I don't agree that every solution Finland or Iceland comes up with can be replicated to the rest of the world. These are ethnically homogenous countries with a small population and the majority of which is centered in a small area. Swedens perfect approach to education in the 2000's has now been debunked and even the swedes are telling everyone not to do what they did! I think the same would be true of Finlands "solution".
The US by contrast is a continent in its own right with a vastly diverse set of people and cultures. My own experience of the bay area is people are extremely giving and donate a lot of money and time towards homeless efforts. However I feel the latest backlash is born from fatigue towards no solution in sight. If homeless refuse to accept help or seek alternative options to sleeping on the street why would you want to keep helping? I am still stunned that the tiny city of San Francisco had a $300m annual budget to help less than 5000 people. Thats $60k/homeless person, this is greater than the per capita GDP of every single country on earth except the US.
Anecdotally I have a guy living in his car on my street that is filled to the ceiling with trash, he refuses to move or get into a shelter despite us trying to help him. Sadly the neighbors on the street are starting to sour towards him after 6 months of having social workers reach out to help and various charities try to assist.
Man am I tired of hearing "the US is too big, too different, too whatever" when it comes to social policies. Social policies don't have to be implemented at a federal level.
SF is doing it wrong? Fine. No one has to do things like SF. But there's no reason not to try a Finnish policy at a city, county or state level if it'd been demonstrated to work.
I don't want to be needlessly cynical but it seems more plausible to attribute all that money being spent because the elites don't want to interact with the homeless, rather than out of compassion to the homeless.
I'm no pro on the subject but it's always worth remembering that statements of this form are almost always wrong:
"300m annual budget to help less than 5000 people. That's $60k/homeless person"
Maybe you have a killer source and I'm out of line, but the usual issues is that these numbers almost never come from one comprehensive study or source. You can't just grab two numbers without context and divide them to say anything meaningful. What exactly is that 300m/yr spent on? How many people did it successfully get off the streets or prevent from ending up there? How many new homeless people arrived over that same time span?
I don't have a meaningful answer to these questions and I'm sure you're right that there are better ways that the money can be spent. It's just that those numbers can be absolutely accurate and still fail to be a meaningful way to understand the problem.
This ”ethnically homogenous” ”small country the size of a state” stuff is a really tired excuse.
Are you guys too ethnically heterogenous to have hundreds of military bases all over the world, have the most advanced weapons technology known to mankind, and global military dominance?
Are you too heterogenous to have science and engineering facilities in the world? Too heterogenous to have the largest corporations in the world? Too heterogenous to produce some of the best art in the world? Some of the best athletes?
Being so good at so many things, being terrible at things like this sounds more like a choice rather than destiny.
It's unfortunate that the culture in the US is so deprived of compassion and so focused on the "punish first" reaction to anything outside of the ordinary that it will be difficult if not impossible to get anything like this solution adopted.
It's plan to see, even in the comments in this forum so many are really quick to jump to "but mental illness..." "but drugs..." etc...
It makes me sad to realize this is unlikely to change during my lifetime.
It doesn't just make me sad, it enrages me. I did everything I was "supposed" to and still lost. I usually avoid making any political statements because it just causes fights and solves nothing, but its just wrong how we treat each other. My life is really miserable through no fault of my own and I am on the verge of losing it entirely. I am terrified of ending up on the streets, would not survive it, and never imagined it possible before. Living in the US Midwest I hear constantly how people in need are leeches and lazy and should just "work harder" etc. A major part of my hopelessness is the cultural norm and beliefs of the people I have to be around, and I have to be around them because I cannot manage to be anywhere else after my life was stolen. Some people are born empathetic, but culture has such a strong effect on how people view others than in many cases even when they suffer themselves they still cannot see the reality and continue to victim blame and rationalize. I hate the egos and excuses that come out every time the topic comes up. I hate how there aren't basic social protections like the rest of the first world has...housing, healthcare, humane things. I am tired of all of it and have failed to get anywhere better for me permanently because of the same reasons that put me here in the first place. It's a trap once you get in it in the USA. It only goes downhill for the overwhelming majority who find themselves here.
The sad thing is that the right thing to do is generally also the logical thing to do.
Housing homeless is less costly than providing jails + ambulances + other services needed when people are on the street.
The data is all there, but people will use sophism to make arguments that are either not proven, or that have been actively disproved. I mean, many arguments against helping the poor can be boiled down to: 'it isn't good enough, so let them rot'.
The majority of Americans I know have a lot of compassion for the homeless. They’d prefer they be helped, but our gov’t has yet to find a solution.
