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.
This is a nuanced issue and I agree with what you wrote. I live in Finland. Some additional thoughts:
- The scale of social problems in the US is on a whole other level. More people requires bigger solutions.
- The state vs government system in the US means it's every state for themselves when solving social issues. This is seen in states actively shipping homeless people to warmer climate states in order to make their problems go away.
- As you point out, homeless people die in the winter. It's also cold in many places in the US, and hot in others - so people die all the time there too.
- As a society Finland has a robust social security system, the society is built on it - and the idea of equality (Hint: its not, but it's not bad at all either compared to other countries). The amount of Americans I've seen arguing against free healthcare as they don't want to pay for it just blows my mind, I would imagine you'd go into a similar situation if the government raised taxes to "fix the homeless problem". "Well i'm not homeless, why should i pay for these people's problems" etc. (Not my view, just predicting how it will go).
>>The scale of social problems in the US is on a whole other level. More people requires bigger solutions.
Bigger country also has far more available resources.
From TFA:
>>So, more than a decade after the launch of the “Housing First” policy, 80 per cent of Finland’s homeless are doing well, still living in the housing they’d been provided with — but now paying the rent on their own.
>>This not only helps the homeless, it turns out to be cheaper.
That bears repeating: it turns out to be cheaper
The solution can be found in the common refrain of conservative ideologues fighting against social programs —— it isn't the government that knows how to best spend the money, it is the people.
The really simple solution to homelessness and poverty is:
Literally house the homeless and give UBI to everyone at a poverty level.
It turns out that the individual people really often do know how to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, as long as they have bootstraps.
A tiny house with a fixed address, bed, toilet, shower, and cooktop eliminates enormous classes of problems both for the unfortunate people, and the rest of society. A basic income is most commonly used by people to improve themselves. Yes, there will always be sad examples of people who fail and use it to drink/drug themselves to death, but every actual study I've read shows that these are vastly outnumbered by those who use the minimal resources to get out of their personal hell; this is just another in those long series of studies.
And to those who scream "moral hazard - you're rewarding bad behavior! Welfare queens!!" — bullsh^t. The richest societies in the world can afford to provide basic housing, food, and medical care to all their residents (but not the entire world, immigration controls are needed). No one wants to be in the dregs of homelessness and poverty. And, the objective results are better outcomes, more people overcoming their problems and becoming self-supporting.
> It turns out that the individual people really often do know how to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, as long as they have bootstraps.
The Finnish case study finds that most of these people never really recover, just that with housing and state support, they still require fewer resources than if they remained unhoused. So this is more like: these people are never going to solve their problems, but at least with housing and a on site social work (to prevent the housing from being destroyed), they won’t burden society more otherwise.
> - As you point out, homeless people die in the winter. It's also cold in many places in the US, and hot in others - so people die all the time there too.
I don't think this point is true. You'll find plenty of homeless people in Seattle from Great Falls Montana, for example. Bus tickets are easy enough to purchase, you don't even have to be shipped. People will migrate where they can survive at least, they aren't stuck in Spokane, Great Falls, or Bismarck. It is always possible to get to LA, some will even get to Honolulu.
Montana to Seattle is 640 miles. That's almost the size of Finland (north to south), while very few people live in the far north. Spokane to LA is 1,200 miles, that's two Finlands worth of travel. 1,200 miles from the population centers of Finland gets you to Ukraine!
There is no part of Finland where you easily survive outside in the winter (without a tent with stove and plenty of firewood). Leaving the country means losing access to the social safety net.
I used to see homeless sleeping in the doorway/building entrances in DC in the evenings while it was snowing outside. It terrified me. They had a few blankets and would huddle up.
I was in Chicago on a pretty very cold night one time (it was sitting around 0F that evening) and it was horrifying to see how many homeless people were still outside despite that cold.
This got me curious, so I compared [0]. To summarize, Helsinki's high tracks NYC's low. Helsinki is 6 -- 8 C (10 -- 14 F) colder than NYC in January -- February.
I agree, it is definitely colder in Helsinki. But heavy snowfall and -12C (the NYC mean minimum coldest day temperature in January) is still extremely uncomfortable to sleep rough in. Yet many homeless people stay in New York year round.
>> The scale of social problems in the US is on a whole other level.
True. Just for some comparison, if Finland was a metropolitan in US, it would be ranked 10th. Above Phoenix metro and Below Atlanta Metro. I understand the good intentions of people trying to show case 'Scandinavian countries' as a model. They miss many things including Scale.
Scale... Isn't the USA supposedly federalised states? So each state has a small enough scale to solve its issues, with an added benefit that countries in the EU don't have as easily: a federal government that can work to provide funding, coordination and national-level programs to solve the issues. The closest to that coordination is at the EU level itself which is much more complex and less powerful than the federal government of the USA.
I really dislike when American exceptionalism gets to the point of brushing away any kind of role model that could be used as an inspiration to be adapted to American needs as "it won't work because we are different". Guess what, every nation and society is different. Learn from others what worked, adapt to your local needs, that's how progress works.
The USA has the largest economy in the world, there's plenty of money that other countries lack for solving social issues. The main issue is allocation, American society does not think that solving social issues is worthy enough so you don't invest in it. After experiencing all the side-effects of such negligence them comes the exceptionalism excuse, that the scale is different, that X, Y or Z are hard because of A, B, C, so on and so forth.
It's just an excuse, a lame one at that. Yeah, Nordic countries don't have a large population, as a whole there's around 28 million people across the Nordics (Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland), with around US$ 1.8T of GDP. Texas in the USA has 29 million people with US$1.8T GDP in a much smaller area than all the Nordics combined, with better weather, why the fuck can't Texas be like the Nordics then?
>So each state has a small enough scale to solve its issues
The problem is that states are choosing to address this problem by bussing homeless to other states.
This is the primary issue with federalized states, solutions are crafted in the interest of each state, negative externalities be damned.
The federal government doesn't have the ability under the constitution to address this problem in any real way. Until it can, it'll be cheaper and more politically expedient for those in charge to maintain the status quo than to actually work towards a solution.
I’m not supporting the idea of USA exceptionalism, but scale /absolutely/ does matter. I’ve lived on most continents, and currently in the EU, I can see when even small increases in load on services leads to total breakdown. There’s a reason they are unable to sustain amidst immigration.
Of course it matters, that's why I brought up the point that each state in the USA is supposedly small enough to have local governance, that they have enough state-level freedoms to solve localised problems and exactly why I compare the scale of Texas to all of the Nordics as they are very similar in GDP and population.
I think you're arguing against your own point - a single US State is the size of 4 countries. Sure it's a smaller scale than the nearly-continent sized US as a whole, but it's still a substantially larger scale. On top of this, individual US states do not have the same freedom to act that independent nation states do, nor the same budget levels. For example, Texas doesn't have an income tax, and its tax revenue in 2022 was only 3.5 times that of Finland, despite having 5.5 times the population. Most projects need federal funding which does have to work at the immensely larger scale of the whole country.
It's a state less vast in area than 4 small countries, with similar population and economy. 28 million people is not a large country population so the scale should be comparable, it's 10 million more than the Netherlands.
> For example, Texas doesn't have an income tax, and its tax revenue in 2022 was only 3.5 times that of Finland, despite having 5.5 times the population.
That's exactly my point, it's a failure of policy, not an issue of scale. The policy is to have low taxes, small government, whatever, and from that failure a US state comparable in terms of economy and population to the Nordics is not even close to these countries in social development.
> Yes, we pay to defend Europe from Russia, and we do it for free.
If 'we' is the USA, then I'd suggest the USA pays to maintain a very lucrative industry, and as far as anyone can tell, they pay way over the going rate, and have very poor book-keeping.
The idea that some older equipment, rather than being retired or disposed of, is being sent to Ukraine, as somehow being exclusively a defence of a distant place, and 'for free' feels asymmetrical to reality.
The USA has some serious risk / concerns coming out of this conflict - not so much petroleum products, but certainly iron ore, argon, neon, cobalt, etc. That's the practical resource based risks, and then there's the whole regional stability, opportunity to assist in the downfall of an enemy empire, etc etc.
> We should stop doing that, and invest more in domestic needs.
If 'we' is the USA, then I suggest you won't stop doing the former, and you won't start doing the latter.
In the past twelve months the USA's sent US$30B (list price) of equipment to Ukraine.
That's out of an annual budget of around 1,900B (or 845B) depending if you're looking at resources or obligations, but either way, 30 is a small component of that.
For context, the most recent US DoD audit identified at least 220B worth of equipment that they simply can't determine the whereabouts of.
So, yeah, I reckon the USA could look after its own interests by sending some equipment to Ukraine and address homelessness within its own borders, if it really wanted to.
Helping an impoverished country that has been actively invaded is one thing.
Providing decades of national defense as a service is quite a different thing. Especially when the beneficiaries are some of the richest nations in the world.
I live in the UK. We have an independent nuclear deterrent that we buy off the US for billions. We have plastic fighter jets we buy from the US at over $100m a pop. We have every credit card payment taxed by Visa and Mastercard. We allow US companies to operate here tax free, destroying local business.
