Finland has slashed homelessness; the rest of Europe is failing | Hacker News Reader

Finland has slashed homelessness; the rest of Europe is failing

economist.com

294 pointsashergill352 comments

I'm in the US. I was homeless as a teenager (not by choice). I live adjacent to a major homeless community (not by design). My ex left our family to join the homeless community (she struggles with mh issues). I have some observations.

We could sharply reduce homeless numbers here if we had in-patient mental health facilities (for non-wealthy), comprehensive housing aid and politically powerful job placement programs.

I just looked up our jail budget and inmate population; we pay ~$25k/inmate/year (excluding court & police costs). That money gets us a pretty solid guarantee that arrested mentally ill people will reoffend, given how many entrenched systems there are to make sure that convicted people are locked out of most jobs and housing.

In-patient services for mental health were decimated in the 80's. Reagan cut the funding and cities were flooded with homeless + mentally ill people. I was at UC Berkeley at the time this happened. There were so many seriously mentally ill folks on the street. It was sad.

It worked out great for Republicans. The spike in crime rates made their "tough on crime" message resonate. When you're homeless and mentally ill it's basically guaranteed that you're going to have fights with the police.

Tough on crime isn't purely a republican stance though. Democrats worked hand-in-hand with republicans in the late 1980s to push through many tough on crime policies. This was due to crime skyrocketing in the 1980s due to cheap and abundant crack cocaine flooding America's streets.

If you replace Republican with Conservative it works. Hell, our current President is debt-hating Conservative if you view it by the bills he's authored/supported as Senator in the past 30 years.

The new POTUS and VP were tough on crime icons up until that recently became unpopular.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/09/joe-bid...

https://www.latimes.com/local/political/la-me-ff-federal-jud...

This is about as inaccurate a take as one could possibly imagine and is a great example of seeing the world through political bias.

Reagan did not lead the charge. The ACLU was actively involved in shutting down inpatient psychiatric facilities because of the abuse that was occurring.[1]

With the advent of antipsychotics, our-patient treatment became an option and was regarded as more humane.

[1] https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-history-mental-institutions

The news media, at the time, said it was due to federal funding being cut, and Reagan was in charge.

I don't doubt there are liberty issues with institutions, though.

EDIT:

Here's a good summary:

https://www.kqed.org/news/11209729/did-the-emptying-of-menta...

Now I remember: pushed the funding from federal to state responsibility, which caused many states to empty out the institutions.

And where do you think many of those people ended up? Berkeley, CA. Because they were sometimes put on buses there, and sometimes it was just the most friendly place to be.

The institutions were being emptied out because organizations like the ACLU brought cases to court to have them emptied.

People were being held against their will in conditions that were causing a stir in the media. It was regarded as a human rights issue that they not be confined unless there was no other option. Hence the shift to outpatient care in the community.

Pining it all on Reagan’s cuts is grossly inaccurate.

You seem to have an axe to grind. What you say is not supported by the evidence. It's definitely true in some cases, but not the main reason for the changes.

See the NPR article I link to, and many others.

Just FWIW the bus runs the other way: https://hsh.sfgov.org/services/problem-solving/homeward-boun...

Yeah, well, that's great. But I read many articles about police departments in other states putting homeless people on a bus for the Bay Area. That's is not cool of them. It overwhelmed the social services in the Bay Area.

> In-patient services for mental health were decimated in the 80's. Reagan cut the funding and cities were flooded with homeless

Deinstitutionalization was a broadly supported policy, especially by advocates of the mentally ill; conditions of the widespread institutionalization were horrible.

The failure to create substitute systems to address the easily forseeable consequences of deinstitutionalization was obviously a problem, but not a uniquely Republican one (though certainly Republicans were more opposed to fixing the problems once they materialized.)

Just an observation. The mental health system doesn’t have much capacity to begin with. Even for middle-class folk with insurance it can be very hard to get treatment. There is a shortage of mental health professionals which is projected to get worse. Psychiatrists are mostly doing medication management because that’s where they’re most effective. Following the path of getting treatment—everything including diagnosis, therapy, medication, and accommodation requests—requires a shocking amount of initiative on the part of the patient.

I would love to see the country dig itself out of the hole. I think the mental health crisis itself is huge. Both in-patient and out-patient. We need more psychiatrists and psychiatrist PAs.

> Psychiatrists are mostly doing medication management because that’s where they’re most effective.

I think it's money: insurance will shell a lot more $/hour if they do 15 minute medication appointments instead of hour therapy + medication appointments.

Integrating counselling and medical doctoring is a strange idea, and it's somewhat weird that it's even as much of a thing as it is. Drug-focused psychiatrists are certainly going to be a thing so long as med school is so costly and med schools conspire to keep the supply of doctors low.

Increased secularization is also probably a factor. I presume going to your clergy for assistance was previously more common. I'm sure that kind of care had mixed effectiveness, but suspect it less available and norms are bit different for initiating that kind of conversation.

> Integrating counselling and medical doctoring is a strange idea

Why? It doesn't seem any different to me than surgery + physical therapy for a non-brain-oriented medical problem.

Right, and a surgeon doesn't serve as your physical therapist just like the psychiatrist doesn't serve as your talk therapist. They're different roles, even though they're both addressing the same part of your health.

Under the US system, the surgeon has to press the patient to learn what operation they're going to perform, because the physical therapist / primary care doc / specialist doc isn't paid to communicate with the surgeon, but they're willing to guess the operation if the patient doesn't take great notes.

It's weird even when the medical doctor is trying to alleviate the same symptoms as the counselor? I think the way you put it simply sounds weird because a psychiatrist isn't the first doctor you think of. The concept isn't strange at all, especially considering the huge overlap in training.

Going to dissent here—we need psychiatrists doing medication management because there are so many medications today, and so many previously untreatable conditions which are treatable with modern medications.

If we switched to one-stop therapy + meds, the psychiatrist shortage would be worse.

the problem with this approach is there's not an obvious person to consult with to decide whether to start with therapy, medication, or both. I find that therapists tend to consider themselves unqualified to even suggest that their clients look into medication (or perhaps they are explicitly prohibited from doing so, idk). psychiatrists can either give you drugs or say no, but they tend to offer you something if there's at least a chance it could help.

The problems with this approach are probably even bigger than that, but given they're already stretched this thin and there are years long waiting lists for new patients it will probably be some time before we can really address the more nuanced issues of phychiatry.

This comes back to what I mentioned earlier in the thread that it “requires a shocking amount of initiative on the part of the patient.”

There are also easy and hard paths through the system. If you are motivated to get a diagnosis, you can talk to a psychologist or psychiatrist and get a diagnosis. You can look for a therapist who specializes in those issues. You can take this diagnosis to a psychiatrist and say “I have diagnosis X and symptoms Y.”

If you go into the hospital with a broken leg, you can just check into the hospital and you will come out with a cast and an appointment to have it removed. If you have mental health issues, unless they are severe enough to require hospitalization, you are in charge of your own treatment.

Can confirm. Suffered some major trauma. I have money and insurance, and even I gave up on help.

Have my 15 minute appointment to get some ptsd drugs, and learn to push through.

Inpatient mental hospitals used to be in every state. They housed not only the mentally ill but also the chronically homeless and other outcasts. As the advent of antipsychotics and antidepressants reduced their population, these hospitals were an obvious target for budget cuts throughout the 80s and 90s. They money for the community health centers that were supposed to replace them never materialized, and thousands of patients were left without access to their medication. Some estimate that over 50% of the homeless population is mentally ill.

Ironically prison systems now provide these services (and sometimes paying more for them!!), but in a much worse environment for the patients.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/showsasylums/

I'll never forget this fact because there is a King of the Hill episode (10:13) where a mentally-ill, homeless man named Spongy exclaims "Ronald Reagan kicked me out of my mental hospital!" and Hank bashfully tries to justify it as part of winning the cold war.

I remember that episode, seen them all at least twice. I was just a kid when they all were closing but thinking back it seemed like a good thing. I do wonder now where people thought all those people in there would go. I think a lot of people believed they did not need to be there and were getting a free ride as strange as that sounds.

I would add that you are missing a major component for why mental hospitals went away-- public opinion changed. The public was made aware of abuses and such abuses were also dramatized in One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest. There was pressure to shut these down.

Separately, I will add that we need these hospitals back desperately. I don't know who will sign up for this tough job, but we need a place for the mentally ill to reside that is not the middle of the street.

True.

The abuses are worse now, distributed rather than institutional, which makes the abuse harder to combat and easier to ignore.

I am not in the USA, and we have a significant problem too.

Odd that "One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest" could have such an effect, but we have all kinds of movies and TV shows now depicting how terrible prison is and that doesn't seem to have a similar (but opposite) effect.

