Comment by 1290cc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1290cc | Hacker News Reader

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.

> 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.

Why is it only bought up for social policies? Why is the size and ethnic makeup never a barrier to starting a war or lowering taxes? It seems to mostly just be a lazy excuse to avoid $thingIDontWant.

It's also implicitly a white supremacist argument, "we can't have nice things because we have ethnic minorities".

The fact that you can just move to SF from Alaska does make difference. Here in Europe we have sort same problem and the poor Romanians and also the people taking advantage of anothers countries social system was definitely one factor for Brexit. A lot of countries that are in the EU are slowly being even allowed to work in different countries, the integration didn't happen overnight. So I'm sure similar problems apply.

People here say a lot of homeless like to move to SF because of climate too?

There's nothing that California can legally do to stop someone from Alaska coming over and staying. But there's plenty that EU countries can do to stop exactly what you described - free movement does come with a range of limitations, like the fact that after 3 months you either have to be employed or have private health insurance to continue "exercising your EU free movement rights". If you don't then you can be kicked out. It's just that no EU country is actually enforcing this law - but it could have done if it wanted to.

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.

> These are ethnically homogenous countries with a small population and the majority of which is centered in a small area.

Minnesota has pretty much the same population as Finland, and is almost as homogeneous, too.

Not sure you’ve been to the Twin Cities lately

Have you been to Helsinki lately?

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.

You should look into the efforts of people trying to get a public audit of where that money goes. At that budget (now doubling), lots of companies and non-profits live on that. And some homeless.

The "ethnically homogenous" argument is just a thinly veiled claim that "we can't do it in the US because of minorities".

Was $300m/yr. Going to $600m/yr

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.

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