When I was a teenager in the 1990s we finally managed to pay the US for selling us WW2. The US took our gold and the rights built military bases on a bunch of strategic islands. They left us as a vassal state.
The US base their front line in the UK against Russia so we get wiped out first. We are a buffer zone for the US defence of itself against Russia.
The US protects Europe 'for free' in the same way that the UK 'protected' India 'for free'.
Your (rather common) attitude will be the eventual downfall of the US empire. Every time the US acts as the world's arsehole (like by electing a protectionist moron as president) it loses legitimaticy. You also find Europe starts buying gas from Russia and turning a blind eye to its military adventures. When it starts looking bad for the US they turn up like 'Team America', blow up our gas connections to Russia and magically find cheap gas to sell us instead.
> When I was a teenager in the 1990s we finally managed to pay the US for selling us WW2. The US took our gold and the rights built military bases on a bunch of strategic islands. They left us as a vassal state.
I find this attitude ironic. If you didn’t engage in this trade there is high likelihood you would not have survived the air battle waged by the German Air Force.
Also the debt wasn’t repaid until 2006.
And the implied threat that you’ll buy Russian gas (and become dependent on it) because we elected a shit-talker? Lol. Salty tears all around, except without a valid reason.
No, you pay to continue having hegemony over multiple continents. Don't call American military spending in any sense some kind of altruism, it's done to keep the USA power and money floating around.
The early reasoning was to not repeat the mistake of the two world wars -- where American kids had to bleed in a European conflict. Of course, US got involved because so much money was lent to allies etc. There is a reason -- why Algeria is not there in "North Atlantic" treaty Organization but Estonia is. Let us not pretend here, America treats Europe differently and with in Europe, UK differently.
There are cultural and institutional bonds -- of course layers of Geopolitical and strategic interests.
But the boys, who are dreaming Americans picking their marbles and going home should really be careful what they wish for, because it might actually come true.
I don't see how that could happen after the US pushed for globalism, globalism inherently requires keeping trade routes protected from interference, the moment the US pulls out from providing protection is the moment where these routes start to erode. If you are ok with all the impacts that will have in your life, go for it, I'm all in for less American interference around the globe.
You just need to be aware that the life you are used to (if you live in the USA) will be vastly different after this.
Yeah, you (as in the US) should do that, and please take every US soldier in europe with you. We (as in central europe) either have nuclear weapons (France, Britain) or could easily build them (Germany)
That is not the point. But I will assume good faith here, Alaska is the one state that has similarities with Scandinavia. In terms of both weather and resource extraction. Is Alaska doing worse than Scandinavia when dealing homeless?
I find it fascinating how the higher-cost and therefore counter-intuitive alternative, can sometimes be the better choice, due to long-term secondary effects that doesn't show up on said paper.
Reminds me of the value of developing your own advanced projects, which is a huge cost (and risk) for a country or a company, but which can pay off big time in the long run through developing advanced marketable industry, exportable competence and just creating lots of jobs.
In a similar sense EU has mandated that wastewater is to be treated in even very small villages. For those same second-order improvements, a sewer system may sound like a luxury but it does avoid a lot of shit.
In a similar sense EU has mandated that wastewater is to be treated in even very small villages.
There are also second-order costs. I know people who live half the year in a 'very small village' (30-40 houses, no shops, no cars, no sewage system, water comes from wells) and these well meaning, but very inflexible, rules can make it very expensive to do even the most basic of renovations.
I also spoke to a couple of people in a very rural village in Italy and asking about why so many houses were in such disrepair. Turns our the people living there could not afford to repair them in a way that complied with all the regulations about preserving 'historic' buildings. These where largely poorer people who's family had owned the house for generations. They couldn't afford to repair their homes, but they also couldn't move since their houses where in such a state that they where effectively worthless.
I think you're confusing homeless with rough sleeping. Rough sleeping is sleeping outside, while homeless can include couch surfing (staying with friends for a few days at a time) or sleeping in shelters. Shelters provide beds but no privacy/no security from other residents and no space to build up possessions.
In the article, Toronto provides shelters and Finland provides homes.
> ... no security from other residents and no space to build up possessions.
This seems a basic requirement for anyone trying to get to a better life. Are there no more enlightened shelters that provide some secure locker or parcel-checkin system?
"simply providing proper housing to these people is a pragmatic alternative"
Did this "proper housing" come with any rules? What is the bar that keeps the homeless from being evicted? I know where I am these places quickly become severe crime hubs.
It definitely requires a lot of support, especially initially, to be successful; indeed, just providing the residence isn't enough. And of course not all homeless people are the same. Some are simply having a rough time and really do just need that leg up. Others are struggling with substance abuse, mental illness, or mental or physical disability, and will at a minimum need support to transition to a stable living situation, but may become self-sufficient (or at least more-so) over time with that support. Others will need significant ongoing support lifelong, and so independent living won't be a viable option. Lumping all these people together exacerbates problems.
'And of course not all homeless people are the same.'
Although obvious, it's not something one hears that often. There is a perception here in the UK that a homeless person is someone who sits on a corner begging all day.
Ironically, a lot of these people are not actually homeless since they are where all the resources are targeted towards. Many real homeless people do not stand out from the crowd because, well why would you?
The houses which are given to homeless are mostly concentrated in certain area's. So if they cause problems, which of course they do, they don't bother 'normal' families.
Those area's are pretty bad, but they're not as dangerous as e.g. in the US. I guess it's because the addicts are mostly alcoholics and they get just enough government money to buy their daily booze.
I’m Finnish and this is not my understanding. Finland has a specific policy that every time a new neighbourhood is constructed, a percentage of those houses are allocated for the municipal government, who then rent them for these less fortunate folk. This means that the problems aren’t concentrated but distributed. It’s part of the larger ideology of equality in Finland, which is that the extremes in both good and bad are softened.
Thanks, I didn't know that. I'm not Finnish but have stayed in the Helsinki area a lot. There were certain area's in e.g. Tikkurila and Jakomaeki which were pretty bad, and Finnish people told me it was because many alcoholics lived there in state housing. So I supposed that state housing was concentrated in certain area's.
This segregation of people based on social class (as well as ethnicity and/or native/immigrant divide) is a big social problem that was unfortunately exacerbated by poor policy choices made in past decades. Today it is recognized that developments should mix people from different backgrounds and income levels in order to not create neglected "problem neighborhoods".
Municipalities own a significant amount of housing available for rent. These are available for anyone but there are societal reasons why someone might be preferred (e.g. single mother), while others are in the queue.
These are not the housing units given to the homeless. They are run by organizations and charities together in collaboration with municipal social workers. There are two or three houses like this in Helsinki.
That's two or three apartment blocks, so maybe 200-500 apartments? Don't have exact figures at hand.
The municipally owned rental housing (available to anyone) which you talk about, together with different forms of social support help people from falling into homelessness in the first place.
Those few apartment blocks used for the "housing first" scheme are the help people out of homelessness. These houses are not normal rental apartments, and have social workers present, etc. These are not available for rent for anyone, and no-one would voluntarily choose to live in one of these if given alternatives. They are somewhere between a shelter and a normal apartment.
There are only a few houses for this purpose in the Helsinki Area, and they are actually in quite nice locations and far from each other.
No-one in their right mind would live in these houses if they have an alternative, but the problems don't affect the wider area. Some restlessness in the immediate vicinity, but not that bad.
> and they are actually in quite nice locations and far from each other.
The area's near Helsinki were I've been and where I was told by Finnish people were a lot of state houses, were certainly not nice locations. There were alcoholics everywhere and the area was visibly poor.
But it's true, they were not as bad as in many other countries.
The source you refer to is talking about municipal housing, which is just normal rental housing owned by municipalities. There is indeed a lot of those and it sure helps keeping the homelessness down together with social support.
There are areas with high concentrations of municipal housing built in 1970s and 1980s, and this is generally considered a mistake in urban planning as there are concentrations of low-income, low-education residents, which isn't a positive for the area.
But I reiterate: this is normal housing available to everyone. You gotta pay your rent and behave or you get evicted. The municipality is just the landlord here.
The supported housing for the homeless is just a few housing units (apartment blocks), and they aren't normal housing. Examples of this kind of housing is Sininauhasäätiö (org), Ruusulankatu (address) and Diakonissalaitos, Helsinginkatu.
There's a really fun section in the amazing Norwegian comedy/drama "Dag". The premise is that you can't both have a good and fair society and good weather because the need to take care of everyone isn't serious enough if you have good weather.
Spain also has relatively few homeless, at least compared to some other European countries.
They have made it "de facto" legal to break in to an empty, unused home. If you squat a home, proceedings can take years to get you out of there. The only way to get an express eviction is if the owner reports it in the first 72 hours of people moving in. So no wonder you see bars on every single house window and alarms.
Talking about France that has a similar law: no, that only works for unused homes.
Let's say you have an empty secondary home that you don't use, don't rent, etc. Maybe you're trying to sell it, or maybe you just don't care because you have the money and you're sitting on it until you maybe take the time to renovate it or put it on the market.