"One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" is about how forcing someone into a mental hospital just because they don't fit into society is evil and dehumanizing.

There's lots of movies and shows that take place in prisons, but th prison itself is usually just the setting. The film is rarely making a statement about incarceration itself. Also, we have a much more fragmented high volume media culture, so it's not clear that film and TV can effect cultural change like they used to be able to.

Pennhurst and Bridgewater State Hospitals and the resulting exposes on these facilities were the start of the abandonment of most state run mental health services and facilities.

Search for "Suffer the Children" from 1968, by NBC10. added: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YG33HvIKOgQ&feature=emb_logo

added: Also search "Titicut Follies" for temporal context

Those calls to action lead to defunding and closing of many facilities on mass regardless of the services they provided or the conditions. From orphanages up to mental health institutions.

That period was followed up by a small influential group of individuals that lobbied very hard to have state schools for the handicapped and severe development delays closed in preference of services provided by local schools culminating in Title 1, which was eventually federally mandated regardless of the level of care and support a child might need.

Both of these large changes led to significant changes in the cultural acceptance of institutionalization of any individual young or old, even to the detriment of those individuals in some cases.

> As the advent of antipsychotics and antidepressants reduced their population, these hospitals were an obvious target for budget cuts throughout the 80s and 90s

Do you have a source that shows that public funding for hospitals and treatments for mental health declined during this time period?

From a quick search is seems it has risen considerably throughout the 80s to today.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/252393/total-us-expendit...

Trump stomping on his predecessor's sand castle is not a new phenomenon. Patients be damned, Jimmy Carter giveth and The Gipper taketh away.[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1...

From your link:

> the Mental Health Systems Act supported and financed community mental health support systems

I'm missing something here.

Not to mention if a night in jail or fine (which itself is not warranted if the person is only mentally ill and not a danger to anyone or themselves), turns into a criminal charge that is then prosecuted and leads to a conviction, you've just made their path to rejoining society so much harder. Likely, their mental health predispositions will also be made much worse due to the strain of prison. The system keeps trotting along because there's money to be made by prisons. People reflexively want the homeless off the streets and will tolerate, even reward heavy handed prosecutors. I've fallen in that category of punitive nearby residents - I live in a place near what has become a runaway encampment. When I drive by it and think how close my place is, I get angry at the homeless, the blight and trash. I have to force myself to think of the humanity, the suffering and lack of options these folks have. But to be honest, other than try to support local action to help these people, I don't do much either. I take pride in not joining the rest of the NIMBYs but you wouldn't believe the shit fit people around here threw because mobile showers were coming to the encampment once a week. Some of the people who threw the biggest shit fit also have political yard signs supporting anti-poverty measures, but as they say, talk is cheap; yard sign, sure - build cheap community housing near me or allow people to camp - hold your horses...

I was taken political prisoner three times in the Broadlawns facility ran by Polk County Iowa - currently helping Federal Medicaid claw back the fraudulent $20k hospital bill. Lynchpins of the rampant political corruption is nepotism between Chief Justice Susan Larson Christensen/ brother 4th District Chief Judge Jeff Larson and Hon Mary Tabor/brother Chief Deputy Attorney General Eric Tabor.

What you speak of does exist, it's Medicaid - the issue is only in states like Iowa do you have such due process free statutes like Iowa Code 125/229 that magistrates can lock you up without solid evidence that the person is a true threat to themselves or others.

> What you speak of does exist, it's Medicaid

I can't say that in-patient mental health care (for non-wealthy) is available nowhere in the US. But it is scarce enough that you may have the only example.

I am excluding 72hour-hold facilities because they are more like an extended Dr.s visit, than any sort of rehabilitation.

No questions asked monastic living without any Jesus down your throat is rare. Only the homeless and wealthy can afford to walk from their apartment/mortgage for weeks without income.

I saw several women that were domestic abuse victims - their family labeled them as crazy because Iowa doesn't really have any emergency shelters to speak of.

An ex of mine worked with the homeless through a training program attached to a shelter. Maybe 2 or 3 out of 10 took the training seriously and were stable enough to actually put it to any use. The rest were just there for free bus passes and meals, or were too unstable to hold even an unskilled job for a month.

The hardest part was that those who needed help the most could have gotten it through the program, but were so untrusting of seeing a doctor that they flat out refused- most thought they would be locked up in a ward or some similar conspiracy fear.

Winter around here is no joke, and it is hard to see them and not want to help, but the truth is that the visibly homeless don't want it enough to change. The invisible homeless- the people who don't look like a living stereotype- usually make it out because they still have hope.

People who are seriously helped by the program will not return, but those who were not helped will come back. Over the long run the program will be full of people who cannot be helped and a small number who will do well. So seeing 2 out of 10 doing well does not shed light on the program's success.

As someone who had the unfortunate experience of being locked in a psych ward, there’s nothing “conspiracy” related about the fear of being involuntary committed, where you get stripped of all basic rights with no trial.

And there's usually no legal recourse either. It has to be some extreme abuse for the possibility to sue successfully.

>most thought they would be locked up in a ward or some similar conspiracy fear.

This fear is quite legitimate though. Search around online forums for involuntary commitment and you'll see lots of horror stories. There are even news articles about it.[0]

If a homeless person can get back on their feet, then they are a full member of society with all the same rights as everyone else. If they get institutionalized, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, then that'll be a mark that follows them around. They will be denied some rights.[1] A patient at such a facility often has fewer rights than even people in prison. At least in prison if your time is up then you'll be released.

The problems don't stop there either. Misdiagnoses are common. Even when they aren't, it's likely that the treatment they offer has no or minimal effect. It's also possible that the trauma of being in such a facility causes issues of its own.

I can completely understand why people would prefer to struggle with their problems as homeless, but free, rather than go to such a facility.

[0] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/pub...

[1] https://reason.com/volokh/2020/09/10/the-second-amendment-an...

> politically powerful job placement programs

What do you mean here?

From what I have seen, job placement programs flounder due to lack of strong, consistent interest from elected officials. Without sticks or carrots from local Govs, area employers ignore employer services in favor of whatever hiring practices they're already using.

source: Five years as employment service specialist and another five years trying to help my kids get jobs in spite of first-time hires being algorithmically blackballed by default.

Related news: European Court of Human Rights just made important ruling that decriminalizes begging. Making it criminal to be poor is against human rights.

-----

ECHR 021 (2021)

19.01.2021

(Judgment Lacatus v. Switzerland)

The penalty imposed on the applicant for begging in public breached the Convention

In today’s Chamber judgment 1 in the case of Lăcătuşv. Switzerland (application no. 14065/15) the European Court of Human Rights held, unanimously, that there had been:

a violation of Article 8 (right to respect for private and family life)of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The case concerned an order for the applicant to pay a fine of 500 Swiss francs (CHF) (approximately 464 euros (EUR)) for begging in public in Geneva, and her detention in a remand prison for five days for failure to pay the fine.

The Court observed that the applicant, who was illiterate and came from an extremely poor family, had no work and was not in receipt of social benefits. Begging constituted a means of survival for her. Being in a clearly vulnerable situation, the applicant had had the right, inherent in human dignity, to be able to convey her plight and attempt to meet her basic needs by begging.

The Court considered that the penalty imposed on the applicant had not been proportionate either to the aim of combating organised crime or to the aim of protecting the rights of passers-by, residents and shopkeepers.

The Court did not subscribe to the Federal Court’s argument that less restrictive measures would not have achieved a comparable result.In the Court’s view, the penalty imposed had infringed the applicant’s human dignity and impaired the very essence of the rights protected by Article 8 of the Convention, and the State had thus overstepped its margin of appreciation in the present case.

This means that anti-panhandling/anti-begging laws will become void soon in several countries.

This could lead to some interesting results if it's true that some branches of organized crime use organized begging.

Yes. This is very exiting.

The ruling creates real incentives to attack real problems, instead of brushing them out of sight.

Unfortunately I would imagine that it's still easier to spread a narrative blaming the EU than to attack the real problems.

The beggar was not Switzerland's problem, it was a tourist.

I doubt it, that court have no enforcement power and Switzerland has direct democracy so isn't easily swayed by rulings like this.

That sounds like a reasonable decision.

After all advertisement is nothing but begging to increase the profit of the advertiser. If I really need to buy something, I'm sure I can do so without advertisement.

Advertisement, be it some marketing phone call, someone offering me whatever subscription on the corridor of the mall, and ads making my phone browsing experience super slow are a much bigger nuisance to me than beggars.

The amount of various form of soliticing might vary where you live. But forbidding everything that's a nuisance to someone won't be the solution.

A bit of a jump. I mean I get that you dislike advertising and I agree with you, but equating it to begging is reaching and diluting the discussion with your issue is adding confusion.

