Given a place to live, Finland’s homeless were better able to deal with problems

There are shelters. They are not always safe for everyone, so homeless might choose to sleep in stairways of buildings. Or recycling paper containers.

There are fewer homeless people here than in many other countries. But that they wouldn't exist is just not true.

The Utah success article was written in 2017, in 2022 its like that never happened. https://www.kuer.org/business-economy/2022-10-12/salt-lake-c... and they have a plan to take it serious again https://www.ksl.com/article/50599199/utah-unveils-aggressive...

Are you justifying having homeless people as long as the climate "allows" for it?

First article I found said the SLC program was successful for 95% of those placed in a home. IIRC, the housing first program in Seattle was similarly effective.

I agree that it’s not as exhaustive as some of the more boastful claims, but I think the better question to ask is why these programs have been cut in favor of far less effective and far more expensive ones.

I lived in Finland for a while. Being homeless in that country is pretty hard core in the winter. Which is a reason that sheltering people there is not a nice to have; you either shelter them or you collect their dead bodies in the morning. It's that simple. Places like Helsinki never had a large community of homeless people to begin with (natural selection). But it has plenty of social issues of course. Alcoholism is a big problem for example and there probably are lots of issues with drug usage and mental health as well. However, it's not a country with a lot of illegal immigration, or a lot refugees with ambiguous legal status. I.e. the vast majority of problematic people are all citizens that have full coverage under the excellent social system. So, they are insured and probably are entitled to some form of income.

And the locals are very pragmatic about it not being desirable to have drunk homeless people passing out and freezing to death in the winter. So, they never had a huge problem with homeless people to begin with and what little homeless people they had were take care off via shelters and other solutions already.

The "innovation" in Finland was realizing that simply providing proper housing to these people is a pragmatic alternative that actually improves their situation while lowering overall cost at the same time. Shelters cost money and they have to be staffed and when they fill up you need to spend money on emergency shelters, which costs more money. And shelters perpetuate the problem. So, providing housing lowers cost and you get a meaningful percentage of people to a level where they stop being a problem. Which frees up more resources to deal with the remaining people more effectively. And it's nice to see people get out of such a situation. Win win.

That's definitely something other countries can learn from.