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

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#291

Post by brailsafe » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 2:14 AM UTC

mrkstu wrote: post #221

Qwertious wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Yep. One might ask what happens if you don't have a functioning economy? Well, this kind of state. A massive failure for anyone but those who don't have theirs.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#292

Post by simoncion » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 2:14 AM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #279

gotoeleven wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Another part of it is the (somewhat justified) worry that "inconvenient" people will declared mentally incompetent and effectively imprisoned in mental hospitals (or -worse- mental hospitals that know they're being used to jail "inconvenient" people, so they don't really bother to provide actual treatment).

IMO, I'd rather have to mitigate that hazard if it meant we got actual, effective treatment for folks with super fucked-up brains than have what we have today in the US... but I'm in no position to change the country's policies.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#293

Post by brailsafe » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 2:17 AM UTC

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.

Cost of housing is influenced by much more than labor and raw material.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#294

Post by timewizard » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 2:17 AM UTC

gotoeleven wrote: post #247

timewizard wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" does not automatically mean "good, moral, and upstanding lifestyle." To the extent that people have a natural right to exist and society does not I think it should be contingent on administrators to prove the standard they're applying is actually reasonable and non discriminatory.

What about babies and children? What about enfeebled old people? Clearly some people can't take care of themselves. Presumably you don't think babies and alzheimers patients should be left to roam free. Why are severely mentally ill people any different?

Is there something unreasonable or discriminatory in taking care of children and elderly in need? I'm not sure what I said that would lead you to this uncharitable conclusion. Of course I don't think they should "roam free," but that doesn't mean I think your comparison is fair. Are mentally ill people automatically feeble to the point of requiring full guardianship?

If you're not quite sure what I'm getting at then you should examine the practice of institutionalization that used to occur in the United States and all the many great reasons we have not continued with it. Or the many famous examples of writers attempting to become involuntarily committed so they can detail just how difficult it is to get out and prove to these often unaccountable organizations that you are not, in fact, "severely mentally ill."

I wonder about the jurisprudence of other nations that use these practices in ways which a US citizen might find decidedly uncomfortable, as was pointed out by the OP, particularly when it comes to the nature of involuntary patient /treatment/ and not just simple social separations for the good of the community.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#295

Post by brailsafe » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 2:20 AM UTC

Tiktaalik wrote: post #280

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…

> 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 Va…

True, on all points, but it wasn't just him, it's been a decades long process of multiple parts of the economy failing imo. One does wonder though how things would be if we simply cancelled zoning and other needlessly bureaucratic development restrictions in the 80s, and enabled automatically correcting policy that was outside the hands of both property owners and politicians. Every time I see an anti tower sign in east van it makes me want to throw a rock through that person's window, and the fact this tension exists on a local level is ridiculous.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#296

Post by sugarplant » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 2:21 AM UTC

sonofhans wrote: post #243

pavlov wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the question you’re asking here? I’m Finnish and I have a close family member with a severe mental illness, so I should be reasonably well positioned to answer your question. But it doesn’t make any sense to me. How does any of this relate to homelessness? To get people off the streets, you give them a place to live. Then you can start solving their other problems. It’s common sense.

In some US popular culture “drug addict” is code for “weak or immoral person.” There’s very little empathy or understanding of people who are much less fortunate; there’s plenty of evidence in this thread. This misguided moral compass outweighs even sensible practices like harm reduction. People would rather see junkies die on the street of hepatitis than give them free housing and needles. It satisfies some primal n…

this is such a dishonest characterization. the issue people have with free needles is that they end up everywhere but a sharps container. they throw loose needles in every park, walking path, bus stop, etc. in the entire city. my city has had this issue for years now.

you should use some of the superhuman empathy you have to explore other perspectives on the issue. even for just a minute.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#297

Post by simoncion » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 2:27 AM UTC

vasco wrote: post #192

mmooss wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming others share your perspective and understanding. > 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". > the former is the actual problem that we care about The word homeless is pretty old, not someth…

> I spend a lot of time in cities and know others who do too. None feel menaced by people who are unhoused - why would that be menacing? - or high. High people generally don't know you are there, and are easily avoided. I've had zero problems; I don't know of anyone else who has This is completely detached from reality. I find it hard to believe you are being truthful unless you're doing some sort of gotcha where you…

> This is completely detached from reality. I find it hard to believe you are being truthful unless you're doing some sort of gotcha where you carry a gun or are some sort of jiu-jitsu master.