Where is the difference? Businesses charge more than what their costs are, the rest is their profit. Beggars request more than what they deliver, everything is their profit. Still beggars seem to succeed worse. I have no problem with that, but there is no reason to "declare" their business model illegal.

If you buy an Apple product you bought a status symbol. If you give to a beggar you bought a warm feeling, that it did not harm you and helped them.

Disclaimer: I have never bought an Apple product. I hardly ever give money to beggars. But I do give them food if I happen to carry some. Which could be my supremacy that I don't want the to spend my money on alcohol.

That depends on how you define 'costs'. You seem to be narrowing a business' costs to COGS (cost of goods sold), and disregarding marketing and financing costs which may be critical to reaching or maintaining an economy of scale.

Your claim would make some sense (not much, but at least some) if companies were panhandling at the train station.

From the size of the billboards there I can see a connection.

> Related news: European Court of Human Rights just made important ruling that decriminalizes begging. Making it criminal to be poor is against human rights.

Lol, you're taking a very ungenuine shortcut. Legal residents who also happen to be poor do not resort to begging because they receive help through the appropriate welfare programs. The the overwhelming large majority of people affected by this law are foreigners who take advantage of Schengen to come to a rich country only for begging. These people have no legitimity of being here and earn no sympathy from me.

I sure that we both can agree that

- illegitimacy or being foreigners does not remove human rights and human dignity.

- feelings or sympathy or lack of them should not be taken account when administering justice or government policy.

ps. Roma from Romania are not illegitimate. They are free to move across Europe. Free travel is also for the poor. Swiss voters reject bid to curb EU freedom of movement https://www.dw.com/en/swiss-voters-reject-bid-to-curb-eu-fre...

>Swiss voters on Sunday overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to limit the free movement of people and immigration from the European Union.

Romania isn't in Schengen so yes, they are illegitimate. But you're the only one talking about Roma here.

What should be taken into account for policy making is the interest of the country's citizens (and non-national legal residents to a lesser extent), not "begging tourists".

Freedom of movement also applies to citizens of non-Schengen EU countries.

> Roma from Romania are not illegitimate. They are free to move across Europe.

Note that freedom of movevement inside EU/EEA is not unrestricted (like, say, inside USA), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Rights_Directive :

> To be fully covered by the European right of free movement, the EEA citizen needs to exercise one of the four treaty rights:

> - working as an employee (this includes looking for work for a reasonable amount of time),

> - working as a self-employed person,

> - studying,

> - being self-sufficient or retired.

I agree with the sentiment but based on the text of the ruling, I can't agree with the ruling itself [0]. Missing from your summary is:

- "The applicant, Violeta-Sibianca Lăcătuş, is a Romanian national who was born in 1992 and lives in Bistrita-Nasaud (Romania)."

- "In 2011 Ms Lăcătuş, who was unable to find work, began asking for charity in Geneva."

Why was somebody who "lives in" Romania begging in Geneva? Would she not have received social benefits in Romania? This looks like a perverse kind of tourism. Refugees and asylum seekers I can understand but Romania isn't a warzone or dictatorship, it's an EU member state.

And I think "decriminalizes begging" is a bit hyperbolic. The court did set some precedent but they were also clear that a critical factor in the ruling was that this woman was in a situation where she genuinely needed to beg in order to survive.

[0]: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/app/conversion/pdf/?library=ECHR&...

> Why was somebody who "lives in" Romania begging in Geneva? Would she not have received social benefits in Romania? This looks like a perverse kind of tourism. Refugees and asylum seekers I can understand but Romania isn't a warzone or dictatorship, it's an EU member state.

Social benefits in Romania are miserable compared to other EU countries. And cost of living in the cities is going up due to business booming. I've seen families with kids sleep on the streets there. It's really sad.

A well educated retired teacher who was begging in Bucharest whom I spoke to for an hour explained it to me. She was very smart and well aware of world politics (and excellent English) but she just couldn't make ends meet. Definitely not an alcoholic or someone 'who doesn't care enough to get a job'. It's the old people that are really in trouble as they lack the skills to work in this modern world and their pensions apparently are worse than in the communist days (taking rent increases / cost of living inflation into account). Many jobs were moved from public sector to private and their pensions evaporated as a result.

Having said that, the young people do really well in Romania, they get good education and all the chances they need. Business is booming especially callcenters because Romanians generally excel at languages.

I wish the EU would start imposing minimum standards to welfare because the old generation there is really getting left behind. I saw people in the flat beside our fancy office who had no windows but just plastic bags hanging in their flat, in -15 C. While outside the Audi's and BMWs from the upper class queue up and the young people are the new middle class, the old are just watching it all pass them by. The gains of the new system aren't divided fairly.

I'm surprised this 28-year-old needed to beg though, their age group have the best chances.

I met an elder romanian begger couple and they told me that EU rights don't matter for them. In practice they simply cannot receive the benefits they are entitled to at home, because they are of some kind of discriminated against minority (gypsies or something).

Western European countries seem to be completely incompetent at deporting people. Illegal immigrants, terrorists, criminals, they fail to deport almost everyone.

I don't think you can simply deport EU member citizens from a EU state. From what I can understand at first glance it is only possible when the citizen has been sentenced for a heavy crime.

edit: Of course Geneva is not in the EU, but in many aspects the situation is similar.

They (we) can't even deport non-EU citizens!

> Related news: European Court of Human Rights just made important ruling that decriminalizes begging. Making it criminal to be poor is against human rights.

Equating begging with being poor is wrong.

Bothering others is not a human right.

> Bothering others is not a human right.

The ruiling doesn't mention bothering others. That was something you introduced to the conversation, just so you could dismiss it.

Roma begging in Europe is a lot more aggressive compared to the US where people usually just sit against the wall with a sign. They usually stop you from walking down the street and refuse to take no for an answer the first few times. And it repeats every single day if they set up near your work or apartment. It can also often be step 1 of a pickpocketing scam. Its not surprising that people were bothered enough to make this a law in the first place.

That's helpful perspective. Thanks.

While this might seem like a victory for human dignity, it's not, it's just going to piss off the locals more and make them dislike foreigners, especially those from certain countries.

The city of Austin, TX could be a case study of what not to do. I was remotely employed to company with offices in Austin in 2014-2015 and it was awesome to visit and walk around down town. I always had a blast.

I visited Austin in 2019 and there were homeless people EVERYWHERE. Every green space and nearly every street corner seemed to be littered with homeless people. The difference crystal clear. Something in the handling of the homeless problem had failed in that city.

> Something in the handling of the homeless problem had failed in that city.

Or, the homeless are recent migrants from other areas? At least where i live, the homeless all congregate in biggest wealthiest cities, because it's easier to beg, their presence blends in more and also local communities are more atomized so they don't fight off the homeless as hard as in smaller places. I've heard a story of one homeless guy who have recently been sleeping on a bus stop near my home - he's basically travelling from one big city center to another, and stays as long as the police doesn't chase him off the area.

Not only do they tend to select larger cities, but also warmer cities. You mostly hear about the homeless population in places like San Francisco, Oahu, Austin, etc. If you're homeless, you might as well go to a place where you're less likely to freeze to death. Although there are some homeless in places likes Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, etc.

Not to mention some cities will give them money if they take a bus to another city. Just shuffle the people around so it's no longer that current city's problem.

> Not only do they tend to select larger cities, but also warmer cities.

As a trucker, my view is mostly from the interstate.

The most homeless I see in my travels all over the country is I-5 in California, Oregon and Washington, and CA 99.

It's pretty cold in Washington and Oregon right now. Even California at night.

Tents, tarps, sleeping bags, on both sides of the freeway fence, or inside interchange cloverleafs.

Not judging their condition or their person, I don't know them. It looks pretty rough.

That's certainly cold. I was just saying from a relative position. For example, it's relatively warmer than the midwest.

In other parts of the country you will freeze to death sleeping outside at night, so west coast cold is definitely relative.

You do hear about it more in warmer cities, but the city with the largest homeless population is actually NYC by quite a large margin.

https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/slideshows/cities-with-th...

I wonder if they have an aggregate comparison of warm vs cold cities. I'd still consider NYC on the warmer side (with the gulf stream on the coast) when comparing it to the midwest or even Albany. For example, even going from Pittsburgh to Connecticut can be an increase of 20 degrees due to the gulf stream even though you are going slightly north.

Per capita? NYC is 2x larger than any other city.

LA/Los Angeles county (what the prior link uses) is a little larger than NYC, 10 million vs 8 million respectively.

I would also be interested in per capita per city. Even more so for aggregates of cold vs warm cities overall.

There is no comparison. LA county is the majority of the LA metro, while NYC is the minority.