That's where a squatter can be considered "living" there even if it's unlawful. That doesn't mean he owns the house now, or that he can't be evicted - just that the police won't kick him out without a court order. The court order can take some time and in any case nobody can be evicted during winter.
The key word was "Empty and unused" - if you are living in a house (i.e. it is your primary residence) and take a vacation, it's not empty and unused.
It is a problem for landlords with empty properties, or for little used vacation homes. Although apparently there are alarms which will automatically call the police when someone breaks into your property which is apparently enough to trigger the 'within 72h' deadline.
That's why in the Netherlands owners of unused buildings often use anti-squad tactics. They let in a legitimate renter in a type of anti-squat deal: rent is low but you can be kicked out at anytime (about 1 month notice).
Not at all the same in Germany, but even as a property owner, I see some justification for effectively legalizing squatting in unused buildings. It would create some incentive for property owners to invest and rent out buildings, or otherwise sell them cheaply. Ideally this would be formalized and matched with a proper framework, i.e. municipalities can easily buy unused properties at a nominal cost, property owners can "convert" squatters into renters (who actually own rent) by bringing the property up to a minimum standard (which in turn the squatter would have to accept or move out), etc.
That is of course the way to redistribute idle personal property to socially positive ends that does not involve imposing misery upon entire neighborhoods.
It's some comment on the perversity of legislative processes that such taxes are not the norm everywhere. Admittedly, enforcement efforts will surely be challenged.
> It would create some incentive for property owners to invest and rent out buildings, or otherwise sell them cheaply.
Property is property, you should be free to do what you want with them. Otherwise it's not property. It's like saying "you have a car, you need to use it everyday, otherwise we can justify people borrowing your car when they need one".
Also, rent controls, aren't they a thing in some parts of Germany like Berlin? That's what leads to poor usage of apartments, because if you own several places and the rent imposed by the authorities is too low for you to turn a profit, then it's not worth renting either.
> Property is property, you should be free to do what you want with them. Otherwise it's not property. It's like saying "you have a car, you need to use it everyday, otherwise we can justify people borrowing your car when they need one".
Property laws aren't law of physics. The natural state is, you own what you can keep. If I come to you, and bash your head in, and take your all possessions - well, it's mine now, as you weren't able to keep any of it (or your life).
A rule-based society is what lets you cry foul when someone "infringes" on your "property rights", and for that to mean anything. A civilization is what lets you forget, day to day, that all the deeds and leases and contracts are just thin abstractions, mutual self-delusions keeping the knives sheathed and the guns holstered. But we're not a post-scarcity civilization yet.
Happy society giveth, an unhappy society taketh away. If you're at the point that over half of your society is worried about keeping roof over their heads, a substantial chunk of it haven't one, and a noticeable part of that group is happy to break in to temporary empty housing - don't turn your back on your society, lest property again stops meaning anything, and your own life may be forfeit too.
Property and property rights are defined by the society. It's not a natural law or something. If society agrees that property works in a "use it or lose it" manner, so it is.
There is not a single jurisdiction in the world where "property is property" in your sense of people being free to do what you want with it, because allowing that would be a massive attack on society and others ability to enjoy their property, and so every jurisdiction on the planet recognises that for a functioning society, property rights must be limited.
Most countries have long lists of exceptions, ranging from limiting your ability to be a nuisance, to limiting your ability to deny others access to various resources, and up to and including guaranteeing public access to some types of property in some countries (e.g. in Norway you have a legal right to cross, forage in and camp on most undeveloped rural land, irrespective of the wishes of the landowner) because it is seen to increase liberty. In Norway, this freedom to roam was seen as so obvious that it was one of the last parts of Norwegian law to be codified, because courts just took it into account despite Norwegian law generally not having any common-law component or system of precedent binding courts.
There's actually quite a lot of restrictions on what I can and can't do with my car. For example, if I don't get my car inspected, I can't drive it on public roads. And even if I want to drive it on private land, it must be within a fenced off area that is inaccessible to third parties.
I also can't just erect whatever buildings I want on my plot of land, but rather I need to get a planning permission. Turning my land into a garbage dump is also gonna get me into shit.
I do prefer this level-headed approach especially when it comes to a basic need, like housing.
High rents are partially caused by low available inventory so if they can fix it by increasing taxes of unused properties, that's a great way of doing that. The other ways I've seen, like banning foreigners from owning properties are kind of bad, that's a net negative outcome (I think).
That is a very extreme view of property that is not shared by vast sections of global society. The German constitution has a very explicit article that states "Property obligates. Its use should simultaneously contribute to the wellbeing of the general public" (my translation) for example.
Similarly, EU jurisprudence has confirmed that laws and regulations can limit the absolute control over individual property, if that contributes to an overall more important social good. Many countries around the world actually do not have permanent private ownership of land/buildings or limit it in significant ways. Historically, basically all societies and legal systems have limited individual property rights in certain, sometimes very extreme ways. The Uber-liberal definition of property that you cite is something of an outlier.
Regarding your question on rent control in Germany: There are several layers:
- Some housing is government/municipality owned (unfortunately not a lot). The rent for those usually covers the cost of providing that housing but not more so it is quite cheap.
- Some private property has been built with government subsidies. This is bound for a certain time (I think 20 years or so) to a government-set rent and tenants usually profit from this even afterwards, because it is very hard in Germany to increase rent on existing tenants.
- Since 2015 there has been a national law on rent control. It covers municipalities which have been specifically designated by state governments. Landlords covered by the law can not increase the rent for a new tenant by more than 10% over the local average, but there are a lot of exceptions: buildings built or substantially improved after 1st October 2014, properties that already had a higher rent prior to the law, etc. It also relies on the tenants for enforcement and their willingness to engage in a protracted legal battle.
- Berlin tried to introduce much harsher rent controls. These were declared illegal by the courts, because state governments (in the view of the courts) do not have the competency to introduce certain types of rent control.
> if you own several places and the rent imposed by the authorities is too low for you to turn a profit, then it's not worth renting either.
This may be the case for new construction. But most existing properties are paid off, ongoing investment is limited (I can say this with some authority, as I own a couple of properties in two different German cities). The huge rent increases in German cities do not come from long-term tenants (because they are protected against steep increases by law). It comes from landlords taking advantage of huge demand by increasing the rent dramatically for new tenants. This is pure profit for the landlord, as the property has been profitable even before the rent increase. This is what most attempts at rent control in Germany are targeted at.
Spain just did a very strict rent control, in "high stress" areas rent can't be raised more than 3% yearly. And if someone is in demonstrable financial distress, the rental contract is automatically protected for a year.
to my sibling comment, so what you're saying is, mob rule? this is probably defacto how it is, but it does not make it right. Nobody else has any rights to what I own, and I dont have rights to them. this kind of thinking that the "society" can just set rules that violates other people is a sick and disgusting development, this form of communist cancer has to be destroyed.
See my sibling comment: property in most societies is something that not only confers rights to the owner, but also responsibilities. If you own an apartment in a city where there is great demand for housing, but (for whatever reason) you decide against making that apartment available for someone to use, society (through creating laws and regulations) can decide that you forfeit your rights to that property.
It is the same logic that is behind laws and regulations that force people to improve their property in some way, i.e. by removing lead paint, installing more efficient heating, etc. This logic is well accepted throughout the world. "Property obligates" is the historical and present norm (except maybe in the U.S.) and the extreme libertarian view of "absolute rights" to property is probably what is a "sick and disgusting" development.
no gang has ever considered themselves to be doing things that shouldnt be done, whether it be the mafia, government, or HOA. They are all illegitimate
"This form of communist cancer" of limitations on property rights is little different to how property rights have been curtailed by law in different ways in pretty much every society since many hundreds of years before Marx was born.
Look, there are two possible definitions of "ownership" and "property". One is, you own whatever you can physically keep. If you have a pretty stone, and I come to you, and bash your head in, and take your stone, guess what, it's mine now. If I scoop your brains out of your half-broken skull, I'll have a new ashtray too, so I profit off this exchange!
The second definition is, whatever set of rules the society enforces to prevent the scenario described above, which define what I can keep, and under what conditions. You could say these rules "violate other people" and is "communist cancer", and you're right in a way - my natural right of coming over to you and bashing your head in is surely being violated now! But I prefer this anyway, because it also protects me from getting my head bashed in by someone stronger than me.
your right ends where it takes away others. Forcing taxes on people is not that. I cannot violate others, and anyone who would give themselves the rights to do so, are bandits, oftentimes having formed a gang
This is exactly Proudhon's argument for his infamous "property is theft" - property rights limits the freedom of others by restricting them from e.g. making use of the land you arbitrarily fence off - and why Dejacque, the father of libertarianism [1], and a firm anarcho-communist, agreed with him.
The right-libertarian property fetishism is founded on ignoring the restrictions property rights places on the rights of others; something every legal system on the planet recognises to various degrees. As such, while none go as far as Proudhon and Dejacque wanted in stripping away property rights, the default of human society is to see property rights as inherently and necessarily limited for the protection of the rights of others.
