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Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

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Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#371

Post by skirge »

crazyeights wrote: post #193
MichaelZuo wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who gets to determine the minimum threshold? And how will they enforce it?

Most people have little to no money, hence being without the ability to afford housing. You’re obviously not familiar with the social security system we have in place now. The only thing lacking is the inspiration to escape that system as Medicaid and social security insurance don’t allow for any savings so participants are frightened to lose the only thing keeping them and their family alive. Provide them with housi…

anyone can hide and claim they have no money, better to provide housing to good students with good job. We can call it I don't know, "credit score" or something like that.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#372

Post by skirge »

dh2022 wrote: post #252
MichaelZuo wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who gets to determine the minimum threshold? And how will they enforce it?

Enter now a bureaucracy who will ask the right questions, involve all the stakeholders, foster an environment of trust and cooperation, coordinate across organizations, proactively address any issues, create a people-first strategy, etc... Meanwhile nothing gets built....

or just bribe the person who is assigning flats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v7eSQJWxc4, because this system was already tried.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#373

Post by jillesvangurp »

giantg2 wrote: post #319
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. >…

"Finland has the highest rates of detention per 100 000 inhabitants, about 214 compared with 93 in the UK ..." Wow those numbers seem high if they're counting unique people and not admissions and re-admisisons.

I think there is a bit of nuance to this. The UK also has about 500 or so homeless people per 100000 inabitants. In the US the number of people in prisons is about that number per 100K. On top of their huge homeless problem.

There is the brutal reality that the climate in Finland and being homeless are not a great combination in the winter. And the summers are short. Getting people off the streets saves lives. If it's -20 during the night you can either lock people up or collect their corpses in the morning. Most people will seek shelter by themselves or not reject shelter when it is offered to them. But people with serious psychiatric issues, that are maybe a bit self destructive and under the influence of alcohol or drugs are going to have trouble doing rational things. So, yes, Finland does the pragmatic thing here. I don't have good statistics on this but I bet there are more than few corpses being collected in the US and the UK on a yearly basis.

I've lived in Finland for a few years. It's a friendly place that is mostly safe and nice to be. There's a level of pragmatism and compassion with much of what they do that other countries could learn from. Including the business of incarcerating people. The US and UK are maybe a bit lacking with that. Finland has prisons and psychiatric wards (not the same thing) of course. But people don't stay in those endlessly. Prison sentences are generally short, and rehabilitation is something they put a lot of effort on. Most crime there relates to people doing stupid shit because they are drunk, mentally ill, etc. The solution usually includes addressing those issues after they serve their shortish prison terms. And with some level of success.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#375

Post by bdowling »

wpm wrote: post #330
bdowling wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homeless people want to live in cities, for all the reasons other people want to live in cities. In cities, affordable housing is extremely expensive. For example, in Santa Monica, California, an affordable housing project can cost over $1 million per unit. https://www.surfsantamonica.com/ssm_site/the_lookout/news/Ne...

They don't cost $1M a unit just because. The article you posted highlights a number of reasons it was as expensive as it was, many of them policy choices that could be undone with the stroke of a pen and a round of votes. There is nothing about building housing in cities that makes it that expensive other than the regulations, many of which could use a re-think or a re-scope. Otherwise, what's Finland's secret? Are t…

I agree. The affordable housing costs $1M per unit because that is the market price for constructing any housing in those areas.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#376

Post by bdowling »

epistasis wrote: post #329
bdowling wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homeless people want to live in cities, for all the reasons other people want to live in cities. In cities, affordable housing is extremely expensive. For example, in Santa Monica, California, an affordable housing project can cost over $1 million per unit. https://www.surfsantamonica.com/ssm_site/the_lookout/news/Ne...

The reason it's expensive is or because the US is bigger. It's because the people in cities want to keep people out so they make it very expensive. Which in turn fuels homelessness. The desire to exclude, the refusal to permit enough housing, and the rejection of density are the fundamental cause. The scale of the US has nothing to do with it. It's merely a cultural choice by a prior generation that younger generatio…

The answer is to just build a lot more housing. Increasing the housing stock by 10% everywhere would be a good start. If there is so much housing available that buyers don’t get into bidding wars and landlords have to struggle to find tenants, then prices will come down.

Why doesn’t this happen? Because developers will have to do more work for less money.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#377

Post by Ekaros »

thereisnospork wrote: post #315
brailsafe wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In our current, over-regulated market: yes absolutely. In a healthy market, cost of low-end housing should approach the cost of labor + raw material (plus necessary overhead for e.g. inspections, plus a reasonable risk-adjusted return on construction). Cost of materials/labor simply slides/scales with additional stories / more difficult terrain. Land/space, while not an infinite resource, is hardly limited on the sca…

Also in healthy market bottom end should be housing build decades ago and already fully paid for. Now it would mean large mid-rises. But still, entirely reasonable standard of living when you are not been brainwashed into needing expensive wasteful single family buildings.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#378

Post by CalRobert »

yieldcrv wrote: post #361
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. >…

Its not a single thing In San Francisco studies of their populations revealed lots of segments of homeless people The one that stuck out to me the most was the most distressing: people that were homeless within last 12 months of the study, a huge percent of them were just people that left a relationship. That was a housing price problem. I knew so many people that had broken up but still living together, and its craz…

I always wondered if housing affordability was the real reason for falling divorce rates.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#379

Post by MobiusHorizons »

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…

From what I have been able to learn from several community mental health friends, there are a lot of causes of homelessness. There are certainly nontrivial numbers of people struggling with mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, or combinations of both in public on our streets. This tends to be very visible and off putting. Housing is only one of many challenges these people are facing, but there are also lots of services beyond housing aimed at this population. There are also plenty of people who are dealing with setbacks and just need to get back on their feet and rebuild. This population is much less visible most of the time, because they are much less likely to be inconveniencing people in public spaces. Sometimes they have more of a social network to tap and can stay off of the streets. For this group, cost of housing and availability of work are the primary issues. I don’t have a good sense of the size of this population relative to other populations though.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#380

Post by tacitusarc »

cyberax wrote: post #307
brailsafe wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

We have a natural experiment: Minneapolis vs. Madison. Minneapolis abolished the single-family zoning and parking requirements in 2018. And it worked, developers swarmed the city like vultures attracted to carrion. Madison did no such nonsense. Can you guess the impact of these policies on housing costs? The house price growth in Minneapolis _accelerated_, just like in the nearby Madison. Here are the price growth ch…

I defy the data [1].

There is too much complexity in that single example and the law of supply/demand has been proven too frequently for it to not make sense that increasing demand to meet supply would reduce cost.

1. For clarity, this phrasing is from here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vrHRcEDMjZcx5Yfru/i-defy-the...

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