The most meaningful comparison is CSA:

NY is 22.5M

LA is 18.7M

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area

I think many people prefer the MSA definition over the CSA, CSA feels like a bit of a stretch in many of its definitions. Are San Jose and San Francisco one entity, or two? CSA says one, MSA says two.

Consider that someone who lives between them could have a 30 min. commute to a job in both. There's definitely a case to be made for some cases to use the concept that encompasses that.

Having lived and worked in the Bay Area I would definitely say they are one entity socially and economically. It was not unusual to have people live in San Jose and commute to SF, nor vice versa.

By contrast, Sacramento was clearly not part of that unit, even though it isn’t _that_ much further away. There’s a notable gap between the cities, and the cross-commute rate was near zero. (Emphatically NOT zero, there were some people who commuted in from Sacramento, but those were rare, and I never heard of anyone commuting the other way).

[...] but also warmer cities [...] like San Francisco [...]

Err...?

Seems fair to me in comparison to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia

Is there any data that homeless people "select" expensive cities?

There's a lot of evidence that expensive cities create homeless people [1, 2, 3].

[1] https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/14/18131047/homelessne...

[2] https://archive.curbed.com/2016/8/26/12652130/homelessness-e...

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-06/why-is-ho...

Anecdata from long-term-homeless youth in particular suggest they're moderately mobile, and that they maintain three criteria: Liveable climate, how abusive the city is or isn't towards homeless people, and the presence of upper middle class residents & tourists to panhandle

People, particularly families, who are briefly homeless until they get the next apartment or who are on the short-list for assistance, are less mobile. There are a lot of homeless people who have a job, have a car, but just can't make it work at the moment as far as housing.

Austin is becoming what LA used to be (and in the winter, still is) for the Midwest: the place for cities to send their homeless to so they don't have to spend money on them.

2019 levels would be an improvement given what’s gone on in 2020, the pandemic has made everything much, much worse.

A progression of one of the camps from Jan 2020 to Aug 2020 https://youtu.be/xbsXgU6PO6U

Downtown Austin a few weeks ago: https://youtu.be/aDvqut1zLso

To add some missing details on this, in 2018/19 the city council passed some ordinances that removed the criminality of some homeless activities. Specifically, they made it explicitly legal to camp in most public spaces (excluding parks) and they permit panhandling, sitting and sleeping on public sidewalks.

So there's a lot of "campsites" downtown. A lot of tents, or just people in sleeping bags on the sidewalk. A lot of people peeing against the buildings.

It's hard to score the upsides and downsides without starting an argument, but it feels like much of Austin has soured on the "decriminalization of homelessness".

Worth noting, before the city council legalized homeless camping there were literally zero tents.

Did you have no homeless people, or were they still sleeping rough, just without a tarp to keep the wind and the rain off their heads?

There was always a homeless population but they would stay in shelters or camp deep in the woods and keep to themselves. Now homeless are leaving the shelters and choosing to live in the streets.

since 2019 (when the camping ordinance was passed):

* homelessness has increased 11%

* Un-sheltered homelessness is up 45%

* Numbers in shelters and transitional housing is down 20%

https://www.statesman.com/news/20200519/austin-sees-11-incre...

Why do you think homeless people are choosing to sleep rough, rather than stay in shelters?

I live in a completely different area of the country, but around here the shelters are all very strict about drugs and alcohol. You can't bring them in, and you also can't be drunk when you arrive. That's one reason why folks here choose to not be in a shelter if they have another option.

Consider that millions of well-adjusted, middle and upper-class people, with jobs, children, access to doctors, therapists, friends, support networks, and, really everything they could ever wish for... Struggle with, and die from drug and alcohol addiction.

If those people can't stop using drugs, it's hard to expect someone lacking all of those resources to be able to do so.

If you make shelter conditional on sobriety, you're unlikely to get more sobriety.

Sorry, to be clear, I wasn't making a judgement either way. Simply that for many homeless people (I volunteered with homelessness organizations for many years), being intoxicated and sleeping on the sidewalk is their favored option over being in a bed and sober.

Whether or not this is the best situation, this was (and likely still is) the reality.

I imagine numerous cities have been spending countless millions on studies and consultants to figure out an answer to that one.

Personally, it's the lifestyle they choose. They make little micro houses out of rubbish and tarps equipped with couches and mattresses. They make comical signs such as "need money for booze" for laughs and get free food from charities or shelters. There are some that have no where else to go but a non-trivial number are there because it's cool these days to live a nomad hipster life.

Downtown Austin is/was somewhat of a party area with numerous bars and clubs and it gets so popular on weekends that the police shut down some of the streets for pedestrians only. It was a festive place to hang out -- which is part of the attraction.

In most cities areas that get taken over by the homeless become blighted places regular people never venture to (i.e. skid row in LA). The reason that people are so freaked out in Austin is that downtown is full of residential and commercially office buildings which results in people having to walk through these areas trying to get to/from work.

I doubt the mentally ill or addiction-riddled choose to be homeless because it's a "hip trendy easy going lifestyle"

There's many reasons why the homeless may choose not to sleep in shelters or certain types of low income housing.

People may be forced to give up property or pets, may be separated from companions. The indoor housing could be unhealthy and vermin filled. It could be an unhealthy environment and den of drug use that the person is trying to avoid.

In Vancouver reporting on the homeless that have chosen to live in Strathcona Park (some 200+) a park resident noted that they were offered a spot at a Single Room Occupancy hotel, but he left because there were "crazy people with machetes" running around.

It's incredible but many of these options for the homeless are so substandard that sleeping outside is a better, healthier and safer option.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903468 for another good reason.

It's more homeless people [1]. I mean, it's really a lot of people. It's pretty unmistakable.

The tent cities do make them more noticeable, though. Also, the police used to be able to roust people illegally camping, so if you had somewhere else to go, you'd have to go, or else go to the shelter.

Now people have the option to refuse the alternatives. So maybe visible homelessness has climbed more than actual homelessness.

[1] https://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2020/05/austin-sees-10...

> if you had somewhere else to go, you'd have to go, or else go to the shelter.

You left out the dominant reality - people who have no shelter option and nowhere else to go. Given that likely realty, what does one do?

Any ideas why it seems like tech hotspots start passing laws like this? I'm thinking of San Francisco, Seattle, and Austin. I feel like there is some correlation, but I do not know what it is. My perspective is that maybe it seems more compassionate to not outlaw street camping, but I do not see how it is helpful to anyone including the ones on the street to allow this to continue.

Probably has something to do with much of the tech scene leaning left politically, so more lax homeless restrictions.

In the end, it doesn't solve the root cause of homelessness (probably makes the situation worse locally since it attracts homeless from elsewhere), but it's not like anyone in the US has some serious plans to tackle the issue at scale.

I don't know, but San Francisco, Seattle, and Austin are all pretty similar politically, falling to the left of the democratic mainstream. I don't think that's a new development since they became tech hotspots.

As for whether it's compassionate, I'd just note that at the extreme, compassion stops being a virtue.

I'm not sure about the "tech hotspot" angle, but https://www.econlib.org/homeless-camping-in-austin-a-modest-... while somewhat satirical may well have a point about the "why"...

Most American cities will do absolutely anything to reduce homelessness except build more housing: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-will-do-anything-to-en...

California cities are probably the worst offenders: https://seliger.com/2017/08/30/l-digs-hole-slowly-economics-..., but even Austin is underbuilding relative to demand.

One of the very liberal reporters at the LA Times did a series of articles on the homeless crisis in LA a year or two ago.

He actually had difficulty finding a homeless person who was from Southern California. Nearly all of the homeless were from other states or other countries.

It's not California's failure so much as it is that the rest of the nation is using California to warehouse their homeless so they can feel smug about not caring for their own citizens.

Remember that only 40% of Californians are from California. Most people in California aren't from there.

Someone moves to California and later becomes homeless - is evidence of what?

No, it's not "someone moves to CA and later becomes homeless."

It's someone becomes homeless and their home city doesn't want to pay to deal with it, so they buy them a $5 bus ticket to LA.

Steve Lopez, the journalist I was referring to, interviewed a group of homeless living in Hollywood in one of his articles. All of the individuals were homeless prior to coming to LA, and almost all of them had been sent here.

I'm guessing it's in fear of tanking existing property values, and therefore stepping on existing property owners?

Austin story is simple: housing is overpriced, they are only slightly behind the same process as the SF Bay Area. In the time frame you mentioned Austin housing prices increased by 50%, which is ridiculous. There's not another mysterious cause of homelessness.

I think that must be an oversimplification. Fort Worth just to the north is growing at the same speed as Austin. My house has doubled in value in the last 11 years. Yet, Fort Worth is extremely anti-homeless in its city ordinances and we don't have a visible homeless problem. As Fort Worth is a giant city in a warm climate I am sure there is a homeless problem, but we residents don't have to see it.