(I'd be all for giving you the opportunity of opting out of taxes, as long as society gains the freedom to refuse to deal with you if you opt out, up to and including freedom to deny you the use of everything funded by said society; freedom is a two-way street)
[1] On the Human Being, Male and Female, Joseph Déjacque, is the first use of "libertarianism" as a political ideology. Dejacque accuses Proudhon of being a "moderate anarchist, liberal, but not libertarian". Dejacque went on to publish "Le Libertaire" (The Libertarian), the first libertarian periodical.
Technically, you can probably opt out of taxes in return for opting out of using tax-funded services and infrastructure, especially in the U.S. and other countries with vast tracts of wilderness: just hike a few days into the woods/mountains, vanish into public lands and do not interact with society anymore. Of course, no libertarians actually go that far, because if they admit to it or not, they are pretty happy to accept the benefits of taxation (roads, police, emergency medical attention, the military, courts, etc.) even if they publicly decry any attempt at funding it. My impression is that libertarianism is basically an attempt by pretty well-off people to create a pseudo-scientific reason for them to free ride on the contributions of others to society.
Yeah, this is why I find bringing it up as a two way street to be the most productive way of dealing with right-libertarians, because the problem is not that they want to be free to do as they please per se, I have every sympathy with that, but how quick they are to gloss over that the rest of society has rights too, and if they are made as expansive as they want their own property rights to be, they'll find themselves without rights of access to all kinds of things they just presume they'll retain access to very quickly - incidentally a large part of the reason why the rejection of property rights is such a large part of left-libertarianism.
> 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
Yes but shelters can be privately run and then a corporation can make a profit from that, because private companies are more efficient than state-driven things.
That a company makes profits more important than perpetuating the homeless problem, or waking up to frozen cadavers. Think of the poor stakeholders.
Thats kind of why homelessness exists in the first place though, and is getting worse.
Providing enough housing to eliminate housing would bring rents down. That's bad for profits.
Taking away the fear of homelessness gives low end workers more negotiating muscle. This means hence higher wages and less incentive to work as hard. Again, really bad for profits.
This is why western governments feign the willingness to do something about it by half heartedly attacking the symptoms (e.g. drugs) rather than fixing the actual cause (lack of homes).
It's also why the media fights so hard to misrepresent the causality between drugs and homelessness.
Besides NYC, which is an outlier in all the wrong ways in this sort of space, I've never heard of private shelters. That's not to say people aren't getting rich of nonprofit shelters.
> I.e. the vast majority of problematic people are all citizens that have full coverage under the excellent social system.
The same is true in the USA; illegal immigrants have enough problems without being homeless, and almost always their point for being in the USA is to work. The "excellent social system" however, is not true for the USA.
> 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
The article is from a Canadian newspaper. It is from Toronto, which, for Canada, has relatively mild winters. But it’s still Canada.
root comment was saying that Finland have to have this policy otherwise people would literally die on the streets due to the extreme cold weather.
the child commenter reminds root that the article is written by a Toronto paper, which is also a very cold place any yet does not have quite the same policy (I think Canada do have homeless shelters?)
> 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.
Unfortunately there are any number of people who would be happy with option B in this scenario.
I would encourage you to wade into commentary on the man strangled to death on the NYC subway if you think it’s outlandish that some people see the lives of the homeless as essentially disposable. Or you could just scroll down to the person in this very discussion thread who more or less argues for deaths from exposure. Or we could look at preferences revealed by policy demands, which often take more of an "out of sight, out of mind" approach.
The guy who was threatening people on the train? That's a dishonest comparison along with a dishonest assertion. First you are asserting that a lot of people supported his death,which is not the case. They supported someone doing something to stop him threatening others on the train, with his death being an unfortunate consequence of his own actions. Then you falsely use this violent individual to represent all homeless people in order to incorrectly assume there exists a large number of people who support the death of the homeless.
All this “violent individual” did was yell. Choking him to death is an extreme escalation. And I assure you it’s quite easy to log on to Twitter and read many comments that either outright cheer for the death or, more commonly, treat it with the same indifference you’d treat accidentally stepping on some ants.
you do not have to be happy with something to not want to personally be responsibility. and to everyone here who thinks otherwise.
there are millions of malnutritioned people, including children, in many parts of the world. And i put fourth that you are happy they starve and get sick and die. After all, you arent spending all your money and effort trying to fix it? is it not your problem?
I would prefer that nobody is homeless, nobody starves, but at the same time, it is not my responsibility to do anything about it. Stealing my money via taxes and doing something(which to make it even worse, is a BAD something), is an attack on me
It is your responsibility, which is part of the reason why you pay taxes in the first place. The fact that so much of your money is misappropriated is another story though.
That the first step of resolving someone's homelessness is to provide them with a home (and then obviously don't stop there but provide additional support where needed). Who would have thought?
Just IMO, many Americans probably don't think homeless people deserve free housing, because they have (the taxpayers) have to pay for their own housing and also contribute to homeless housing via taxes.
"Fuck you got mine" is real here. Just see the nauseating argument against discharging student loans.
Even from a selfish perspective, I expect "solving" homelessness would ultimately save money for taxpayers, when you consider all of the police and healthcare resources that go into it now, as well as the negative effects on communities. But it would take a lot of time and consistent effort to get there, and the costs would be a lot more obvious and direct than the benefits.
Not sure I agree on student loans though. The main reason I struggle with that one is because it seems to me to be a regressive policy: most people with student loans (though certainly not all) are better off that people who didn't have the opportunity to pursue higher education at all. So forgiving student loans benefits a chunk of the population, but does nothing for those who are even more in need (some of whom might have chosen a different path if they'd known they could have their debts forgiven). I'd rather see policies that can benefit everyone in financial need proportionally.
This kind of selfishness is not about yourself getting more, it's about others getting less. As harsh as it sounds, this is the center of many political ideas. This is what happens when you start from "we should do X", instead of "I want things to be Y, so let's find out how to best get there". Just think about the droves of people fighting to teach abstinence in schools, although studies have shown time and time again it leads to more abortions!
You don't even need to get into the second order social costs. SF spends about $70,000 per shelter bed per year, or $5,800 per month. Rent in SF is expensive, but not that expensive.
More so than "fuck you got mine", my impression is that a lot of it comes down to at some level believing in "karma" or the Just World fallacy. That is, the notion that you get what you deserve somehow. Even if you don't consciously say it, if you deep down has some troubling sense that someone homeless must either be lazy or otherwise have done something to deserve the situation they're in even when there's no direct causal link, it's easy to think that they either don't deserve the help and/or will mess up even if you bother. It then becomes a lot easier to do the bare minimum to try to prevent homeless from being a nuisance to others even when helping them properly might be cheaper and better overall.
A lot of social dysfunction makes a lot more sense if you assume a large chunk of people actually do go around thinking that both good and bad outcomes must have been earned somehow and so are deserved whether or not you can establish a causal link.
Every student loan forgiveness proposal I see suggests that taxpayers foot the bill and the counterargument is why should those who did not attend and/or those who paid off have to foot the bill.
I agree with that counterargument and will never vote for forgiveness.
However, send put a proposal in front of me that seizes assets from the universities selling these degrees that apparently can never pay for themselves and sell off their assets to pay down student loan debt? You'll get my vote.
Not to mention it was the fact that we are giving children loans that are risk-free to the lender due to the government's guarantee is what resulted in the costs skyrocketing to begin with. Colleges were always going to use that consistent free cash flow from indentured young people to enrich themselves.
A lot of this would solve itself if people in student loan debt could discharge it through bankruptcy. Colleges that can't produce degrees where students can pay their loans off would close and many people wouldn't be able to get student loans, and I argue that would be a good thing.
It seems 1:1 to me. With your counterargument logic then, why should the taxpayers have to foot the bill for homeless people? It's not like it's your fault they're homeless; you pay your own rent/mortgage so why should you foot the bill for others?
Well that's the core (or one of the cores) of modern US society - everybody for themselves. Maybe its not written on dollar bill, but if you look closely enough you can see it in various aspects of society. Gun wielding (for protection from other folks but government too, very common mindset in gun culture), having right to shoot folks that enter your property, whole health insurance system, whole social system, and definitely higher education. Basically a class system based on wealth/income.
I just named basic pillars of any modern society. Yes economic approach is very effective in open markets and due to historical reasons gives US top spot in global economy, but society as a whole is much more selfish and less humane. Not something future generations will look and judge kindly, unless we reverse massively due to some catastrophes (and then nobody will care about the past anyway).
One of the reasons very few people from richer western Europe strive to move to US, its just a bad quality of life overall and more 'primitive' cruel society, which define actually important stuff in life much more than just raw paycheck amount. And yes its cruel, walk among homeless folks in LA that should be in professional psychiatric facilities, and not dying slowly on streets in front of everybody, without much care, for decades.
I think both are valid points: Finland has less inhabitants than London and besides maybe from Swedes, Russians and Lapps no large minority groups, of which the aforementioned most likely don’t instill ambiguity about how they obtained their citizenship and why. Studies show that homogenous countries have less objections to social welfare programs aka income redistribution [0].
