substantial disease.

[deleted]

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

#196

Post by danaris » Fri, May 05, 2023, 12:57 PM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #170

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.

"We're the best country in the world, so if there were a way, we would have found it already! The problem still exists, so obviously it's not solvable!"

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

#197

Post by seanmcdirmid » Fri, May 05, 2023, 1:03 PM UTC

IOT_Apprentice wrote: post #114

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a reason west coast cities are the most popular greyhound destinations.

In the US, many states put homelessness people on buses to western states like California. They don’t want to deal with them in their own states and then complain about how NY and especially California have dirty streets and homeless problems. The cognitive ignorance is amazing. The US has many institutional problems in sectors that impact life. No nationalized healthcare, very short training of police officers with…

A lot of states/charities will give people open tickets so they can get “home” but they don’t verify that it’s really their home, so it’s just used to go where they want, which is often the west coast during winter or really any time. The bus is also cheap enough that you can scrounge up some money for a ticket in a few days.

Vancouver is a mirror of Seattle in its homeless problem, the Canadians handle it better, but the underlying issues are very similar, so it’s not like the USA is fairly special in this regard.

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

#198

Post by lordloki » Fri, May 05, 2023, 1:17 PM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #181

dazc wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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.

I would encourage you to wade into commentary on the man strangled to death on the NYC subway if you think it’s outlandish that some people see the lives of the homeless as essentially disposable. Or you could just scroll down to the person in this very discussion thread who more or less argues for deaths from exposure. Or we could look at preferences revealed by policy demands, which often take more of an "out of si…

The guy who was threatening people on the train? That's a dishonest comparison along with a dishonest assertion. First you are asserting that a lot of people supported his death,which is not the case. They supported someone doing something to stop him threatening others on the train, with his death being an unfortunate consequence of his own actions. Then you falsely use this violent individual to represent all homeless people in order to incorrectly assume there exists a large number of people who support the death of the homeless.

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

#199

Post by bjarneh » Fri, May 05, 2023, 1:23 PM UTC

draugadrotten wrote: post #109

bjarneh wrote: post #57

> And that led to an insight: people tend to function better when they’re not living on the street or under a bridge. Who would have guessed? Reminds me of the old Fran Lebowitz bit about homelessness, where she says they insist on calling it homelessness, since that makes it sound unsolvable. You really can't buy people a home . If they called it houselessness it would be too easily solvable.

> If they called it houselessness it would be too easily solvable. Only if one believes that the lack of a home or a house is the root cause of the individuals problem. A drug addict provided with a house as a home will turn that house into a cesspit in very short time. The drug addict does not clean, does not take out the trash, does not repair. The drug addict will invite other drug addicts to the house, essentiall…

> Only if one believes that the lack of a home or a house is the root cause of the individuals problem.

There are other ways of seeing this. It can start the other way around for instance. I.e. if you end up on the streets; both drugs and alcohol can numb the pain of your current situation, slowly but surely giving you a drug problem on top of your homelessness problem.

I fully agree about what can easily happen if we just offered free housing to people with severe drug problems. I'm just wondering if we are using that as an excuse not to help people with something we know is an effective method.

Even people with serious drug problems must have a much better chance of kicking their habit if they can avoid living in a tent or under a bridge. How do these horrible conditions with constant fear of being robbed/raped help them kick their habit?

> Help needs to be directed on the root cause and issues and homelessness is a symptom, not a cause.

Lets assume that the root cause is child abuse, i.e. they are on drugs due to being molested, i.e. molestation is the "root cause". How are we helping that person better by allowing them to live in a place like skid row, where they say that almost 100% of the women living there have been raped (while living there)? I'm just not seeing how the tent/under-a-bridge lifestyle adds anything to our "assistance/help" here?

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

#200

Post by hasseldahoff » Fri, May 05, 2023, 1:26 PM UTC

jimnotgym wrote: post #190

cvwright wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we pay to defend Europe from Russia, and we do it for free. We should stop doing that, and invest more in domestic needs.

You do it for...free? OMG, you can't actually believe that? I live in the UK. We have an independent nuclear deterrent that we buy off the US for billions. We have plastic fighter jets we buy from the US at over $100m a pop. We have every credit card payment taxed by Visa and Mastercard. We allow US companies to operate here tax free, destroying local business. When I was a teenager in the 1990s we finally managed to…

> When I was a teenager in the 1990s we finally managed to pay the US for selling us WW2. The US took our gold and the rights built military bases on a bunch of strategic islands. They left us as a vassal state.

I find this attitude ironic. If you didn’t engage in this trade there is high likelihood you would not have survived the air battle waged by the German Air Force.

Also the debt wasn’t repaid until 2006.

And the implied threat that you’ll buy Russian gas (and become dependent on it) because we elected a shit-talker? Lol. Salty tears all around, except without a valid reason.