Even so, housing costs in Ft. Worth are still much cheaper than in Austin, and the difference is widening. In the last 30 years housing in Austin has gone from 30% cheaper than Ft. Worth to 30% more expensive. It's easy to see why: Ft. Worth enjoys liberal-marketarian zoning policies and Austin suffers increasingly from left-NIMBY potectionism, meanwhile population pressure is actually higher in Austin due to job growth. That is why the Austin situation seems to me to be quite similar to the SF Bay Area.

Not discounting that Ft. Worth local policies may do a better job of hiding homelessness, only I don't think it is the root cause.

It's because the city council a while back decriminalized homeless camping, so it's become much more obvious and prevalent in high traffic areas. I can see this for myself if I walk a handful of blocks from where I live and see the new tent city which wasn't there a year ago. They're likely going to reverse this rule since it's not really fixing problem.

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/01/25/austin-texas...

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/01/21/homelessness...

What do the jails look like?

How awesome is it that anyone who becomes homeless in Ft Worth gets forced out of the city?

> Something in the handling of the homeless problem had failed in that city.

Austin city council removed a ban on camping in public in 2019. The pitch was that it "decriminalized homelessness".

Austin is still a liberal city, but revocation of the ban is now widely reviled given the tents and trash that have grown everywhere, without doing anything really to help homeless people. There is an initiative on the ballot for an election in May to reinstate the camping ban, and I'd take a 100-to-1 bet it will pass.

San Francisco has passed many bans like this, and the results speak for themselves. Legal prohibitions are quite separate from what will be enforced.

>Something in the handling of the homeless problem had failed in that city

I'd wager that they made the problem worse by importing rich people with a high tolerance for bad public policy and homelessness.

Just another city run by Democrats. Seriously I'm a blue voter myself but its beyond parody how Democrats screw up their own cities like this.

Im not american but looking at your poll numbers isn’t every major city democrat-leaning?

Please don't take HN threads into partisan flamewar. Nothing good can come of this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It all comes back to a concept as freshman as it gets - Maslow's hierarchy of needs. How are you supposed to get out of any societal freefall without shelter?

Exactly so. I mean there's plenty of people that are not homeless but because of poverty can't get to the next tier of said hierarchy.

One of the hardest things for me when I was in financial free fall was how little my friends could understand or help. They didn't understand that I literally had no where to go, and that me asking for a place to crash wasn't me simply wanting to visit at the last minute. My friends also weren't rich, so even if I could have stayed with them, it's not like they had a spare bedroom or guest cottage in which I could stay for a while. Oddly enough, the people who did let me stay with them were folks that were themselves nearly broke and/or recently homeless, all of whom I had only recently met. They understood that if I was asking them for a place to crash, that I really needed a place to stay. The kindness of strangers really saved my butt in 2009.

No one I knew could provide a bed. I lived in my car. I was eventually able to trade remodel work for a chance to stay in the house.

That worked until a sibling & friend of mine, both w/ drinking problems, became regular, disruptive visitors and wouldn't leave. It was back to the car again.

I eventually escaped homelessness the same way everyone does. With help.

Finland has 5.5M people and about 5 thousand homeless. Los Angeles county has 10.5M people and estimates are nearing 100,000 homeless. The situation is an order of magnitude different in Los Angeles, even by West Coast standards, and what works in Findland is unlikely to scale anywhere else, much less a place like the U.S. which has the bare minimum of a social safety net compared to the rest of the developed world.

Homeless in LA also won't freeze to death if they sleep outside in January.

what works in Finland (giving people housing) definitely works in Los Angeles - LA was the subject of a recent research paper demonstrating the massive success of such a program

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H9oD3zeBPua7r5wFoHVrMZmmiqK...

Giving people housing helps those homeless who have the wherewithal to go forth and build a life from that point. That population of homeless are rarely chronically homeless. The most visible source of homeless, the chronically homeless population accounting for the most deaths, the most crime, the most in need of resources, are the drug addicted and mentally ill. The solution is not to create more sober housing that will be turned down by addicts or people who aren't in the right state of mind who believe they really do have a better life living on the sidewalk. The solution is to create mental health facilities and drug treatment centers, and to remove people off the street by offering a choice of going to seek treatment at one of these places, or jail. Living in subhuman conditions on the street shouldn't even be an option

It's embarrassing to me that LA county is putting up port a potties underneath freeway overpasses and patting themselves on the back for their "lofty" goal of 10,000 shelter units in 10 years, when they should instead be building hospitals and long term psychiatric wards if money were to actually be spent on doing the most good towards the people impacted by this public health crisis on our sidewalks.

Why wouldn't scale help los angeles tackle the same problem?

Every rail project they've built in the last 30 years has been some sort of unique boondoggle. All the billions in homeless funding to date has been squandered on things like housing units that cost nearly half a million dollars each. There is no competence in local governance here except in finding some unique graft to milk before the FBI eventually raids your office. Even if the problems were on the same scale here, costs would be enormous due to the inefficiency and insistence on using for profit contractors with public works.

Provide evidence it won’t scale?

That kind of defeatist attitude won’t help either. You can’t create a systemic problem like this and then just shrug and say “it’s gotten too big we can’t stop it now”.

The truth is that human beings need a huge amount of investment - time, money and love - to get us to the point where we can function effectively - and once we fall off the train, it can be nearly impossible to climb back on again.

Human misery is a systems problem.

Perhaps the most productive way of tackling it will be to bolster and expand the mechanisms which enable people to avoid poverty and homelessness. E.g. helping a recently-redundant person quickly find another job, or giving someone at risk of becoming homeless another three or four months of breathing room so they have a chance to turn things around.

It's not just about financial support, either. Social, emotional and psychological support is essential, as it's so incredibly hard to keep a clear head when you are in distress.

Note that the "homeless" people in Finland are mainly people who refuse to accept support from the social welfare, this is because they prefer to get drunk instead of spending it on food and rent. The social welfare eventually suggests a different system for such people: pay the rent for them and give a special card that can be used for anything except alcohol and cigarette. If the people keep refusing that other option, then they went homeless on their own accord and keep spending the welfare on alcohol and living on the streets. Such people are very rare in Finland in reality however, but they do exist.

There is also one woman [1] who for whatever reason chooses to live homeless with bunch of luggage. She doesn't drink at all, and keeps moving from town to town with all her luggage, by walking.

Here's also a discussion about the Roma beggars you see in Helsinki streets. [2]

1: https://shl.fi/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/IMG_2935.jpg

2: https://www.reddit.com/r/Finland/comments/79mqjs/question_ab...

While giving people who can't afford the food or housing, the food and housing mainly has upsides. It also has problem of artificially inflating housing and rent prices. Especially in the capital where most career opportunities are. (Helsinki is very expensive place to live)

While there's truth to that, it's worth noting that most of those homeless people are suffering from ill mental health and/or substance dependence.

You make it sound like they just shrugged and decided that that's the life they want, but I don't think that's how people end up homeless. There are decisions involved, but they're probably not quite as voluntary as that.

Those people are given help, but if they refuse that, there's nothing you can really do. People are only forced if they start being dangerous to other people.

I'm not saying you can necessarily do anything; in some cases you can't. I'm just saying that things might not be under those people's voluntary control and decision-making either once mental health issues or substance abuse problems go far enough.

I'm not familiar with Finland but to those people have access to mental health services? In the US, a lot of folks who are addicted to drugs and alcohol are written off as moral failures when in reality, the drugs and alcohol are simply used to self medicate and numb the pain of their lives.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be any accountability for addicts, but the fact that we completely write them off as a society says more about us than it does about them.

Yes, they have access to mental health services, and even rehabilitation services, but again only if you agree to it.

They do have access, at least in theory and to some of the services.

But when people do become homeless in Finland, their problems usually run quite deep already, and they may just be quite difficult to help.

I don't know if this is true but I've understood that in the U.S. homelessness might more often be a result of just financial downfall, while in Finland homelessness is very strongly connected to mental illness, substance dependence, or both [1]. Those people have pretty much lost control of having a normal life, or perhaps they never had one. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be helped, but it does mean helping them is likely to be an uphill battle.

Drug addiction does get judged harshly by the society in general; alcohol abuse is likely to be swept under the rug unless it causes obvious problems e.g. at work, but if it does, it gets judged as well, although not quite as harshly as drug abuse. I'd expect most social workers and medical professionals who work with the homeless to know better than to see addiction as just a moral failure, though, so the problem may rather be that it's quite difficult to treat people who have a multitude of problems that run deep. Health care professionals might be wary of committing limited public resources in cases if they don't expect it to bear fruit, so the mental health services might be limited to emergency care and general assistance by social workers.

I'm not intimately familiar with how those services work, though, so they might be more extensive than I think.