Of course some people have a negative opinion of the homeless due to negative interactions - being scammed, not really homeless, taking advantage of people.
US public housing projects are some of the most dangerous places on the planet. We need to give the common person a path out of poverty that doesn't involve higher education. Once those people are able to move up the ladder, those at the very bottom (homeless) will be able to move up as well.
I always wonder if Puritanical roots in US have something to do with it. There seems to be a general belief that people "get only what they deserve". The belief that evil and misfortune comes from within each of us and some cosmic scale is constantly judging whether each person's demons are getting the better of them. These beliefs also carried through to capitalism where individuals who out-exploit and out-hoard everyone else are able to claim most of the rewards of society but any accountability for failing is also placed on individuals who just didn't "work hard enough", or didn't "want it badly enough", weren't "strong enough". Basically if you have any genetic propensity for addictive behavior, mental illness or self-destructive behaviour, belong to a group that's discriminated against, were born in poverty or with parents who didn't have the means or the time to raise you "properly", it's nobody's fault but your own and society doesn't owe you any help, support or compassion. A very heartless and cruel culture that'll ultimately cause our stagnation and eventual downfall.
It's a classic problem of mistaking the symptom of homelessness for the problem. If a person simply has a life event that wipes out their finances and they get evicted, okay sure - providing cheap housing just for people in their situation is great. But as much as we don't like stereotypes, a lot of homeless people do actually end up in that situation because of behavioral cycles that still need to be broken. What makes it worse is that homelessness changes a person - and sometimes they are unable to be a part of society right away for more reasons than money (and sometimes they don't even want to). My family operates a hotel that will sell off excess hotel rooms to various homeless groups in the winter - and many times the homeless don't want to be complete inside, so they open windows, etc. and only be as "inside" as they absolutely need to be to survive. That does cause problems if you share infrastructure with other people.
I think the word "solution" is being used offhandedly here, to mean a mitigating response.
They claim that homelessness is dropping in Finland (contrary to other EU countries), but don't go so far as to say nobody is homeless.
Being homeless doesn't necessarily mean you are unable to afford accommodation; even if you have no private income, this may be covered by welfare benefits. In many cases psychological issues, drug addiction and criminal history are barriers to renting in the private market, which result in homelessness. Being "moved" out of this accomodation may not imply being made homeless again, in some cases the destination may be a more managed form of accommodation (e.g. rehab; prison).
More homes means higher supply means rents fall? And the three-month trial period, additional support services, and near-guaranteed contract in perpetuity would help get people into homes who might previously have had difficulty holding down a job, or might previously have been evicted for reasons other than rent.
I live in Salt Lake City and we were doing a pretty good job with this approach. Unfortunately, a change in the police chain of command and in the local government led to scaling back of the housing program and a switch to a more traditional model (arrest, choice between jail or rehab, various support programs, housing at the end if you make it through all that).
This new system (which is really the old system come full circle) is much less effective as is clear to anyone who walks around the city. We have a beautiful public library downtown, which is completely unpleasant to visit because it has turned into the place where the homeless stay during the day. About half the times I go I see someone either being arrested or in active withdrawal.
Like most social problems, the solutions are simple, but politically hard to sell, and even harder to maintain once they've been put in place.
One problem of applying this to the American cities that have a homeless problem is that housing in those cities is prohibitively expensive.
Go to a city like Seattle and a 1 bed 1 bath is going to cost 300k+ to construct at density. (The city doesn't have enough land to build enough tiny houses at 30k or so a pop, so fixing the entire housing problem that way isn't doable.)
Right because Helsinki is famous for it's cheap real estate. Oh wait.. Condos are pretty comparable to Seattle and single family homes in the city are very rare and expensive. Seattle has probably built more housing in the last 5 years than Helsinki proper in the last 50.
Increased investment in public transportation would make it easier to use land that's not in already-densely-packed urban areas. It's not as though the US has less land than Finland, after all.
a 1 bed 1 bath is going to cost 300k+ to construct at density
This is a problem that can be worked on that will benefit everyone across the income spectrum. No way we should be stuck with $~7500 per square foot construction costs (assuming a small 1 bed 1 bath would be 400sqft).
It’s my understanding that lots of US cities have more vacant homes than homeless people, so perhaps our solution is not building homes but simply placing people in existing homes.
Does anyone here think markets alone could solve this problem? Or do you see that coordinated group action is necessary to practically solve problems markets can’t fix?
Depends on how you define "the problem". Homelessness is a symptom of several other things widely considered to be problems.
