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Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

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Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#631

Post by skrebbel »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #619
skrebbel wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was told by locals that it was explicitly to keep homeless people from dying. A few streets in the center were heated. Like, not warm in any way, but it was kinda weird to walk into the center and suddenly all the snow was gone. Just warm enough for it all to thaw. Note, this was 20 years ago, maybe it all changed, either the system or the reasons. I can imagine that if you have a zero homeless strategy, it's weird…

> I was told by locals that it was explicitly My experience with Finnish people is that it can be hard to tell when they are joking and they have a dark sense of humor. Great poker players too.

True! That said, I wasn't fooled. I'm very good at Finns. It might be incorrect but they believed it for sure :-)

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#632

Post by seanmcdirmid »

SequoiaHope wrote: post #630
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Consider NFTs. They are a speculative asset with no recurring revenue attached. Housing isn't comparable to NFTs, all logic goes out the door when something doesn't have intrinsic value. > In the dry economic sense of “production” yes, but at the expense of dismantling communities. Yes: whenever cities devote resources to "clean up" a neighborhood, they are also doing this. Slums are ugly, but they are also a sourc…

Yeah I was trying to reason about the affects of speculation but it turns out that of course there’s plenty of research on the topic, and the affects are broad and complex. Unfortunately I don’t have time to read this right now but you may find it interesting: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24058... For public housing, there is also the approach taken by Singapore. This article discusses both…

The Singapore model only works because they distinguish between citizens and residents. You can’t just move to Singapore one day and buy into public housing the next. It is Austria on an even more narrow scale.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#633

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#634

Post by [deleted] »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #618
throwawayq3423 wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That can mean any number of things. A lot of people move to LA to "make it" with no plan B, they didn't have a plan B where they came from either. California has 30% of the US homeless population, but 11% of it's total population. It is dramatically disproportional, period. https://shou.senate.ca.gov/sites/shou.senate.ca.gov/files/Ho...

California has the most expensive housing in America. That is the primary reason for its larger homeless population.

[deleted]

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#635

Post by throwawayq3423 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #618
throwawayq3423 wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That can mean any number of things. A lot of people move to LA to "make it" with no plan B, they didn't have a plan B where they came from either. California has 30% of the US homeless population, but 11% of it's total population. It is dramatically disproportional, period. https://shou.senate.ca.gov/sites/shou.senate.ca.gov/files/Ho...

California has the most expensive housing in America. That is the primary reason for its larger homeless population.

That doesn't explain how 11% of the population could supply 30% of the homeless. That's impossible if it was a self-contained statistic.

I think housing prices does make the homeless problem worse, but it didn't create it. Good climate and numerous public services did.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#636

Post by throwawayq3423 »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #621
throwawayq3423 wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxes have made our modern societies possible, so yes they are often the answer to a problem. The American insistence taxes are wrong or "theft" is a malign view that, if adopted widespread, would destroy the ability of most democracies to function.

So if a little of something is good, more must be better!!

No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#637

Post by bryanlarsen »

throwawayq3423 wrote: post #635
bryanlarsen wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California has the most expensive housing in America. That is the primary reason for its larger homeless population.

That doesn't explain how 11% of the population could supply 30% of the homeless. That's impossible if it was a self-contained statistic. I think housing prices does make the homeless problem worse, but it didn't create it. Good climate and numerous public services did.

> impossible

Finland got to 0 by giving everybody a place to live, not by kicking the homeless out of their country.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#638

Post by andrewla »

MobiusHorizons wrote: post #379
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 se…

I don't think of this in terms of "causes of homelessness". These are different categories.

The "visible" homeless, ironically, are extremely difficult to measure. They often don't carry or won't present identification, they often have no family or support structure, they often make little to no attempt to use services.

The "invisible" homeless are the opposite, and can be easily measured, because they have all of those things.

When you see numbers trying to measure homeless people, it will almost always be the "invisible" homeless. Sending people out with clickers to count the homeless people on the street is nearly impossible, so the best we can do is various sampling approaches with huge margins of error.

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#639

Post by andrewla »

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. >…

The timeframes are fuzzy, but it looks like the current Finnish mental health regime was enabled by a law passed in 1990. Since that point, given the 5.6M population times the 214/100,000 rate, we get a total of ~12,000 people committed.

The graph in the linked article shows a reduction in homelessness from about 17,000 to about 4,000, a reduction of approximately 13,000 people.

So I think it's fair to say that Finland's mental health changes have been responsible for the overwhelming majority in the reduction of Finland's homelessness problem. This is consistent with the point that I was trying to make elsewhere in this thread [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42660372

Re: Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

#640

Post by toss1 »

marssaxman wrote: post #579
toss1 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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…

> Moreover, saying that zoning in locales like this should be changed to accommodate low-income high-density housing is just stupid. It's a good thing I am not talking about locales like yours, then; unless your small town has a demographically-improbable homelessness problem, akin to the ones you see in big cities whose history of inadequate development due to strict zoning regulation has created a persistent housin…

>>unless your small town has a demographically-improbable homelessness problem...nothing I said pertains to you.

Well, the current town has no homelessness problem, but there ARE most definitely laws in place (Massachusetts 40B) that specifically seeks to override local zoning and mandate low-income housing in ALL towns.

So, while we agree that what you said should not pertain to me, the people making the actual laws most definitely apply it to me.

I don't know why there is the disconnect, perhaps some misguided "it must apply to everyone everywhere" cop-out to avoid the actual complexity, but the fact is that the rhetoric is very destructive.

>>defining "the character of a neighborhood" entirely in terms of money.

The DEFINITION is "quiet, low traffic, wildlife, gardens, etc.".

The COST is defined in money as well as work.

The point is that those things are not free — they cost a lot of work and yes, money in both taxes and improvements and maintenance. More importantly, it is not cost-free to decide to destroy those valuable things. Especially when the result will not help the people you are intending to help.

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