Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#271

Post by usr1106 » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 1:24 AM UTC

j45 wrote: post #189

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…

Finland has figured out a number of thing it seems other than homelessness. Their education system is pretty interesting, and their policing system has some approaches to interacting with the community as well. If I can find the links I'll share. Skepticism is fine, but it shouldn't be a reason to discount or dismiss something, nor does it mean to accept it. Take it in as a data point.

Finland elected the most right-leaning government in the history of the country in 2023. A lot of the education, social, and healthcare system is facing deep cuts at the moment. Economy has not recovered from the fall of Nokia around 2010, so needs for social services would actually be growing.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#272

Post by sudosysgen » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 1:30 AM UTC

toss1 wrote: post #71

marssaxman wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your skepticism! The proposition that rates of homelessness are primarily driven by housing costs has actually been well supported in research - this Pew article contains many useful references: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/... As per econ 101, high prices are a function of scarcity relative to demand: we can reasonably claim that regulations which restrict housing developm…

>>which is a polite way of saying "we don't want apartment-dwelling poor people coming to live near us". NO, it is most definitely NOT that. It is overwhelmingly exactly what people say it is — maintaining the character of a neighborhood that everyone there has paid higher cost of entry, cost of taxes, and cost and time of maintenance and upgrades to maintain. Don't make claims in areas where you have zero knowledge…

The groceries and convenience stores and so on will naturally appear once density increases if they are allowed to. It's a non issue.

I'm sympathetic to your plight seeing the character of your neighborhood change if public housing is built, but society has to balance it against the plight of people who are forced to change their neighborhood due to poverty, and on the balance their plight is simply worse than yours.

Unlike them, in such a scenario, you get to sell your land whose value now increased and go somewhere else with similar attribute.

Any society that cannot make this obvious decision to inconvenience some to save others is doomed to failure.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#273

Post by Aachen » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 1:30 AM UTC

carlosjobim wrote: post #185

peab wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it's cultural, it can be fixed. Culture can change and can be changed by choice

What if culture springs from genetic inheritance? How do you change that?

Are you wondering whether some humans are better than others?! Eh, I don't have the research to know that's not the case, but this seems like an extraordinary hypothesis

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#274

Post by ttkari » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 1:39 AM UTC

justin66 wrote: post #117

philip1209 wrote: post #4

Worth pointing out that Finland is one of the most ethnically homogeneous societies in Europe - only ~10% of the population is of foreign origin and background [1]. So, like Japan, it's easier to have a high-trust society if you eschew immigration. Edit: Just to be clear, I'm very pro-immigration. I just think that studying rich homogeneous societies doesn't result in many useful takeaways for countries like the USA.…

> Worth pointing out that Finland is one of the most ethnically homogeneous societies in Europe - only ~10% of the population is of foreign origin and background Meh. They've got two different official languages. It's not as ethnically uniform as a lot of other European countries.

FWIW, the share of Swedish (the other official language) speakers in Finland is about 5%.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#275

Post by Ylpertnodi » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 1:40 AM UTC

changoplatanero wrote: post #251

h_tbob wrote: post #250

My problem is this: Being homeless is not inherently wrong. But I feel when a society makes camping on common ground a crime - like native Americans did, it owes it to them to a) give them land to camp on or b) give them housing. It shouldn’t be a crime to sleep, ever. It horrifies me that the “conservative” Supreme Court could deny the most fundamental right to existence, literally jailing people for sleeping.

It's not going to stay common ground for very long if anyone can just set up camp there and claim it for themselves.

I agree with, but maybe someone, or a group of people, could make a legally-defined difference between 'sleeping', and 'camping'. Perhaps they could start by using different words, plainly understood by most - or, easily researched, for each of the different (perhaps) activities.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#276

Post by dinkumthinkum » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 1:40 AM UTC

dyauspitr wrote: post #70

nostromo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how every westerner visits Japan and comes home thinking we can "solve crime" or "solve homelessness" or "have clean subway stations." Japan's culture is why those things are the way they are. It's not due to funding. It's because people raise their children differently than we do in the west. The family's obligations are also greater. And, yes, there are homeless people in Japan. But they typically are in…

It’s definitely cultural. I’ve been to every major city in the US and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a homeless Indian. Some groups have broken familial cultures that does not churn out good citizens. Did the US in the past play a major role in breaking down those groups and surrounding them with abject poverty that makes it hard to escape from? Absolutely.