If you limit the problem to "some people who want a house don't have enough money to afford living space qualifying as a house", then broadly speaking market solutions are possible because we can assume these people participate in the market via their "demand" and their ability to "supply" something in return. Obviously there's an active debate on many market issues here, whether around too much market regulation (eg NIMBY), or too little market regulation (eg minimum wage).
However, my understanding is that there is mounting evidence that the homeless population is composed of people who have either no demand for a house ("free spirits") or no ability to supply anything to the market (mentally disabled). Obviously in these cases the market is not very useful, and only functions insomuch as those outside of the homeless population include it in their "demand function".
Homelessness would never be "solved" completely, by market or government, as there are always going to be people who transition into homelessness for unexpected/emergency reasons. Would a market prevent tenuous financial situations, broken family ties, substance use disorders, schizophrenia, PTSD, domestic violence, intimate partner violence? The causes of homelessness are too multi-factorial and hard to prevent, I think the best we can do is a dramatic reduction, not a complete solution.
In my opinion, to solve all of these predisposing/causative factors, we'd need a much much stronger healthcare system, and probably UBI or a strong welfare system, to cover all the above scenarios. Even so, good healthcare and welfare won't matter that much in acute emergency scenarios, for that we need vigilance and persistence and unrelenting altruism.
On the surface this kind of solution is easy to dismiss as an expensive socialist extreme; a cost to the taxpayer that there is no political appetite for in other countries. Yet counter-intuitively this is likely a saving for the taxpayer, as hospitals and prisons often end up filling this role, at a much larger cost than simply housing people.
Said bluntly, who gives a shit about the taxpayers. Some things are to be done because they are right, not because they save money, even if they end up saving money.
The ROI-first perspective when talking about social policies has created the monstrous society the US is now.
The savings are there, the article even talks about it. I think the socialist extreme is the government owning 70% of the housing in the city. Not that it's a bad extreme, it sounds like it works fine, but out of the ordinary.
Comparing other countries'policies to our own is like saying "but it works on mycomputer". There are too many differences in culture, rights and laws to just pretend that if something works over there, then it should work here too.
This annoys me to no end; so is this intended to make sure no one does anything about a serious problem with this Whataboutism? Or is it intended to make us care less?
What exactly is the purpose of this kind of comment? Why on earth wouldn't it work?
[+] [-] 1290cc|6 years ago|reply
The US by contrast is a continent in its own right with a vastly diverse set of people and cultures. My own experience of the bay area is people are extremely giving and donate a lot of money and time towards homeless efforts. However I feel the latest backlash is born from fatigue towards no solution in sight. If homeless refuse to accept help or seek alternative options to sleeping on the street why would you want to keep helping? I am still stunned that the tiny city of San Francisco had a $300m annual budget to help less than 5000 people. Thats $60k/homeless person, this is greater than the per capita GDP of every single country on earth except the US.
Anecdotally I have a guy living in his car on my street that is filled to the ceiling with trash, he refuses to move or get into a shelter despite us trying to help him. Sadly the neighbors on the street are starting to sour towards him after 6 months of having social workers reach out to help and various charities try to assist.
[+] [-] rndmize|6 years ago|reply
SF is doing it wrong? Fine. No one has to do things like SF. But there's no reason not to try a Finnish policy at a city, county or state level if it'd been demonstrated to work.
[+] [-] Bakary|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sampo|6 years ago|reply
Minnesota has pretty much the same population as Finland, and is almost as homogeneous, too.
[+] [-] kjeetgill|6 years ago|reply
"300m annual budget to help less than 5000 people. That's $60k/homeless person"
Maybe you have a killer source and I'm out of line, but the usual issues is that these numbers almost never come from one comprehensive study or source. You can't just grab two numbers without context and divide them to say anything meaningful. What exactly is that 300m/yr spent on? How many people did it successfully get off the streets or prevent from ending up there? How many new homeless people arrived over that same time span?
I don't have a meaningful answer to these questions and I'm sure you're right that there are better ways that the money can be spent. It's just that those numbers can be absolutely accurate and still fail to be a meaningful way to understand the problem.
[+] [-] opportune|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sroussey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] originalvichy|6 years ago|reply
Are you guys too ethnically heterogenous to have hundreds of military bases all over the world, have the most advanced weapons technology known to mankind, and global military dominance?
Are you too heterogenous to have science and engineering facilities in the world? Too heterogenous to have the largest corporations in the world? Too heterogenous to produce some of the best art in the world? Some of the best athletes?
Being so good at so many things, being terrible at things like this sounds more like a choice rather than destiny.
[+] [-] luckydata|6 years ago|reply
It's plan to see, even in the comments in this forum so many are really quick to jump to "but mental illness..." "but drugs..." etc...