What does size have to do with anything? Nobody's saying you spend the same amount or provide the same number of houses - you can scale it up to meet the larger population eh?
Of course size matters. Finland’s homelessness likely coalesces around its largest urban areas, as they provide the most foot traffic and anonymity (and homeless services) with the least annoyed population. Like in every country.
So most likely Helsinki.
If your pool of possible homeless is 5M and they gather in a city the size of 600k it is a hugely different situation than say San Francisco, which is 800k and draws from 330M possible homeless
> If your pool of possible homeless is 5M and they gather in a city the size of 600k it is a hugely different situation than say San Francisco, which is 800k and draws from 330M possible homeless
I'm struggling to follow your logic here.
The 'possible homeless' would not be total population of a country - if it is, you've got more urgent problems.
I think in the USA the number's around 500,000, or about 0.2%, yeah?
There's more than one city in Finland, but even if there wasn't (but there really is!) there's definitely more than one big city in the USA, so I don't understand that extrapolation to 'all the homeless will move to San Fran'.
And even if they did, you've still got the considerable resources of the USA [0] that could be brought to bear on the problem. The fact that the problem is distributed quite widely, and definitely not exclusive to large urban centers[1] should make it easier.
Do homeless people not congregate in cities in the US? So just scale up the effort, I don't get it lol. You may have to do more in certain cities than others, and yeah the program may need to span states.
If your country has 5M, it means your largest city is fairly small, or cannot compare with the cities that have 10M inhabitants alone. Scale creates totally different problems, I'd thought that people on HN understood that kind of things.
Then highlight what kind of magical new problems it creates where the solution does not also scale (e.g. sure, you need more funding, but the number of taxpayers to pay for it scales at the same or similar rate). The "US is too big" argument gets used for everything the US struggles with, even with things that are easily subdivided. It's a lazy argument.
What is it about the US that makes people choose to die so much? Are American citizens just more prone to wanting to die, or is there some kind of societal or systematic pressure encouraging people in the US to want to die? Or is the US simply especially, spectacularly inept at housing the homeless; that the US just fucks it up over and over in some way, making a real mess of it?
The difference is the Finnish scheme is getting people into their own homes, fairly well distributed across society - not beds in hostels/shelters or low quality apartments in sink estates.
I've lived all over the US. Sometimes, homeless are down on luck. These are mostly the invisible type, that you may not even know exist.
Then you have the crazies. Mostly harmless, but not productive in society so much, so kinda outcast.
Then you have the grifters. Harmless mostly, enterprising folk. They're out there playing fake violins in parking lots with their family. And staking out busy offramps with their signs.
My city now has mostly the drugged type. These are the worst, they are aggressive, hateful, and many times violent. I've seen people ask for money, then spend a few seconds sizing me up before just going about their day. For reference, I'm a huge guy, and I'd feel sorry for normal folks in those situations. One beheaded a woman in the parking lot of a Kohl's last year, for example. The city has mostly given up, and are building them little drug dens downtown so they'll stop bothering everyone, hopefully.
It's easy to say you want to be compassionate, and look for solutions. After living in it with the aggressive type, I honestly wish the cops would just billy club them and ship them off elsewhere.
I absolutely want to help anyone down on their luck and trying. And the crazies. And I feel sorry for them getting grouped in with the other category of folk.
It's not simple to compare homeless across a single city, much less different cities, much less different countries. There aren't a lot of lessons to be learned between the three or four types.
Any solution not currently being employed couldn't work because the local issues are different in some nebulous way, and it would require careful study before making a hasty move, and there are all these special cases that are different, and it just couldn't work so we should give up because nothing will ever work even if it has worked elsewhere, and just club them all to death instead.
This is so dismissive. We have to admit and analyze the reasons for homelessness before we attempt a solution.
Sometimes, people who do everything right end up homeless due to illness, rising rents, death in the family, or any multitude of reasons. If we gave these people free housing and resources, they'd likely bounce back and be fine.
If we mix in folks who are drugged out beyond belief, who are violent, who have no desire to improve, it taints the entire project. Do you want to put a family of 4 trying to get by next door to some shirtless guy with a machete who constantly threatens to stab everyone? Why? Now all the neighbors complain, crime goes up, etc.
It's time to admit some people either aren't worth helping, or at least can't be helped in the way that others can.
But who is gaining anything if the "drugged out, violent, no desire to improve" folks are living on the street instead of some government provided (or paid for) permanent housing?
The point of the Finnish project and similar approaches in other countries is to first get people off the street, because it is much easier and cheaper to resolve any other issues within the context of a permanent home.
Yes, some of the beneficiaries will still take drugs, be violent, etc. But they would be that way (or worse) if they were homeless and it actually makes it cheaper and easier to deal with these issues if they have housing. So you loose nothing by making housing available even to the worst or most intractable cases but you open up a whole world of opportunity for those homeless people, who just need a permanent place to stay to get their live back in order.
The worst approach to this type of problem (which most US cities seem to have taken) is to basically say "as long as we do not have a perfect, magic solution that resolves the homelessness problem instantly, we'd rather keep all these people living on the street, because heaven forbid we pay even one dollar of tax payer money to someone who turns out not to be 'worthy'".
Frankly it is a barbaric and dumb view of the world. Every government program (just like all private investment and enterprise) will include some waste and misadventure. Just accept that its not going to be a perfect experience for everyone involved and commit to constantly evaluating and improving the approach.
Usually, these programs achieve the best results if people are actually integrated into "normal" neighborhoods and not clustered with other people with pre-existing problems. But of course this should depend on a social and psychological assessment. People with mental issues (under which I would count violence as well) should absolutely receive different and more attention and special arrangements.
Is the shirtless guy with a machete going to be less dangerous when sleeping on the streets? Are the neighbours not going to complain, and the crime going to be lower because he doesn't have a fixed address where he can get sleep, and where authorities can follow him up?
> It's time to admit some people either aren't worth helping, or at least can't be helped in the way that others can.
Even if that was the case, the experience from Finland is that giving homeless people housing reduces the cost to society, so even if that is the case providing housing is still worthwhile even from a purely selfish point of view of taxpayers wanting to reduce the impact on themselves.
In a great many cases, it's because they lost hope, and the drugs were the only thing that let them escape from their pain and despair.
There's a good amount of scientific evidence that drug addiction is harder to fall into, and vastly easier to break out of, when people have a support system. This includes having a place to live.
Are the homeless in Finland hooked on fentanyl and various other hard drugs?
Is half of their homeless population suffering from mental illness (stemming from and made worse by the psychosis from the hard drug use)?
Do they have an illegal immigration problem?
Is there a perverse incentive for politicians and their families to profit off suffering?
The situation in the US imo is not at all equatable to most of the world.
Hell I grew up in a third world country without running water and spotty electricity. Saw poverty like you wouldn’t believe but never saw junkies or thugs like you do in SF. I was walking around Market St and saw people dealing drugs and people just drugged out of their minds laying flat on the sidewalks. Horrible. Not to mention all the trash, graffiti, and other waste while brightly lit multi million/billion dollar tech company logos shine brightly above.
America needs to become a stern father at some point and just set their kid right. First get clean and clear minded, we have too many fools that have been voted into power by even bigger fools. Or maybe it’s just a SF/big city loony tune.
The point of the Finnish experience, and plenty of evidence from elsewhere, is that you're far more likely to address drug abuse (yes, the Nordic countries also have drug problems) and other problems once people are housed.
The US exceptionalism is almost always a cop-out. For a country that is supposedly so advanced, a shockingly high proportion of Americans seem convinced you can't possibly solve anything.
I think it’s due to the fact that there’s no “honor” system or any homogeneity in the population.
I’m a naturalized citizen and US is my one and only home. It’s sad that half the people I meet seem to hate living here and even hate their own country.
When I was in Japan there was a massive rainfall and Kyoto station was flooding. I saw a bunch of old people appear out of nowhere wearing bright vests and helping to remove the mud and water. I found out they were elderly volunteers and that it’s just something Japanese people do there.
In the US I feel like it’s so rare to see that kind of unity unless it’s a situation already dialed to 11.
The investor class in the US treats people here like cattle. And the cattle all know they’re fucked unless they can elevate into the investor class.
"We're the best country in the world, so if there were a way, we would have found it already! The problem still exists, so obviously it's not solvable!"
Does Finland have a problem with Mexican cartel meth and fentanyl being dumped by the truckloads into its communities?
To be clear, there are many types of homeless in the US. But the ones that get the most attention and seem to cause the most problems are those pushed into mental illness by drug use. And, yes, drug use does not always cause mental illness and many mentally ill are not on drugs, but as those of us with direct experience with meth and other 'hard' drug users can attest to, a meth habit is not conducive to mental wellness. There is an acute phase of reality detachment that gets better with cessation, but even then, the hard core meth addicts I've known have mental scars that linger indefinitely.
Yes, most of the homelessness in Finland is driven by substance abuse and mental illness too.
It's mostly alcohol, amphetamines (meth included), buprenorfine and benzos from Eastern European organized crime and fentanyl is not as common, but the landscape is similar.