You say its cultural ... ok ... then you say you have never seen "a homeless Indian" ... ok ... Does Indian culture exist in India and is there virtually no homelessness in India?

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#277

Post by dinkumthinkum » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 1:42 AM UTC

elevatedastalt wrote: post #180

mmooss wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

India is overwhelmed with poverty far beyond anything I've seen in the US. The people of India started from even worse poverty and have generally made progress (especially since recently-deceased PM Singh). I'm not criticizing. But holding forth India's culture [1] as a model of preventing homelessness is pretty incredible. [1] India may have the largest, most diverse collection of 'cultures' within one national bord…

OP is referring to a homeless Indian in the US, not in India.

Do they have a vastly different culture?

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#278

Post by dinkumthinkum » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 1:46 AM UTC

wesselbindt wrote: post #108

nostromo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how every westerner visits Japan and comes home thinking we can "solve crime" or "solve homelessness" or "have clean subway stations." Japan's culture is why those things are the way they are. It's not due to funding. It's because people raise their children differently than we do in the west. The family's obligations are also greater. And, yes, there are homeless people in Japan. But they typically are in…

[flagged]

What genocide? I'm not aware of genocide that is currently occurring that the US is funding. The US is not bombing children.

How would just giving people houses solve homelessness? Do you know what happens to places that house homeless people? How long would this solve the problem for these people? This just seems like anti-Americanism with no quantitative grounding.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#279

Post by PaulHoule » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 1:54 AM UTC

gotoeleven wrote: post #228

PaulHoule wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Part of it is the burden on the caregivers.

It can be exasperating to care for an elderly person with dementia, they can range from very agreeable to rather disagreeable but most of them have had enough experience with caring for people and being cared for that they can have some empathy with their caregiver -- even if they have a hard time remembering it.

People with serious mental illness have disturbances in those relationships (remember how Freud asked "tell me about your mother?") and are much harder. And if they want to kill you because they think you are something other than what you are they're more able to do it.

Communities that adopted "housing first" early on had great success with it. In the fentanyl age there's a lot of fear that a volunteer or someone who isn't paid nearly enough will open a door from time to time to discover a dead body.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#280

Post by Tiktaalik » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 1:59 AM UTC

peab wrote: post #83

thePhytochemist wrote: post #50

This issue is very relevant for me since I have been homeless since May. It's been a bad run of being a target of criminal activity, unemployment and just running out of money during my job search. I cope with a mix of volunteering, overpriced housing (think $1200/month for a room in a rural area before I ran out of money for that), catsitting, house-sitting, staying with family and sleeping in my ancient car. Althou…

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…

> bringing too many people into the country via immigration

The housing situation has clearly severely declined post pandemic at the same time that immigration was restarted and increased, but I gotta point out that Vancouver has had a severe homeless crisis my entire life, long, long before this recent government changed immigration rates or even came to power.

As far back as 2007 I was reading articles about how Vancouver was net losing the sort of affordable housing that those most at risk of homelessness depended on. Unsurprisingly the amount of homeless in Vancouver has continued to increase.

https://thetyee.ca/News/2007/07/10/SRO-Losses/print.html

But you're absolutely correct that the core of this problem is a severe lack of building. Both a lack of construction of market product and below market publicly owned housing. Building more homes is the solution to get our way out of this crisis and end homelessness.

If there is any real villain here to blame IMO it is Jean Chretien, who with the severe austerity budget of 1993 completely got the Federal government out of all social housing development and building of housing plunged to near nil for decades.

The chart from this article is remarkable. https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/04/22/Why-Cant-We-Build-Lik...