It makes me sad to realize this is unlikely to change during my lifetime.
[+] [-] adammichaelc|6 years ago|reply
“Utah reduced chronic homelessness by 91%. Here’s how”
https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni...
[+] [-] hestipod|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 4ntonius8lock|6 years ago|reply
Housing homeless is less costly than providing jails + ambulances + other services needed when people are on the street.
The data is all there, but people will use sophism to make arguments that are either not proven, or that have been actively disproved. I mean, many arguments against helping the poor can be boiled down to: 'it isn't good enough, so let them rot'.
[+] [-] refurb|6 years ago|reply
Of course some people have a negative opinion of the homeless due to negative interactions - being scammed, not really homeless, taking advantage of people.
[+] [-] linuxftw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mladenkovacevic|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0898|6 years ago|reply
The article says they have to pay rent or they get kicked out, but doesn't explain how these homeless people can suddenly afford rent.
[+] [-] TallGuyShort|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sampo|6 years ago|reply
General housing allowance [1] + unemployment benefits [2] + last resort social assistance [3]
[1] https://www.kela.fi/web/en/housing-benefits
[2] https://www.kela.fi/web/en/quick-guide-to-unemployment-benef...
[3] https://www.kela.fi/web/en/social-assistance
[+] [-] AnssiH|6 years ago|reply
Kela is the Social Insurance Institution of Finland (https://www.kela.fi/web/en).
[+] [-] vinceguidry|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnode|6 years ago|reply
They claim that homelessness is dropping in Finland (contrary to other EU countries), but don't go so far as to say nobody is homeless.
Being homeless doesn't necessarily mean you are unable to afford accommodation; even if you have no private income, this may be covered by welfare benefits. In many cases psychological issues, drug addiction and criminal history are barriers to renting in the private market, which result in homelessness. Being "moved" out of this accomodation may not imply being made homeless again, in some cases the destination may be a more managed form of accommodation (e.g. rehab; prison).
[+] [-] Qwertystop|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] logfromblammo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TaylorAlexander|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffreyrogers|6 years ago|reply
This new system (which is really the old system come full circle) is much less effective as is clear to anyone who walks around the city. We have a beautiful public library downtown, which is completely unpleasant to visit because it has turned into the place where the homeless stay during the day. About half the times I go I see someone either being arrested or in active withdrawal.
Like most social problems, the solutions are simple, but politically hard to sell, and even harder to maintain once they've been put in place.
[+] [-] petrikapu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TaylorAlexander|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] com2kid|6 years ago|reply
Go to a city like Seattle and a 1 bed 1 bath is going to cost 300k+ to construct at density. (The city doesn't have enough land to build enough tiny houses at 30k or so a pop, so fixing the entire housing problem that way isn't doable.)
[+] [-] kazinator|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redisman|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Qwertystop|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WillPostForFood|6 years ago|reply
This is a problem that can be worked on that will benefit everyone across the income spectrum. No way we should be stuck with $~7500 per square foot construction costs (assuming a small 1 bed 1 bath would be 400sqft).
[+] [-] WhompingWindows|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TaylorAlexander|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TaylorAlexander|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yitosda|6 years ago|reply
If you limit the problem to "some people who want a house don't have enough money to afford living space qualifying as a house", then broadly speaking market solutions are possible because we can assume these people participate in the market via their "demand" and their ability to "supply" something in return. Obviously there's an active debate on many market issues here, whether around too much market regulation (eg NIMBY), or too little market regulation (eg minimum wage).
However, my understanding is that there is mounting evidence that the homeless population is composed of people who have either no demand for a house ("free spirits") or no ability to supply anything to the market (mentally disabled). Obviously in these cases the market is not very useful, and only functions insomuch as those outside of the homeless population include it in their "demand function".
[+] [-] WhompingWindows|6 years ago|reply
In my opinion, to solve all of these predisposing/causative factors, we'd need a much much stronger healthcare system, and probably UBI or a strong welfare system, to cover all the above scenarios. Even so, good healthcare and welfare won't matter that much in acute emergency scenarios, for that we need vigilance and persistence and unrelenting altruism.
[+] [-] Qwertystop|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnode|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luckydata|6 years ago|reply
The ROI-first perspective when talking about social policies has created the monstrous society the US is now.
[+] [-] Konnstann|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dgzl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OldSchoolJohnny|6 years ago|reply
What exactly is the purpose of this kind of comment? Why on earth wouldn't it work?
[+] [-] Bodhisattya|6 years ago|reply
Who knew? I am not partial to 'handout' economy, but one wonders where did capitalism go wrong.