No, Finland isn't waging a ridiculous War on Drugs, doesn't have long ties between its three letter agencies and sponsoring drug lords in the more tropical neighbours, nor a broken and corrupted police, justiciary and political system.
The drug issue in the USA is not the problem. It is just a symptom of a more systemic and substantial disease.
Plenty of drugs are still making it to Scandinavia. I can't speak for Finland specifically, but in the past couple of months over 1600kg of cocaine was found in Oslo and over 100kg were found in western Norway. So yes, drugs are readily available here. There was also an article several years ago that estimated Norway was the 5th cheapest country for drugs compared to average wages.
Finland has a really long, shared border with Russia, a country that is much worse than Mexico in about every aspect I am aware of.
That said, I think most drugs that comes into Scandinavia comes in freights from European ports or by couriers, at least that is how I understand it from the news.
Well I became homeless when my landlord decided he needed to sell up and gave me notice to leave (much more than legally required, I should add). He eventually sold the house at auction for a sum 3 times smaller than I currently have sitting in a bank account.
This was over ten years ago and, obviously, house prices have increased a lot and I eventually got back on my feet but, the point is that you can find yourself in a situation that you're not mentally equipped to deal with at that moment in time regardless of all other external factors.
The reason I became homeless was because I had to find another home whilst suffering from depression. To cut a long story short, I put off doing what I should have done until it was too late and then made a series of poor decisions.
The cost of housing was nothing to do with it, I didn't have a lot of cash available at the time but I know plenty of people who did. My landlord even offered me another place for the same rent but I turned it down.
When you are depressed you avoid making decisions, and then when you eventually do, those decisions can turn out to be the wrong ones.
I would say that making a series of poor decisions is the most likely way to end up on the streets. This may be a result of mental health issues, pure stupidity, simple bad luck or a combination of the three.
The cost issue may be a factor but the majority of people manage to cope with this somehow. As I said, I became homeless when housing was still considered to be easily affordable.
This is also very much a problem which the US engages in its own way. Would the meth and opiods be sold under a state monopoly to addicts for the manufacturing price, the cartels wouldn't have a market.
Why do I mention that?
Well...
https://www.concealedwines.com/business-opportunities-scandi...
ever heard of oxycontin? It was a FDA approved drug (and still is), a powerful opoid that probably killed hundreds of thousands of people in the US, because it was used to train any kind of chronic pain and turned normal folks into drug addicts. It was all legal, until the people realized what was happening and the FDA acted 10 years late.
Legal opoids just lead to more dead bodies piling up, which is why many countries put heavy restrictions on legal opoids.
The US government half-assed it. They pulled the rug out from under a huge population, and then acted surprised when they fell over. It was clearly being abused, and needed to be better controlled, but in making it impossible to prescribe rather quickly, and to not provide any help to the addicted, the US government created this mess. Where are the massive social programs to get users off opiates, legal or illegal. Where's the bridge to getting better, a helping hand to get over the hump?
The rich can afford to take a couple months off in a resort in a tropical location, and then resume their now drug-free lives. The poor get no such luxury. They get fired, and then lose housing, and become homeless. Which doesn't lead to a good mental state, so they unsurprisingly turn to drugs even harder than before.
It was viscous and punitive to end the prescription of oxycontin that way, and it's resulted in problems that could largely have been avoided. But America hates the poor, so they must be punished for doing bad things.
It was legal, but sold for profit. And the problem ballooned because the state and society did not care. It was legal, lots of people made lots of money, everything was great apart from the fact many people died.
What I am arguing for is the exact opposite. The drugs should be sold with no profit and only to addicts, thus eliminating the motivation to sell more and enlarge the market.
Something similar is done in Switzerland, with state provided safe injection rooms, or in Portugal. But for that the mindset would have to change and I am not sure whether this is possible.
it's interesting that Americans all seem to assume the US has a horrible homelessness problem when it actually has a pretty low homelessness rate by OECD standards (and for that matter Finland got the idea from a US municipal program). It's like half the UK rate and a third of the German rate, and thats even with the US using a broader definition of "homeless" than UK or DE.
Utah had a similar outcome; house the homeless, and improve 80% of cases.
I still bristle at the description “virtually end homelessness” - you buy them free housing and 20% still remain unhoused, is that “solved”? What happens next? What more can you do?
It's a bit unclear exactly what the 80 % figure measures, but according to TFA it's the lower bound of the fraction of people who got housing fully subsidised and is now pays their rent independently.
Given that the homeless include people with serious problems, that only at most 20 % need ongoing subsidising sounds like a huge win to me.
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.
Good housing first programs do not cluster beneficiaries but try to integrate them into "normal" neighborhoods and provide them with ongoing support by social workers, medical attention, etc. Just dumping a couple of dozen homeless people in a motel is not a great way to approach this, I agree.
Why can't they? Municipality-owned housing is a thing in many places around the world and is generally cost-covering even when rented out to low-income housesholds. In many places (i.e. Germany and Austria), even some of the most desirable middle-income housing is owned by local governments so it's nothing that has to come with stigma attached to it.
Housing always needs planning permission and that is something local governments have huge sway over. You can easily imagine that to get planning permission, developers have to cede 15% of the land to the local municipality or have to construct housing that has 25 years of priority for municipality-nominated tenants. It has been done.
private landlords maximize profits or personal utility (if they live in the property themselves). Usually that means creating middle-income detached housing or large apartments with very high rental values or conformant to some idealized middle class image. When housing is tight, it also drives up rents enormously, because landlords will increase rents even if the cost of running the apartments doesn't rise and pocket the difference as profit.
Municipalities as landlords can focus their investments differently. They can build low-cost housing designed for low-income or lower-middle-class families/individuals and rent them out at cost. This gives local politics huge leverage over the housing market and enables them to prioritize certain groups (i.e. families or homeless people) for preferred access to affordable and well situated housing.
In Vienna for example, around 220.000 units are publicly owned, offering space for a large share of the 1.8 million inhabitants of the city. If managed well, the city can strongly influence rent prices and conditions for certain segments of the population. In my view, every city should aspire to own at least 30% of the total housing stock and more than 50% of the housing stock for low-income tenants.
That’sa possible alternative but the experience here in Germany shows that landlords will use every loophole available to get back to profit maximizing = just rent to upper middle class. Or alternatively they’ll just let low cost units rot away without the required maintenance. The effort to enforce this system is arguably better spend on simply running it yourself.
I definitely agree there’s a point where it’s easier to run the system directly than to regulate it.
In America, this just isn’t done. I’m trying to think why.
I guess part of the issue is that building/maintaining structures is high risk, while owning land is low risk.
So even if an American city owned lots of land, they would just do a long term lease to a property developer who would take on the risk of developing and maintaining it.
So the tax payers would get revenue, but not be on the book for any losses.
Actually playing the real estate game means making and losing money.
Trump spent decades in real estate, didn’t beat the returns on SP500, and was often bankrupt.
Most citizens don’t want the government engaged in high risk speculation.
I could easily see an American municipality owning lots of land, but not actually developing and maintaining the real estate themselves.
What happens in Germany if real estate falls through?
I had assumed you were Austrian because you mentioned Vienna. Vienna has a reputation for being very affordable, while Berlin is reputed to be expensive. Is that true?
Berlin used to be very cheap, because after reunification, there was a lot of housing stock available of quite low standard and at least initially, there weren't actually a lot of people that wanted to move there. At that time the city of Berlin also owned about 65.000 apartment units directly.
Unfortunately, the city also needed a lot of money so they sold these units to a private investor around 2005. Both this former public housing, as well as most of the other housing stock has been heavily upgraded in the intervening years and the city has experienced an immense influx of people since it became Germany's capital (again) in 2006.
Given Germany's laws regarding rent increase, there are now basically two rental markets in Berlin: You got tenants who have lived in the same apartment for 20+ years. They pay basically nothing (i.e. 300€/month for a two bedroom apartment), because rent increases are heavily regulated and can easily be challenged in court. Of course investment in these properties has also been quite low, although the German government has required certain upgrades by law.
On the other hand, if you want to move to Berlin now or want to change apartments, the same two bedroom apartment can cost you easily a multiple of what long-term tenants pay and you'll have trouble finding one. Berlin is now the second most expensive city to rent in (for new tenants), after Munich.
> What happens in Germany if real estate falls through?
Inner-city residential real estate does not "fall through." You could have bought a plot of bombed out housing after the war in 1945 in any major German city, built an apartment building on it and its valuation would have been stable or increased for every single year up until today. That Trump managed to do badly with real estate basically just proves how dump he and some of his fellow investors are: they try to make a quick big buck by investing in dept-leveraged office real estate, which is extremely dependent on the economy's boom-buts cycles.
Germany also never experienced (with the exception of some cities in the eastern part, which have since recovered) the desolation of inner cities that some U.S. cities had to deal with. Neither do we have much of the "suburbia" that is common in the U.S. and which is - financially speaking - a ticking time bomb. Our cities are quite dense and as long as we don't experience a strong decline in the total population multi-apartment properties within city limits are quite a safe investment.
