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

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#461

Post by lifestyleguru » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 2:01 PM UTC

skirge wrote: post #460

lifestyleguru wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither what you mention is working in reality, sorry. Cheap workforce? Yeah you will be exploited physically, and paid something or rather nothing. Social benefits? These are usurped by various professional groups and institutions are plagued with nepotism. Poland delegated its homelessness to Germany and Netherlands while it's pretending to be a state with 5% unemployment and without housing crisis. Your attitude i…

1 house built by grandfather, surrounded by 4 empty houses. No housing crisis, only people looking for something better they already have, preferably free money.

> surrounded by 4 empty houses

They'd happily sell but for 1mln PLN.

> people looking for something better they already have, preferably free money

They'd rent but they are also aggressively sly, dismissing every perfect tenant. In the end they indeed end up renting to another non-paying sly who will tell them exactly what they want to hear.

At this point of the real estate the market, it's the owners who want free money.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#462

Post by pavlov » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 2:01 PM UTC

So many people in these comments are arguing some form of:

“Let’s first figure out if the homelessness is actually the person’s own fault. If we can really be confident that they’re repentant and sober, then we should perhaps consider helping them find housing.”

This is the approach that Finland had in the 1950s! And it didn’t work. Hundreds of young WWII veterans were dying under the bridges after years in the streets drinking illegal booze (and many also abusing stronger substances, since e.g. amphetamine was given to soldiers during the war). Post-war Finland was not some socialist wonderland but a hard, poor, unforgiving place.

Finland’s U-turn on treating homelessness came after the dismal failure that left so many of these deeply traumatized men and women to die. For the past decades, the policy has been to try to get everyone off the streets into safe and private housing, and then sort out the rest. And the numbers show it has worked.

Many of America’s homeless are also war veterans, just like 1950s Finland. They deserve better.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#463

Post by euroderf » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 2:03 PM UTC

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #415

friend_Fernando wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Ooh, as an American involved lightly in real estate who relocated to Suomi a few years ago I always love this topic. Let me ramble. It's worth pointing out that, on a country-wide level, Finnish housing prices have been remarkably stagnant for the last 20-30 years when compared to e.g. the United States or most other European countries. That is not true of the cities, obviously, and cities are where all the work is,…

> the "middle of nowhere".

*"snow-where"

That being said, yes Helsinki has been a magnet for employment at least since the Nokia boom years, but its population has ebbed at least once in lulls since then when rental demand cannot meet overpriced supply.

Outlying regions do have a big overstock of housing. Even with low rents, I don't think you can keep any even moderately ambitious young person out in the sticks and away from Helsinki/Tampere/Oulu. Long ago one might think that maybe the country's policy of universal high-speed internet coverage might counter that tendency, but... no.

FWIW some stats on population age by region here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/529458/average-age-of-po...

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#464

Post by lumb63 » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 2:09 PM UTC

retrac wrote: post #299

friend_Fernando wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I live near Boston. Part of the housing supply issue here is the mandate for a certain amount of “affordable housing” in all new developments (I forget the percentage, on the order of 10-20% of new units?). This results in either housing not being built, since the developer would not be able to earn enough on the sale of the building due to below-market rent payments, or the non-“affordable housing” units have to pay above-market rates to subsidize/offset the below-market-rate units.

This drives me nuts, because the goal should be for 100% of housing to be affordable. Stifling development or shifting the unaffordability to different areas of the income distribution do not solve the problem. More housing has to get built. This is a supply-demand issue, as anyone with basic economic knowledge can tell you. There are two ways out: people relocate, or more housing gets built.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#465

Post by ghaff » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 2:12 PM UTC

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #415

friend_Fernando wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Ooh, as an American involved lightly in real estate who relocated to Suomi a few years ago I always love this topic. Let me ramble. It's worth pointing out that, on a country-wide level, Finnish housing prices have been remarkably stagnant for the last 20-30 years when compared to e.g. the United States or most other European countries. That is not true of the cities, obviously, and cities are where all the work is,…

A lot of that probably applies to the US as well. There's no shortage of relatively inexpensive housing but a lot of people just don't want to live in those places for a variety of reasons. Ask a lot of the people here: it's cold and snows, it's not welcoming to people like me, there aren't a lot of good local jobs, there's a lot of crime...

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#466

Post by jimmydddd » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 2:20 PM UTC

lumb63 wrote: post #464

retrac wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I live near Boston. Part of the housing supply issue here is the mandate for a certain amount of “affordable housing” in all new developments (I forget the percentage, on the order of 10-20% of new units?). This results in either housing not being built, since the developer would not be able to earn enough on the sale of the building due to below-market rent payments, or the non-“affordable housing” units have to pay…

** "...the goal should be for 100% of housing to be affordable."

In a world where everyone had housing, I wouldn't mind if Taylor Swift built a house for herself that wasn't "affordable."

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#467

Post by oezi » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 2:24 PM 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.

Housing is an inelastic commodity. Increased demand will take considerable time to lead to additional supply.

Over-supply is even harder to reduce because housing is amortized over 20 or more years.

Developers are well aware of the cyclic nature of the housing market and thus reluctant to invest in many cases.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#468

Post by itake » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 2:29 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #462

So many people in these comments are arguing some form of: “Let’s first figure out if the homelessness is actually the person’s own fault. If we can really be confident that they’re repentant and sober, then we should perhaps consider helping them find housing.” This is the approach that Finland had in the 1950s! And it didn’t work. Hundreds of young WWII veterans were dying under the bridges after years in the stree…

you're not wrong, but I think the underlying premise is:

"We have limited resources. Lets identify the most impactful places for our $$."

Presumably, people with social disorders will be much more expensive to house than someone that is more recently functioning in our society.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#469

Post by Symbiote » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 2:29 PM UTC

lifestyleguru wrote: post #403

yieldcrv wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes this is absolutely the case also in Europe. In Berlin or Munich you're not going to rent anything as a single person. In Warsaw or Prague you'll not afford to rent anything on one local income (assuming you even have a job there currently).

It's not too difficult to rent a room in a shared house/apartment as a single person in these cities, regardless of age.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#470

Post by squigz » Sat, Jan 11, 2025, 2:31 PM UTC

verelo wrote: post #313

retrac wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fifty years ago Montreal was the business centre of Canada, now that’s Toronto. That $800 rate might actually be more affordable in a less business oriented city, or even Montreal itself since it’s seen a lot of decline in that time. Having said that, there’s zero debate rents are out of control. I own a triplex and every time a unit turns over and i do my research on rent i get a bit shocked. I’ve found myself legit…

I'd be shocked if you could find $800 rent in any city in Ontario, business-oriented or not.