[1] That is, at least among the native population; another visible group of homeless are poor immigrants living in the streets. They probably just wanted a better life in a richer country or something, and their reasons for vagrancy are probably different.

In the US, most circumstances resulting in homelessness are imminently solvable.

However, there is little community will to address those circumstance and a great deal of political pressure against aiding vulnerable adults.

To see strong examples political resistance, suggest moving folks in prison for low-level, mentally ill related crimes into in-patient facilities - redirecting per-person funding from prison budgets to pay for their care.

Some mental issues make you basically unwilling to accept that you have issues. And plus, we can't really fix mental health. It is not like everything would be curable.

It's pretty much the same in the Netherlands, given enough issues and after failing to get you back to work you basically land in a situation where the state pays for your existence though direct money and a lot of subsidies (ie when the stress of work cause a relapse in your drinking habits and it happened time and time again over the past 10 years).

It is thus very difficult to understand why there are homeless people. But I once went (with work) on a trip with a homeless person (this is a charity, you pay and homeless people take you one trip and talk about their lives). And indeed the people on the streets always have psychological issues. Extreme ADHD, abused as a child, depression but just a little bit to afraid to die to really end it. If they want help it is there, always. Homeless shelters, places to get a postal address for free to apply for subsidies and minimal social income etc. But some just go crazy while waiting or go crazy while sleeping with other people in one room. Or they walk barefoot in the winter until their feet are so rotten that they can't walk anymore, too afraid to get help because they believe help means they will be abused again or mind altered or something strange. Most of them are constantly afraid and not a danger to others, more like very shy animals afraid of other humans, so they retreat and suffer while their fear of death keeps them alive, just barely.

One woman we spoke to had her child murder her other child and she just started drinking. How can you help such a woman? So much pain.

Exactly, it's not a choice.

Also, I think the current method of making alcohol really expensive through levies is not working. It only makes homeless addicted people poorer and more likely to turn to crime.

The rest of us don't give a shit how much it costs, we don't use much of it anyway. The price is never a factor in getting addicted or getting off it.

All it is is the government profiteering of people who can't help themselves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK7l55ZOVIc

But no one likes the alternative, which is to say there is no more alcohol, because it's just another human being saying you can't have more of this that you crave.

When they can't kill their feelings with alcohol they will find something else. Substances or actions. Probably not something good.

I agree alcohol is a drug and should be treated as one.

You could try to prevent people from reaching such state in the first place, for future occurrences.

And still allow them the civil liberties expected in a democracy? I'm honestly not sure that's possible. Self-destruction seems almost like a human right.

> People are only forced if they start being dangerous to other people.

I assume this isn't really true, and that the standard in Finland is that they're institutionalized if they're a danger to other people or themselves. The latter part is tricky, though. A person who is clearly in danger of killing themselves with a razor blade can be committed. A person who is in danger of drinking themselves to death on the sidewalk, perhaps not.

For the record, welcome to San Francisco. (a joke, it's the similar here)

> People are only forced if they start being dangerous to other people

Really this definition needs to be more strict. In San Francisco, you could be drugged up, throw needles and broken alcohol bottles on the street, openly defecate, and this behavior is still considered not dangerous.

A better way to deal with this is to allow people to reject welfare, but if they do, they still need to live as a decent member of the society. No littering, no public nuisance (shouting, spitting, harassing people), maintaining hygiene (no public urination/defecation, no risk of disease transmission etc.), no permanent encroachment of public property and so forth. Otherwise, it just ends up in a slippery slope that creates a sinkhole of billions of dollars in costs to the economy, at the expense of others.

> A better way to deal with this is to allow people to reject welfare, but if they do, they still need to live as a decent member of the society.

And if they refuse to "live as a decent member of society"?

Then take them out of society. Same as any other person who persistently refuses to obey laws.

From the GP:

> Otherwise, it just ends up in a slippery slope that creates a sinkhole of billions of dollars in costs to the economy, at the expense of others.

So given that is it better to try and help them reintegrate with society or do we just lock them up and forget about them? Or worse?

There are people out there who, end of the day, are going to do things the people in charge don't like. There are 3 options:

  - Tolerate the behaviour
  - Remove their freedom
  - Kill them

Even if the plan is to try to persuade them to behave differently, that still has to be done while either tolerating misbehaviour or removing their ability to misbehave.

The line between tolerance and removing freedoms has to be drawn somewhere. This question of yours isn't helpful to the debate - the only way to push the conversation forward is to proactively say where you want the line drawn. All that this question will do is discover that the line is drawn arbitrarily and has uncomfortable edge cases. But that is a property of any legal boundary. Nobody has yet been able to draw a line that isn't arbitrary.

This is the hardest question.

I make a point of talking to people across the political spectrum and I have heard all kinds of answers, from things which are basically "stick them in camps" (from both left and right-wing people!) to "ignore them" to various rehabilitation approaches.

My view is that we should step back, and consider what it is that we, the folks who are the so-called decent members of society, want.

The city I live in has a big decaying area next to the downtown core, like many cities of a million or more do these days. It waxes and wanes, right now in particular in the wake of Covid it's very bad. Crime, needles, sketchy people, it's horrible. The thing is, these are neighbourhoods that should be nice; they should be full of young families living a walkable distance from downtown, not crackheads and needles.

I get that, as decent human beings, we owe each other a fundamental level of dignity. I am fine with efforts to feed, clothe, and house those who cannot do it themselves. But why does this need to extend to giving them a huge swathe of land, land that is potentially much nicer than any place I will ever live in, for them to ruin?

But what can we do - lock them up? Restrict their fundamental freedoms? Can we _really_ just ignore them and accept sketchy, scary, crime-ridden cities?

Apply the same set of rules that apply to the larger society. If I throw trash around in the society, I would be fined hundreds of dollars, and failing to produce the amount, will face punishment and even jail. No reason these set of rules should not apply to everyone.

Rehabilitation, reeducation and basic assistance should always be the first step (Welfare). But if you opt out and willingly chose to continue to damage the overall society, you should then also be willing to face the consequences. Just like criminal justice system, for minor offenses, you get off with warnings, but if you show up for the fifth time at a courthouse for a drunken disorderly conduct, you go to jail.

> If I throw trash around in the society, I would be fined hundreds of dollars, and failing to produce the amount, will face punishment and even jail.

You, presumably, are not mentally ill, mentally disabled, or suffering from severe substance addiction. The majority of homeless people (besides Roma) in most European countries are some mix of these.

When you say "just fine/jail the homeless for bad behavior", what you are really saying is "mentally ill/disabled people should not be helped, they should be jailed". Do you still stand by that statement?

In case you didn't read my comment at all, "Rehabilitation, reeducation and basic assistance should always be the first step (Welfare)."

> The majority of homeless people (besides Roma) in most European countries are some mix of these.

The number is less than half for mental health patients and about half if you account for substance abuse. That number is lower in the US.

But regardless of the number, in your hurry to virtue signal someone over the internet, you completely missed the point. The argument was pretty simple, rehab and assistance is the first step, the rest was for people who actively refuse that.

For the mentally ill who refuse help, would you rather have them live a life of abuse and then die in misery on the streets or have them institutionalized? And for the drug abusers/alcoholics who refuse rehab, at what point does individual accountability start kicking in? Society is willing to help you, but if you still reject it, at some point you need to face the consequences.

I stand by my statement.

How does that woman carry all the stuff from one city to another? Does she take buses and they just wait for her to load it all?

She walks with all that luggage. She sets up the luggage in queue, and takes the last luggage, brings it to the front, and repeats it until she gets to the next town.

Wow, that's a trip. Is there somewhere I can read more about this? I'll google translate it if all you got is in Finnish but I can read Swedish too.

Edit: Reverse image search tells me her name is Laukku-Leena. https://www.iltalehti.fi/kotimaa/a/b225828d-c1b1-40b5-b7b1-a...

Yes, googling laukku-leena will get you some news and forums where people discuss her whereabouts. Not sure if you can find any non finnish articles however.

> Note that the "homeless" people in Finland are mainly people who refuse to accept support from the social welfare, this is because they prefer to get drunk instead of spending it on food and rent.

When you posted this hateful nonsense, did you think nobody would bring you up on it? Can you provide anything to back up this assertion?

How is this hateful nonsense? Every citizen is eligible for that support. Do you perhaps live here so you can say it's not true?

Sure it's not always perfect, errors in bureaucracy happens sometimes but getting social security is the default. If you accept it you get a house.

Without evidence, he stated that all homeless people in Finland are homeless because they would "prefer to get drunk". I don't think it's incorrect to describe this as hateful, because it's very clearly informed by a bias against homeless people rather than any real evidence.

This is the equivalent of jumping into a discussion to say that Black people are poor because they "keep buying cellphones". It's not a serious intellectual comment, it's cloaked hatred.

