A cautionary tale from the streets of San Francisco

“ A lot of progress has been made. We now have the lowest number of homeless. Our present government has decided that the rest of the homeless should be halved within the next four years and completely end by 2027”

So we’d need 5 years before even the most gang busters assessment could say if it was solved or not. And it seems to be because it was decided, not because that is what projections show will happen? So if the last 10% don’t co-operate, then what?

2) Finland has only 5.5 million people in a massive land area, and one of the lowest population densities in the world. They also are remarkably ethnically consistent. They also have a incredibly hostile climate that will strongly discourage (or outright kill in the first month of winter) anyone who is unsheltered homeless. They also have socialized medicine. They are also very wealthy because of natural resources which almost no other country has.

For comparison, the San Francisco Bay Area discussed earlier on it’s own has approximately 50% larger population than all of Finland all on it’s own in only 5% of the land area, and none of those other factors helping (add scare quotes depending on the factor).

That is pretty much the definition of a ‘toy population’ in this case, and even they aren’t saying it’s actually solved in that case yet, just that it totally will be at some point in the future.

While I think SF advocates have stopped trying to claim victory is possible or they’ll have it under control at some point in the future, there was a time that is what they said too.

Regarding your other questions - Smaller populations are much easier to work with, and organizations that are working with them are easier to manage to a high quality. Socio-Religo-Ethno consistent groups also tend to be aligned more consistently on cultural values and behaviors among individuals, which allows doing interventions or even understanding patterns of problems is easier and more doable. There is also less ‘us vs them’ and more ‘we’ involved. So fewer diametrically opposed factions, less infighting, less corruption of core social infrastructure, less jockeying for position vs other factions required. The set of stakeholders is fundamentally lower and easier to deal with. For a counter example, see Lebanon, Bosnia-Herzegovina, etc.

Low population density is also a huge help with any sort of homelessness issue because there is little to no pressure on housing availability. If someone previously owned a house and lived there, as long as it didn’t burn down, buying out any loan (going to be a smaller amount) is just as effective as anything else probably because 1) it’s not going to be a huge amount of money, 2) there won’t be as much moral hazard as there would be in a less cohesive and higher density location as it’s less money, and the neighbors all know you and there is an incentive to not abuse it, 3) no one is moving in to just take a house and then doing whatever with no connection to the land or the area or the culture before hand.

And also since it’s a smaller population, your overall number of folks being involved is much smaller, and there are fewer really problematic outliers.

Also because of the smaller population, more homogenous groups, and stronger ethnic identity, it’s not as likely someone is going to be able to even start throwing wrenches in the works for whatever disingenuous reason like happens here in the cities very often. Judges would just go ‘what are you doing, get out’ if someone tries.

Here, it would tie the agencies involved or property owners up for years or decades.

Does that answer your question?

It’s also why New Zealand was able to stop Covid coming in (for awhile) and others couldn’t, that and a lot of ocean. There was strong buy-in across the population, and a consistent set of values folks could agree on and feel like they were working together with others on.