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Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

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Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#221

Post by mrkstu »

Qwertious wrote: post #191
peab wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The housing situation in Canada is insane and is so obviously due to not building enough housing and bringing too many people into the country via immigration. The fact that it costs 1200$/month for a room in a rural area is incredibly damning. I went to college in Ottawa, and now I live in Austin Texas. It's similar in size, although Austin has been growing more lately. Curiously, they are also both capitols, colleg…

>and bringing too many people into the country via immigration. In a functioning economy, more immigration will just result in more housing being built , as long as the immigrants are working. Especially since the cost of housing construction is largely the cost of labor. Immigration is a distraction from the core inability to build more housing.

"In a functioning economy" is doing a lot of work here. Here in reality the parent comment is 100% correct.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#222

Post by [deleted] »

carlosjobim wrote: post #183
cousin_it wrote: post #106

I think governments should offer free housing to everyone who asks, in their city of choice. "But why should taxpayers pay for that? It's expensive!" Yes, it would be very expensive. But you know what's even more expensive? The sum of everybody's lowered wages, bad bosses, fear for the future, fear of having kids and so on, due to the threat of homelessness. Yes, building housing is expensive, but the removal of fear…

What you're proposing is classical Soviet communism. Particularly Khrushchev era communism. Much have been said and written about it, if you're interested.

[deleted]

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#223

Post by dragonwriter »

sudosysgen wrote: post #214
teractiveodular wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck getting commie blocks pushed through planning approvals today. NIMBYs in general are violently against any kind of public housing.

Large scale public housing is driven by the state or federal governments, which can simply ignore NIMBYs and local zoning laws. The issue with public housing is not NIMBYism.

> Large scale public housing is driven by the state or federal governments, which can simply ignore NIMBYs and local zoning laws.

No, they aren't. They are generally run by local housing authorities with state and federal financial participation, and, in any case, there have been basically no major new public housing projects in the several decades, with many existing projects decommissioned, and public housing assistance shifting from project-based to tenant-based vouchers.

Traditional government housing projects started falling out of favor in the 1950s and 1960s as the new projects were often both viewed as worse than the slums they were supposed to replaced and failed to even replace most of the housing units that were destroyed in the urban renewal efforts that created them, and support for them was essentially completely halted by the Nixon Administration in 1973, though it is possible (though, again, rare since the 1980s) for project-based subsidized housing to be created under Section 8, as well as the (far more common) voucher-based aid under Section 8.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#224

Post by mrkstu »

cousin_it wrote: post #203
carlosjobim wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're proposing is classical Soviet communism. Particularly Khrushchev era communism. Much have been said and written about it, if you're interested.

What nonsense. Did you hear me proposing nationalizing all industry? Having a state ideology? Closing the borders? Removing freedom of speech? No, what I proposed was giving people free housing. Another thing I'd propose is giving people free healthcare. Both these things are good ideas. Mentioning the USSR doesn't make them bad ideas.

I can say all day that my ideas are 'good.' But the only place in the modern era that has tried mass 'free housing' are communist ones and all those societies stopped doing it or failed altogether. That doesn't seem like it has worked out as a 'good idea.'

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#225

Post by [deleted] »

ipaddr wrote: post #27
Carrok wrote: post #3

> In the United Kingdom, for instance, people who had been living on the streets or in shelters were housed in individual accommodations in a matter of days. So it was always possible. We just didn’t care to do so.

When they refuse to go inside do you jail them? Some cities with big hearts have been through this before.

[deleted]

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#226

Post by s1artibartfast »

throw_pm23 wrote: post #165
s1artibartfast wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so what is the operational theory then?

one can describe the situation and its causes without prescribing solutions

Don't seem so suggest a cause unless they can be connected

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#227

Post by theteapot »

andrewla wrote: post #92

Without digging too deep into the nature of the statistics they use, I'm a little skeptical of this. The transition to using the word "homeless" has resulted in transforming something we can't easily measure -- "drug addicted or mentally ill people being a public menace" -- into something that we can measure -- "people without a good living arrangement". Sure, the latter is important in a lot of ways too. And there h…

I'm really sick of people lumping homeless people in with "drug addicted or mentally ill people". There is a lot of sober hard working people that are homeless because they got caught out with some bad luck and don't have friends or relatives to fall back on. Once your homeless everything becomes much harder.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#228

Post by gotoeleven »

PaulHoule wrote: post #148
andrewla wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we have any numbers on the number of people that are in this system? I'm frankly curious if the numbers in the original article can effectively be completely explained by this system rather than the policies listed in the article. In the US the system broke down in the 50s and 60s and collapsed completely in the 70s and 80s due to bad treatment options and often very inhumane conditions and cases of misdiagnoses.…

That's a wrong chronology. Before the 1950s we did not have effective treatments for schizophrenia other than incarceration. In old books you read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catatonia being intractable, now it usually clears up in 15-30 minutes with benzodiazepine medication. In the 1950s we got the Phenothiazines which were the first hope for many patients, there has been a huge amount of progress since the…

I really don't understand society's attitudes here. Why is it more humane to give a psychotic person agency, resulting in them living in filth like an animal, dangerous to themselves and others, than to commit them to a mental hospital? If you let a baby or an old person wallow in their shit, it would be considered abuse. Why is this not abuse?

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#229

Post by lostlogin »

grahamplace wrote: post #217
andrewla wrote: post #92

Without digging too deep into the nature of the statistics they use, I'm a little skeptical of this. The transition to using the word "homeless" has resulted in transforming something we can't easily measure -- "drug addicted or mentally ill people being a public menace" -- into something that we can measure -- "people without a good living arrangement". Sure, the latter is important in a lot of ways too. And there h…

Charles Lehman was on the Ezra Klein show recently[1] and had a useful definition for disorder, re: your first point. This may not be exactly the quote, but it was something like "Disorder is domination of public space for private purposes." As an SF resident, that really resonated; day-to-day quality of life here (for me, at least) feels much more impacted by that type of "disorder" than "homelessness" generally (ob…

> “Disorder is domination of public space for private purposes."

The first thought I had on reading this was ‘the world has a car disorder’.

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