He said mainly. No all.

You do understand that everyone gets social security as money if they need. The problems happen if they are unable to use that money to pay the rent. And yes indeed the main reason is some sort of intoxicant use, as they rather get more stuff than use the money for rent.

Legal debts are also not a reason not to pay rent, as one is protected from repaying them when it's about essentials. So that doesn't count either. As long as you're able to push the pay button in your online bank you use the default system. Only when that's not possible do you fall into the provided housing system. And not surprisingly drug use is a major reason for not pushing that pay button but rather taking the money and using it elsewhere. Does that honestly surprise you? What else could it even be?

That's why we have the second option with food stamps and provided housing. It's not perfect as people elsewhere have stated the obvious "Hey want to buy 20e foodstamp for 10e?". But still they get it.

I'll be happy to retract the "hateful" comment if anyone can provide evidence that "people are mainly homeless in Finland because they would prefer to get drunk".

Here ya go [0] https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/220951/Mort...

Check out page 845 showing death by alcohol poisoning is 5x higher in the homeless population of Finland than the whole of the country.

FWIW, and anecdotally, my ancestry is Finnish and we are known for having issues with alcohol. The majority of my extended family has drinking issues. Within our Finnish-American community, it’s believed that Finns have some sort of gene that pre-disposes us to drink to excess.

Thanks, but I didn't ask for evidence that "alcohol poisoning is 5x higher in the homeless population", I asked for evidence that "people are mainly homeless in Finland because they would prefer to get drunk."

Well, that’s all you’re going to get out of me. I gave you a 30 second google search. Have a great day!

https://ysaatio.fi/en/housing-first-finland there's no extensive graphs, but this page mentions it briefly. There's also been some freelancer yle documents covering up some homeless people that mainly refuse the social benefits to get more money for their daily drinking. [1]

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08FET347Tx4

This does not support your claim. It's pretty clear that you didn't have the evidence before you made the claim, and you don't have it now.

We use two terms for homeless here. Strictly speaking if we just use the term homeless you're correct. 79% of them are not like that [ARA Asunnottomat 2019]. They're people like students bunking in a friends bed without a valid address or other short term issues, like the social security making a mistake, but they're eventually rectified. This means the homelessness has lasted for less than a year.

21% are long term homeless. And that's what people generally mean when they collegially use the term homeless. That's defined as homeless that has lasted for more than a year and has significant social or health component, such as substance abuse or mental illness. The thing about mental illness is that there is also treatment for them. The solution is different for them as for the substance abusers.

If you ever see a Finn begging it's pretty much always an alcoholic who wants more beer. That's because the mentally ill cannot really beg as they're either receiving treatment or if they have unfortunately slipped trough the cracks of the system they're also unable to beg for any extended period.

As for the scale of this problem. 2019 there were 961 persons listed in the long term homeless category. That's out of a population of 5.518 million in 2019. That's 0.017% of the whole population. Also, even out of them 584 live with someone, just not with an official address. They wouldn't be counted as homeless in US.

The actual amount of people in street on that category was 177. That's 0.003% of the population.

Are you American?

No.

Uh, no. I'm finnish. You go to social security and they fix you with an apartment. It is mostly due to the decisions of the homeless that they remain homeless.

No, the poster did not say “all” homeless people are alcoholics. He said that is “mainly”, meaning most, but certainly not all.

Just so we can all be as pedantic as humanly possible, here.

Sure, fine. It's still a hateful, unevidenced comment about homeless people that can't be justified.

> it's cloaked hatred.

Homelessness causes suffering which is usually self-treated with substance abuse. This is not a hateful commentary.

I'm not sure how a blanket characterization equates to "hate", when it's a lazy attribution due to indifference. Maybe disdain is the appropriate term.

It ascribes a characterisation to homeless people (that they would prefer to get drunk than have a home) that there is simply no evidence for. The comment blames homeless people for their own destitution purely based on the commenter's preconceived bias against homeless people.

> It ascribes a characterisation to homeless people that there is simply no evidence for

Except for the evidence there is. https://www.addictioncenter.com/addiction/homelessness/

Homelessness causes suffering, which is usually self-treated with substance abuse/use, depending on how you want to play with numbers. Fair enough? That's normal human behavior.

Cloudef's comment might make it seem like it's predominantly a voluntary decision by the homeless, and I disagree with that. AFAIK most homeless people in Finland do have a substance abuse problem, though.

Edit: What actually might make this more interesting is that this could be how things are regarding homelessness in Western Europe in general, more or less, not just in a single country. I mentioned this in another comment, but AFAIK living in the streets in Finland, and quite possibly in Northern and Western Europe in general, is rather strongly connected to mental health issues and substance abuse problems. That doesn't mean that the homeless should be vilified, as both of those are illnesses and largely not a voluntary choice, but it could be something that's different about homelessness in the U.S. and in Western/Northern Europe.

I can see people taking issue with the word "prefer" in relation to getting drunk. It makes the tone of the OP seem dismissive of the fact that by the point you're putting alcohol/drugs before shelter and food you're no longer expressing a preference but rather a symptom of mental illness: addiction, depression, or otherwise.

> the Romanian beggars you see in Helsinki streets.

While Finns tend to use the term "Romanian beggars", this can be inaccurate and misleading. I understand that this confusion could have arisen because "Romani people" and "Romanian people" sound similar in Finnish and some of them are from Romania. However, many of them come from Bulgaria as well – a very large community comes from the Bulgarian town of Pleven seasonally each year.

FWIW, the ethnicity names "Romani" and "Romanian" are not actually etymologically related, it is only a coincidence that they sound similar. You would think that after a decade-plus now of having Romani migrants very visible in the Helsinki city center, people could have learned a little more about who they are, and what drives them to make the long journey to Finland.

Thanks, I edited my post.

small addition which should clarify some more the issue: romani == gypsy

At least in the German speaking countries the word Gypsy ("Zigeuner" in German) is considered a racial slur similarly (if not quite as strongly) ill-considered in usage as N*gger is in English. There aren't a lot of Romani in the US, which I think is why Americans aren't aware this is a word you should avoid (but I'm pretty sure it is also considered a slur in English in Britain and Ireland).

It's pretty common knowledge to be a slur in the US too

That varies a lot regionally. Plenty of people use "gipped" for "ripped off", and "Zigeuner Schnitzel" is on the menu at US German-cuisine restaurants. For once, it's us who haven't caught up with the magical outrage words.

I'm sure you wouldn't consider it a magical outrage word if you were in the outgroup in your country and the word was used to describe your ethnicity in a usually negative way.

I'd be unhappy, but I'd much rather fix the outgroup part than ban the word.

I'm sure the Romani would prefer to fix discrimination and generational poverty but you can do that while also asking people to not use their name as a curse word (and also it's not really being fixed).

In Western Europe there have been movements to avoid using the local equivalent of the term "gypsy", and these have seen some success. However, in the Balkan countries these movements have had little impact, even among the Roma themselves.

There is a small Roma intelligentsia, university-educated and aware of those international trends, who welcomes the usage of "Roma (and Sinti)" instead of the traditional word. Among most Roma, however, it is often the case that if you use the term "Roma" while speaking with them, they will correct you and say "Don’t call me that, I’m a <local word equivalent to 'gypsy'>".

Note also that in the Balkans, the Roma generally prefer to maintain their own language rather secret, for in-group use only. I wouldn't be surprise if this extended even to their ethnonym, and when outsiders say "Roma" this sounds like those outsiders are appropriating their word.

In the SW US, there's also "I'm an Indian, not a 'Native American'." Euphemisms don't accomplish anything.

I was directly asked by an American Indian: "Don't call me Native American, First People or anything like that. I'm an Indian. Native American is a term invented by white people"

So, I called people Indians until a Native American said to me: "I prefer Native American. Indian is derogatory." When I asked her about what my previous friends said, she said "The people who want to be called Indian are ignorant people from the reservation who don't know any better"

I think it's just best policy to ask whatever term someone prefers to use, and use that.

They can say what they want but if their language is a close relative to Punjabi they are fools if they don't realize there are about 100 million people out there who understand them

> That varies a lot regionally. Plenty of people use "gipped" for "ripped off",

In my experience, they tend to stop, when you gently remind them that a very similar term that means the exact same thing, but refers to jews, has fallen out of favour in recent decades.

What's the word that refers to Jewish people?

https://www.jta.org/2019/09/25/culture/what-does-jew-down-me...

Oh. Oh wow. Thanks, man.

I don't think anyone is particularly bothered by their race, rather their behaviour. (In the UK there are both Irish gypsies and Romani gypsies, both have a bad reputation).

