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Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

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Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#581

Post by mmooss »

Boogie_Man wrote: post #195
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'll decide without the slightest moral compunction: If you're addicted to fentanyl and living on the street you're getting involuntarily committed.

But you complain about fictive homeless people attacking you, with or without moral compunction.

What will you do with this person after you've committed them? It turns out that forcing people to detox isn't effective. Addiction is a disease with no reliable cure; you can't just give someone a round of antibiotics.

But if you think it's possible, demonstrate it to the world: Get yourself addicted, then detox, and you should be fine!

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#582

Post by tyingq »

rayiner wrote: post #494
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. >…

Wow. Finland’s medical detention rate of 214 per 100,000 is on the same order of magnitude as the U.S. incarceration rate of 541 per 100,000. I wonder how many imprisonments in the US could be addressed by mental illness detention.

There's a chart in this whitepaper where you see how they may have shifted from mental hospitals to jail/prison when US policy around that changed in the 1970's.

https://freopp.org/whitepapers/reimagining-the-policy-approa...

Scroll down to "The Homeless Have Moved from Hospitals to Prisons"

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#583

Post by CaptainFever »

INTPenis wrote: post #241

I'm proud of all the socialist policies here in Sweden, and our neighbors. But a lot of times these things are posted as comparisons with the US, and let's get real, there is no comparison. The United States as a country is vastly different from any nordic european country. So stop holding these countries with insignificant populations up as beacons of light. I think the problem with the US is very clear to me as an…

In this case, does socialist mean "high amounts of government intervention" and capitalist mean "low amounts of government intervention"? I think it's important to be clear about such muddy terms.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#584

Post by epistasis »

lostlogin wrote: post #524
throw5959 wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, you have no idea what you're talking about. I lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union. You don't want to live like that.

It was massive turmoil for sure, but world didn’t end (I’m referencing your earlier comment, not downplaying the devastating fall). How would continual growth work? We will run out of everything.

Continual growth is possible in at least two ways:

1) standard sigmoids, which never stop growing yet are also finite

2) standard ecological growth, where growth is never ending but so is death. This is much more typical of systems like capitalism than sigmoids growth. New upstarts experience exponential growth for a whole, then peak, and then die.

Of course be careful of mentioning these standard scientific observations around those in the degrowth cult, as the cognitive dissonance may cause an unpleasant explosion.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#585

Post by [deleted] »

cyberax wrote: post #573
germinalphrase wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW: as a Minneapolis resident, my experience is that there is active hostility and grassroots rejection of adding dense housing in neighborhoods that are traditionally single family homes. I would be curious to see how much dense housing has actually been built post-2018 relative to the historical norm, as the small number of apartment buildings I've seen go up along light rail and buss corridors have fought tooth…

It'll get worse: https://minnesotareformer.com/2023/08/31/ending-minimum-park... The usual misery pushers are already celebrating the win.

[deleted]

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#586

Post by Symbiote »

lifestyleguru wrote: post #476
Symbiote wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How long into your life do you accept to share rooms and apartments? > It's not too difficult to rent a room in a shared house/apartment as a single person In Berlin or Munich absolutely not, even shared accommodation have some absurd castings. Some people really smell their advantage and squeeze every drop of humiliation they can.

Indefinitely, if you can't afford to live alone. It's obviously not something you'd want to do, but it's much better than being homeless.

I've shared a house with people in their 40s (or more) when I was in my 20s in London. I'm sure they would have preferred their own place, but it was much, much cheaper for them to share.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#587

Post by dinkumthinkum »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #455
dinkumthinkum wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are likely talking about aid to Israel, which then uses it to buy American weapons. Probably a bigger horror was 20 years ago when the US invaded Iraq, leading to something like half a million dead.

Oh, that’s not a genocide, if that’s what they think it is they should look the definition.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#588

Post by throwawayq3423 »

fsloth wrote: post #558
throwawayq3423 wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the result of being a small and rich country. The scale of these actions in a country like the US (Or India) would be impossibly expensive.

Finland rich? Not as such. Small and homogenous definetly (pop 5.6M). US is rich. Vastly richer than Finland. PPP GDP for US in 2023 was 73k $ and for Finland 64k $. The systems are quite different. But it’s not about total wealth as such. If we use GDP as rough back-of-the-envelope estimate (problematic I know!) us could implement similar system economically but politically probably not. The gini coefficient gives s…

Looks like you are confusing median / average. The US has more billionaires, and many many more desperately poor people than Finland does.

> us could implement similar system economically but politically probably not.

But they won't. Spending significant amounts of money on your poor is a decision made by politicians and society as a whole. Some countries choose to do it, some don't.

> But it’s not about country’s total wealth!

Again, the existence of more billionaires does not make a place rich. In fact it could prove destabilizing in the long term because billionaires use their money to lobby against policies for the poor.

The answer I suppose is that both Finland and US are rich by global standards, but the US has a middle class only because of policy decisions it made post WW2 (GI Act, housing, education, etc.) that are quickly eroding.

So yes, Finland is "richer" in the sense that a greater % of its population live better lives.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#589

Post by germinalphrase »

cyberax wrote: post #574
waveBidder wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those abolishments are way less intense than you're thinking. There's still a ton of restrictions that make building even the triplexes that they technically legalized actually get built. Things like floor/area ratios and setbacks, which make building dwellings that people want difficult. https://streets.mn/2023/10/24/mapping-minneapolis-duplexes-a...

The abolishments actually fundamentally changed Minneapolis: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/... Most of the new units are in massive multi-apartment buildings. And these buildings have a huge disproportionate impact on the quality of life. It's now going to be sliding into shittier and shittier conditions. More crime, more congestion, higher housing prices.

You live near one of these developments? Your reaction may be correct, but my experience has been that the density has brought amenities. A brewery, a cafe, and a good restaurant moved into vacant/underutilized spaces. My street hasn’t been had issues with long-term parkers. Crime’s no issue. IDK. My experience doesn’t align with your certainty.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#590

Post by asdf6969 »

mmooss wrote: post #131
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…

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…

Stop lying. I live in a big city and everyone agrees with him and knows exactly what he’s talking about. I’m not worried about the guys who want to sit around drinking on the sidewalk but almost every time I go outside there’s at least one of them screaming at pedestrians, yelling at nothing, blowing meth or crack fumes, etc.

If you don’t think it’s a problem then give me your address so I can yell at you through the window and poop on the sidewalk. Part and parcel of living in a big city, right?

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