We did have a huge wave of people (especially young women) moving out of the rural parts of former Eastern Germany into western cities, which desolated many smaller towns and villages in that part of the country. But public ownership of real estate in rural municipalities has never been much of thing, nor is it necessary as there is always enough space available to expand, if needed. So decreasing property values in these parts fell on private owners (often the same people who moved away).
It's not fully clear from the article if that 20% didn't manage to keep the housing at all or if it was just that they didn't manage to pay their own rent.
To me 80% sounds awesome. There are some people in this world that just wasn't built to cope with life. But they are still part of society and there needs to be a place for them too.
In Finland if you cannot find work the government will pay you enough money to rent an apartment and eat. Most "homeless" in the streets of Finland are alcoholics, in summer you can see them roaming in the streets, in the winter they are in shelters.
> In 2008, you could see tent villages and huts standing between trees in the parks of Helsinki. Homeless people had built makeshift homes in the middle of Finland’s capital city. They were exposed to harsh weather conditions.
> Since the 1980s, Finnish governments had been trying to reduce homelessness with the building of short-term shelters. However, long-term homeless people were still left out. ...
> But in 2008 the Finnish government introduced a new policy for the homeless with the ‘Housing First’ concept. Since then, the number of people affected by homelessness has fallen sharply.
The tent camps that were common 15 years ago were victims of human trafficking by southern European gangs. They were predominantly from a certain ethnic group from two southern European countries. They are moved to other countries when the weather gets cold and come back in the spring.
Street homelessness was not common before the housing first doctrine, there were shelters.
Housing first is the new doctrine because it is cheaper than shelters in the long run.
Someone living in the streets and shelters is unable to care for themself because they spend all their time, money and effort trying to stay warm, fed and clean. Once they have a place to sleep, cook, wash and keep their stuff safe, they have resources to address their own wellbeing.
When they were sleeping rough, any resources spent on their wellbeing went down the drain. And more resources needed to address the damage to the society.
bboygravity's proposition was that Finland doesn't have long-term homeless people because the harsh winter kills them off.
This is clearly not so, because the source I gave shows long-term homeless people in Finland, who survived winter using "tent villages and huts".
That over a quarter of them were immigrants [1] does not change the fact that they existed, or that almost 75% were not immigrants [2].
> Street homelessness was not common before the housing first doctrine, there were shelters.
Yes, it's a good point that there are many types of homelessness, and living rough/on the streets is only one. But I think that distinction is directed more towards bboygravity?
] Since the 1980s, Finnish governments had been trying to reduce homelessness with the building of short-term shelters. However, long-term homeless people were still left out. There were too few emergency shelters and many affected people did not manage to get out of homelessness: they couldn’t find jobs without a housing address. And without any job, they couldn’t find a flat. It was a vicious circle. Furthermore, they had problems applying for social benefits. All in all, homeless people found themselves trapped.
An emergency shelter like you mention is not a housing address needed for finding a job, thus making it harder to get out of homelessness.
[2] "The shortage of small rental dwellings and very high rents in the metropolitan area,
especially in Helsinki, create and sustain youth homelessness.223 Two kinds of groups
can be found within youth homelessness: young people who are homeless due to
their low level of income and overpriced rental housing, and young people who, in
addition to housing, need support services.", same source
There aren't that many homeless killed by the harsh winter any more (or in decades). There were in the 1950s.
> This is clearly not so, because the source I gave shows long-term homeless people in Finland, who survived winter using "tent villages and huts".
The source you gave is an Australian magazine, and what was said in it was not accurate.
There were indeed "tent villages and huts" during that time, but they were 1) there only in the summer 2) predominantly transient people that were a part of a human trafficking scheme from southern Europe.
I do remember these tent villages as there were two near where I lived at that time.
Tent camping is not legal in city areas and they were effectively evicted. There are some transient people still living in allowed camping areas during the summer, but mostly the transient people are now housed somewhere by the people trafficking them.
During the late 20th century there were a few homeless villages built in shacks in urban wastelands (near the airport and close to garbage dump sites) but they were of a more permanent nature.
Winter in Finland is not survivable in a tent without constant heating.
The shacks were built from waste materials and had rudimentary insulation and heating. They were built on waste sites where fuel (wood and garbage) is readily available. The most "famous" site is Simosentie, Vantaa, next to the airport (remains of the "houses" are still there). These shack villages had mostly disappeared by the early 2000s.
The homeless of the 1950s were predominantly war-torn men with mental and addiction problems. Due to their service to their country a decade earlier, Finns adopted an understanding and forgiving attitude to homelessness which is to some degree still present to this date.
> but they were 1) there only in the summer 2) predominantly transient people that were a part of a human trafficking scheme from southern Europe.
Thank you for the correction.
That doesn't change the fact there were still long-term homeless people, contrary to bboygravity's proposition " If you're literally homeless in Finland you would die during winter season? Could that be a contributing factor to the "success"?'
> That doesn't change the fact there were still long-term homeless people, contrary to bboygravity's proposition " If you're literally homeless in Finland you would die during winter season? Could that be a contributing factor to the "success"?'
No, it is not.
There are emergency shelters and homeless people take advantage of any warm space they can. At most a few people die of exposure during the winter months (say 1-2 people per year, it makes the news when it happens). The ones who survive the winter in shelters will remain homeless next year.
The reduction in the number homeless is primarily driven by the "housing first" scheme described in the article. The homeless are given supported housing and social work, in that order. Because the other way around (try to "help" first) did not have good results.
Freezing to death is so unspeakably painful so that you will do anything to avoid that, in the olden days homeless people would sleep in hidden maintenance spaces or near heat exhaust vents in the most extreme cases. Dying of cold is so rare that it does not even warrant it's own category in causes of death statistics here but you could argue some of the drug/alcohol deaths might cover that.
More people die of hypothermia in Los Angeles than New York because New York has a right to shelter, while Los Angeles does not. So, unfortunately, your just-so story doesn’t pan out.
In the US, many states put homelessness people on buses to western states like California. They don’t want to deal with them in their own states and then complain about how NY and especially California have dirty streets and homeless problems. The cognitive ignorance is amazing.
The US has many institutional problems in sectors that impact life. No nationalized healthcare, very short training of police officers with no federal standards & longer programs as they have in the EU or other industrialized nations.
We have a prison industrial complex where we imprison more people than ANY other country.
And we now have a fully broken political system. Between Citizens United unleashing unlimited dark money & a 2 party system where it is more important NOT to do anything involving improving things other than tax cuts for our wealthiest.
Homelessness due to unemployment, bankruptcy, medical bankruptcy or mental/psychological issues are obvious results.
There is tremendous room for improvement across all areas, but there is too much institutional & corporate influence in maintaining the status quo.
A lot of states/charities will give people open tickets so they can get “home” but they don’t verify that it’s really their home, so it’s just used to go where they want, which is often the west coast during winter or really any time. The bus is also cheap enough that you can scrounge up some money for a ticket in a few days.
Vancouver is a mirror of Seattle in its homeless problem, the Canadians handle it better, but the underlying issues are very similar, so it’s not like the USA is fairly special in this regard.
This is true for many US cities, but by far not all of them, and probably not even the majority. Places like SF, Los Angeles, Houston, Miami..etc, have very mild winters that are relatively easier to deal with if you're homeless.
I do question that it's largely the winter weather responsible. Even in places like Chicago, where the winter does get cold enough to quickly kill, there is still a large homeless population, so the weather alone isn't all that's at work. And similarly, Murmansk and Arkhangelsk are also very northerly cities with some serious winter weather, and there were plenty of homeless there too.
yes - you can walk. there are no borders in the way that would stop you.
Also "no money" might mean some but very little money - enough for a bus ticket - some municipalities also solve the homeless issue by just putting them on a bus for free.
As luck would have it, I took pictures of last ever homeless abode in Helsinki 2005. It was destroyed soon after. It is totally functional all-year-round, with good sleeping bag and oil-lamp quite comfortable. https://photos.app.goo.gl/MqwRWdgkN0oynyTw1
I personally would not move from this abode to Helsinki Mäkelänkatu homeless shelter, full of creepy drugheads and violent drunks.
It took only 3 guesses for ChatGPT to get close to the correct answer. Google was hopeless.
-- I believe the correct translation for "sissimajoite" from Finnish to English is "guerrilla camouflage". "Sissi" means "guerrilla" or "insurgent", and "majoite" refers to "camouflage" or "camouflaging".
> And that led to an insight: people tend to function better when they’re not living on the street or under a bridge. Who would have guessed?
Reminds me of the old Fran Lebowitz bit about homelessness, where she says they insist on calling it homelessness, since that makes it sound unsolvable. You really can't buy people a home. If they called it houselessness it would be too easily solvable.
> If they called it houselessness it would be too easily solvable.
Only if one believes that the lack of a home or a house is the root cause of the individuals problem.
A drug addict provided with a house as a home will turn that house into a cesspit in very short time. The drug addict does not clean, does not take out the trash, does not repair. The drug addict will invite other drug addicts to the house, essentially turning it into what is called a drug house. The house can no longer be lived in, and it stops being a home.