As someone who has lived in San Francisco, CA for the past long-ass while, I agree with the paragraph that you're objecting to. I own no firearms, and can hardly throw a pillow, let alone a person.

Maybe try, like, talking to more homeless folks? Or at least observing them from a distance? They're folks like anyone else, and most of them (like most folks) simply don't want police attention, so doing anything more to regular folks than asking for spare change isn't in their repertoire. Honestly, I'm a LOT safer in the parts of the city where there are folks out on the street than I am places where there's noone. [0]

[0] The only times I've gotten mugged or robbed were when I was in the fancy parts of town where there's noone on the street to provide assistance... and my assailants were groups of folks who looked to be doing well for themselves, rather than rough-looking folks looking for cash for a score.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#298

Post by PaulHoule » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 2:37 AM UTC

simoncion wrote: post #292

PaulHoule wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Another part of it is the (somewhat justified) worry that "inconvenient" people will declared mentally incompetent and effectively imprisoned in mental hospitals (or -worse- mental hospitals that know they're being used to jail "inconvenient" people, so they don't really bother to provide actual treatment). IMO, I'd rather have to mitigate that hazard if it meant we got actual, effective treatment for folks with supe…

The Soviet Union might be the only place where people were routinely diagnosed with schizotypy.

On the other hand I'm still a touch angry that it was missed in a psych eval I had in school that, I'm told, was a really superior psych eval for a kid in the 1970s. (Kohut's Analysis of the Self was a major discovery for me when I did a round of research trying to understand an crisis at work circa 2006 but I missed the literature connecting his work to schizotypy in the 1980s; a really good monograph came out in 2013 which fell into my hands a year ago... and I think "now it all makes sense" but "I lost so much time") It's hard to come out because (i) so much about it is offputting, and (ii) I find schizotypes on YouTube to be so annoying I can't stand to listen to them for more than 30 seconds. Those of you who think there's something weird about what I write here are right... It's what you get when you mix verbal intelligence too high to measure with a good measure of line noise. At least I find it easy to emphasize with people with schizophrenia and schizoaffective because "thought disorder" doesn't seem so strange to me.

I was at risk but dodged the bullet to get schizopherenia but I worry about psychotic dementia.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#299

Post by retrac » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 2:43 AM UTC

friend_Fernando wrote: post #261

verteu wrote: post #220

They also do a lot of compulsory psychiatric detention: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychiatric-bulletin... > Finnish mental health legislation takes a medical approach to compulsory measures, emphasising the need for treatment of psychiatric patients over civil liberties concerns... Finland has the highest rates of detention per 100 000 inhabitants, about 214 compared with 93 in the UK and 11 in Italy. >…

> I should mention that I've seen fairly convincing cross-sectional evidence that homelessness is more related to the housing market than mental illness This is absolutely the right diagnosis. For instance, SROs used to be very affordable.[1] Placing someone into housing was well within the means of local governments and non-profits. In Coppola's 1974 movie The Conversation, a large portion of the titular dialogue is…

Fifty years ago in Ontario, Canada if you were a single adult destitute with no income you would be eligible for general welfare which would pay about $180 a month, when the average rent on 1 bedroom apartment in Toronto was about $150 a month. Today, an adult in the same position gets about $800 while rent is $1300. It used to be possible to afford (slummy) housing at market rates, even for the very poor. Now it is not. It can be viewed either as a housing price issue or an income inadequacy issue.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#300

Post by cyberax » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 2:44 AM UTC

simoncion wrote: post #286

cyberax wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The result? I'm looking at 2 bedroom apartments, and they are 1000$ cheaper than they were 3 years ago when I first moved here. Rent has gone down and continues to go down. I'm seeing studio apartments in the middle of the city renting out for 800$ now! That's not a result of new construction. It's a result of the Austin population declining in absolute numbers: 978,763 in 2019, 975,418 in 2022. It bounced back a b…

Honey, you can't math. That 2023 number is roughly a thousand larger than that 2019 number. The changes to all of the numbers you're quoting are in the noise as far as considering changes to the cost of housing.

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