Now, is that really helping anyone? No, it is not.
Helping homeless people is a noble cause and should be done - Finland is doing good there. Helping SF drug addicts is a noble cause and should be done - but not
by giving them a free house. They need help with their drug addiction first and foremost. Having somewhere to shelter while they get that help is a necessary part of the solution but it is the solution.
Mental issues and drug addiction frequently overlaps but otherwise the same argument applies. Help needs to be directed on the root cause and issues and homelessness is a symptom, not a cause.
You disruptors out there, get going. Where is the unicorn hidden here?
> Only if one believes that the lack of a home or a house is the root cause of the individuals problem.
Homelessness may not be the root cause, but it effectively prevents one from having a normal life.
One is unable to help oneself if they spend all of their time, money and effort staying warm, fed and safe.
> A drug addict provided with a house as a home will turn that house into a cesspit in very short time. The drug addict does not clean, does not take out the trash, does not repair. The drug addict will invite other drug addicts to the house, essentially turning it into what is called a drug house. The house can no longer be lived in, and it stops being a home.
If you do this you get evicted from normal housing.
Which is why the supported "housing first" initiative apartment blocks come with rules, social workers, etc. Typically they tolerate substance abuse but have restrictions on number of visitors, visiting hours, etc.
> Helping SF drug addicts is a noble cause and should be done - but not by giving them a free house. They need help with their drug addiction first and foremost. Having somewhere to shelter while they get that help is a necessary part of the solution but it is the solution.
It's is extremely difficult to try to get out of substance abuse or mental illness issues when living rough.
This is exactly why the paradigm of giving housing first exists. Previous attempts at helping the homeless with substance abuse and mental health were fruitless. All the money and effort put into that had very poor results. Give the keys to a normal apartment to an addict and they'll be doing drugs instead of paying rent and back on the streets in a few months.
Housing first, addressing problems second was found to be much more effective. This was researched extensively. About 80% of people given supported housing get out of homelessness [0]. That's a massive difference to earlier "shelter only" model of social support for the homeless.
> Only if one believes that the lack of a home or a house is the root cause of the individuals problem.
There are other ways of seeing this. It can start the other way around for instance. I.e. if you end up on the streets; both drugs and alcohol can numb the pain of your current situation, slowly but surely giving you a drug problem on top of your homelessness problem.
I fully agree about what can easily happen if we just offered free housing to people with severe drug problems. I'm just wondering if we are using that as an excuse not to help people with something we know is an effective method.
Even people with serious drug problems must have a much better chance of kicking their habit if they can avoid living in a tent or under a bridge. How do these horrible conditions with constant fear of being robbed/raped help them kick their habit?
> Help needs to be directed on the root cause and issues and homelessness is a symptom, not a cause.
Lets assume that the root cause is child abuse, i.e. they are on drugs due to being molested, i.e. molestation is the "root cause". How are we helping that person better by allowing them to live in a place like skid row, where they say that almost 100% of the women living there have been raped (while living there)? I'm just not seeing how the tent/under-a-bridge lifestyle adds anything to our "assistance/help" here?
I don’t know about Finland, but Dutch people already can’t find places to live.
If you are unlucky financially and need government housing you will wait years if not a decade or more for something. If you can rent something you will pay €1000 for a modest place in a bad neighborhood. Given that a fair chunk of the population earns in the €1500-2000 range, that’s not a good prospect.
Housing is not just something you give away that easily (anymore, if ever).
I was planning to move to NL because the tech market is shit in my other EU country, but the housing was the show stopper for me. Same for Berlin. It's so bad it's no point in trying to move there anymore unless you make bank or already have connections.
Europe should seriously invest to develop tech in other cities/countries as well and not expect everyone to squeeze in for jobs in the places that are already the most overcrowded.
Worth noting: population density for all of the Netherlands 532/km^2.
The highest density in Finland, in the Greater Helsinki area, is 421.8/km^2. Finland does have a lot more space.
Still, Paris has a density of 690/km^2 and is not a hellscape, so the choice of not having more housing (and pushing down RE prices) is political, not a deity-given rule.
But Paris absolutely has the housing issues described by GP.
More and more "middle-class" people are moving out of the city, especially those with children. Schools are starting to close classes for lack of pupils.
There is a lot of government-subsidized housing, but it's very tough to get any if you actually make some money. They mostly go to the poorest, of which there are many. Waiting lists are long (think multiple years).
Private sector housing is very expensive and landlords won't rent to you if you don't make three times the rent and have a long-term contract. 1000 € a month would get you a studio apartment, yet require you to make 3000 € a month. That's "a good salary".
Want to buy? Nah. With 3000 € a month, you better have a serious down payment (rich parents, I guess?), or banks won't lend you a cent.
You figured being freelance would net you a better income? Sure, but guess what? That's not "stable employment", so banks will laugh you out the door. You also won't qualify for the landlord insurance scheme if you resign to rent, so better know someone with a stable contract who'll cosign for you.
I know these numbers and they are brought up often, but nearly 100% of our terrain is fundamentally habitable - but some of it is purposefully claimed for nature - and filled to the brim with essential infrastructure. I don't think you can just take the vast, empty and rough mountainous and wild terrains of Finland and declare them realistically habitable.
It looks like Finland is similar to my country in this respect; homeless people don’t need to be homeless in the first place as, even if everything falls down (financially or (whatever)abuse wise), they still are entitled to state support. They get state housing, but here, at least in the summer, I know quite a few who choose to sleep on the streets anyway. They have mental illnesses (they get help for) and they like begging (wearing clean clothes mostly) as a means of socialising (that’s how I got to know them; they come over when you sit at bars and when you don’t give money right away they start talking).
The problem is generally not comparable to some other countries; if you do see horrible scenes like in some US neighbourhoods (drug zombies, crack prostitutes, drug dealers, violence), they are extremely rare here and almost exclusively involve a tiny group of illegal immigrants. They are usually removed pretty quickly and, presumably, taken to an immigrant center (where they get beds and food) to be processed for either legal immigration or redirected to their home country.
The city of San Francisco spends $70,000 annually per homeless person! <https://abc7news.com/sf-homeless-plan-housing-all-san-franci...> The homeless there are homeless because severe mental and addiction issues cause them to reject help, not because resources aren't available.
How effectively is that money spent?
My cynical assumption would be that most of the money goes into employing political allies of the city of San Francisco.
1. Looking at the article, it looks like a proposal, not actual spending
2. Even if you spend it, I doubt the people get any of that money. Are these shelters paying market rate for their real estate? Some weird local property taxes that get absorbed right back?
I think overall, like many problems this one is something we should handle at a federal level.
> Also they can remain homeless because of the climate.
Weather is part of the reason, but not the most important one. If it were, San Diego would have a worse homeless problem than San Francisco.
The most important difference is that the city of San Diego spends one third as much as San Francisco per homeless person. ($46.8 million in city spending[1] for an estimated 1900 homeless.[2])
San Francisco has an enormous homeless-industrial complex that uses every virtue-signaling, heart-tugging propaganda tool at its disposal to increase the flow of money thrown into its bottomless maw, despite no metric ever improving one bit whatsoever.
[3] The count is only of the homeless in downtown San Diego. While presumably most homeless San Diegans are there, just as there are very few San Franciscans living on the sidewalk in Pac Heights, the point is that a larger number would mean that much less spending per homeless person in the city as a whole, and that much more glaring a discrepancy between the two cities.
That won't magically make enough housing appear on the market. Many of the major cities where jobs can be found have a chronic shortage of housing, at all levels of value.
We need to build housing like there's a WAR effort, like there's an actual battle against homelessness by building enough homes for everyone who wants to live in an area. NIMBY and 'sense of character' are the major issues that prevent this, along with the perverse incentive of existing residents to prefer the rising 'value' of their house due to artificial market scarcity.
It seems like this is true, and depressingly short term thinking on the part of governments. Social housing can be an asset for the state, and if not profitable at least less costly in the long term than current piecemeal approaches.
There are a plenty of people who want to build more housing, and they would make a lot of money doing that if it wasn't illegal. The problem is not capitalism, it's statism.
It's an infinite loop. Build more housing to suck in more jobs and people. Then you need even more housing since people from now-depleted surroundings come in. Rinse and repeat.
It's not capitalism or statism. It's lack of safeguards to prevent concentrating too many people and economy into too tiny pieces of land.
Homeless sweeps in many places in the US result in about 1 in 200 accepting help and the rest telling you to go procreate with yourself. Most by far prefer living in a place where normal rules don't apply. Loans would not be recovered - it would be a grant to allow them to continue living the way they choose.
If the state lets social housing be purchased then its stock of rentable housing diminishes until it needs to start renting out private properties, which means the taxpayer effectively paying investors' mortgages.
If instead the state invests in building a certain amount of social housing that can be maintained and used long term at affordable rent for people under a certain income, you would take inflationary pressure off the private housing market.
I'm not an economist but it seems obvious to me that paying private investors rent in order to provide short to medium term social housing is counter productive in the medium to long term, and it's something for example Ireland is doing a lot, contributing to Ireland's housing nightmare.
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.