The racist part is generalizing the behaviour of some people to everyone of that ethnicity. I'm sure a few decades ago you'd easily find plenty of Europeans telling you they are not bothered by the Jews' ethnicity per-se but by their behaviour.

Godwins law.

It was the first comparison that came to mind. You can replace my example with comparison to generalizations against black people in the US if that doesn't break the Internet Law.

Godwin's Law isn't "if you mention Hitler you are wrong".

On the contrary, in the UK (and Ireland) people are extremely racist towards both Travellers and Roma. They treat both races with equal contempt.

I'm not saying this to excuse the negative behavior of the Traveller or Roma communities which I've been on the receiving end of several times.

However, we need to look at this from both ends and accept that us (the ethnic majority) automatically treating members of a particular ethnic minority as scum doesn't help to change their behavior.

If a group has a tendency for bad behaviour should it be ignored because they are a minority? Why shouldn't the majority be allowed to call it out?

Lol that's not true.

Which part? I've lived in Vienna and then Berlin since 2005 and have heard multiple times that you should say Roma & Sinti because Zigeuner is a slur.

In the press, literature and academia you will generally not find the term Zigeuner in referring to the people (but again Roma or Roma & Sinti) if it was written in the last 20+ years.

Never heard of "Zigeuner" being considered a racial slur. I've usually heard it/hear it when it comes to certain people (actually, two varieties even - one tied to the "Zirkus" and the other one being a group of "Landstreicher" basically) but that's not tied to an ethnicity or whatever.

A more prominent example would be the word "Neger" where the media tells us it's a terrible word, insulting, racial slur etc etc, yet however, it is used by normal people in a conversation without any issues. It's funny how irrational media (and some crazies) get, ignoring all context, how something and with what intention something is said. There is always a stark contrast between that and actual real life. I, for one, like to eat my "Negerkuss".

So it is pretty identical to the n-word, in that it is a term for a minority that is rejected by the minority, and some members of the majority decide not to care, because they "do not mean it in a negative way". I am left to wonder how "please don't call me that" is not sufficient to end these discussions.

For non-Germans reading along, "Neger" used to be a common word, but is not anymore. Language is changing, society is changing, but as always, some will be left behind. If your grandpa says "neger" you gently correct him, if your peer says "neger", you are in bad company.

"Zigeuner" is less extreme, because awareness for the term is more recent. I was told in high school 15 years ago to avoid it, so everyone should have gotten the message by now. It shows a lack of education, mostly. Germans killed 200k+ Romani in the last century, so it not a wild claim that when our grandparents cautioned us about Zigeuner, that might have had something to do with racism.

(20 years ago I had friends who called Schokoküsse "Negerküsse", and my parents told me not to do that. I simply do not understand why people insist on calling them "Negerküsse", when they know it's hurtful to some. It's a shitty sweet targeted at children).

> pay the rent for them and give a special card that can be used for anything except alcohol and cigarette

In theory that works but addictions are super powerful, so what ends up happening is that the person will still obtain cigarettes and alcohol, even if it requires begging to get the cash for it. Or they will trade their subsidized food for cash or cigarettes/booze.

For hard addicts, I don't know, they'd do anything to get their fix and that can manifest in unproductive ways for the society: theft, muggings, etc. I'd actually let incurable cases of addiction get their fix for free in exchange for some things such as bathing regularly, stay in shelters at night and not wonder the streets, etc. I'd be a win-win situations in my opinion. Living in NYC allows me to see a very large number of homeless people. And what makes it really worse is that there are sometimes almost 1-to-1 to train cars and there is no way of escaping the stench on trains. If you weren't forced to be stuck in a subway car with a homeless with half of the car packed and the other completely empty except for one sleeping stinking homeless person. The other day my wife took my kid on the train and a homeless guy started smoking on the train. When the train got off she got off that car and got on the next one. It was worse, the smell of rotten gangrene is not something I'd wish upon anyone.

> they prefer to get drunk instead of spending it on food and rent

Some are just deep into a depression pit. I agree that some people are just weak, but most people hitting homelesness went through big losses that damages your motivation to lead a normal life. Grudge, sadness, loneliness, grief, abuse .. don't conclude too fast.

The thing is that the "home first" movement in Finland states that home isn't a trophy that you get once you fix your life. Home and food is essential to get your life on track, and home is given even for alcoholic people. But if they don't pay their rent, and even give up on social welfare to pay the rent for you, what can you do?

I think it's unrelated, people like that are not ready to function 'normally', they need a shelter, asylum, hospital. It's an emotional problem more than material.

If they don't cause harm to other people, you can't really force them or tell them they are living their life wrong.

You can show them though, get them to talk to other people who have been in a similar situation, have been helped out of it, and have now a better life.

Note that, these kind of people are very rare. I can assure everyone gets all the help they can get. But these kind of extreme cases, usually have no drive to live their life other way, and you can do little to change them. There is very little homeless in Finland in reality, and it's one of the first things that always rubs me wrong overseas when I see homeless on the street. Seeing homeless on the street in Finland is not _normal_.

You're very contrarian it seems and that's annoying.

There are other approaches to treating people with drug and alcohol addictions than trying to get them to quit. One is harm reduction. This has most famously been used to help people with IV drug addictions, in the form of safe injection sites.

It can also be used for alcoholism: you provide a bar-like setting where people can go to get free drinks (rationed and served on a schedule by a trained server) and also socialize.

If this is coupled with free housing, food, medical care, and therapy, it stands a good chance of helping people where involuntary hospitalization might have failed.

I’ve volunteered serving free meals to homeless people in a restaurant style setting. People get their choice of appetizer, entree, salad, and dessert. Volunteers wait tables and then sit down to eat with people at the end of their shift. I’ve had some amazing conversations with people who have all kinds of experiences to share. It’s amazing how much of a difference it makes when you treat people like a person rather than a problem to solve.

I don't necessarily disagree, and have no expertise on the subject. But skip to any part of this (excellent) documentary about a 'wethouse' (basically what you describe, a place for homeless alcoholics to live, drink and socialise) and you'll see abject chaos, violence, misery at every turn. It's probably better than the streets, but not by much.

https://youtu.be/MF5wNsfKo84

You can make public housing rent-free for formerly homeless and then decrease the social welfare amount.

To be fair to the reputation of Romanians on HN, the beggars and squatters around Finland, Norway, and Sweden are not ethnic Romanians even if they often are born there, but come from the Zigeuner/Gypsy/Roma people.

Investigating how Romanians often think and talk about the Roma people in their country may be more harmful to their reputation than thinking the beggars are non-Roma Romanians.

I don't think it's fair to single us out, though. This social problem, integration, is present in almost exactly the same way in Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Serbia. To a lesser degree it's also present in Spain from what I know.

It's far from a simple problem. As the Finns are discovering.

True, this is widespread and not unique to Romania.

Finland is home to a centuries-old Roma community that arrived via Sweden. They too are seen as abusing social services and not integrating, the same general stereotypes as in southern Europe. (Members of this community can often be identified in Helsinki from their distinctive clothing, the women wear traditional skirts.)

So, Finns are already aware that Roma populations often live in tension with the major ethnicity of a country. However, the confusion about the ethnic makeup of Romania along with other Balkan countries persists due to the coincidentally similar names for these ethnicities, and lack of interest among the Finnish population about educating themselves about a region that seems far away and to which very few go to on holiday.

True. I checked and Helsinki is as far from Munich as it is from Bucharest, to choose a semi-random comparison point.

I guess perception will shift as these regions become more touristic.

Things are more complicated than that. Romania is home to more than one Roma people. The Roma who go to Finland for organized begging are almost exclusively from the south of the country. They can actually seem quite foreign to Romanians from e.g. parts of Transylvania. There, the local Roma are often associated with different ways of making a living than begging, and speak a different set of languages preferentially. Some ethnic Romanians from Transylvania may be very tolerant about their local Roma community, but feel that those particular Roma people from particular counties are ruining things for everyone. Even Transylvanian Roma people can feel that way about the Roma from elsewhere.

I have read stories about almost any European country wherein it is claimed that homelessness is a choice, and that there are facilities that the homeless aren't utilizing, because they præfer to the homeless or are plain stupid.

In many of those cases the actual situation is more complicated and the actual protocol is so involved and complicated that it is very hard for a homeless man to research.

I find it almost incomprehensible the first time sometimes told me (in the UK) they were going to sleep on the street because the shelter didn't allow drugs. I don't think they were a particularly special case.

Victims of circumstance to some extent, but not stupid nor really living their preferred life I'd wager.

I suspect you need a stable caring society for a couple of generations and still there will be some outliers. A worthy cause to address though.

There are absolutely some homeless people who choose to reject housing assistance and shelter programs. I know because I did some volunteering to help the homeless and met a handful of individuals that were happy to accept donations but refused to be committed to any program. They refused to have rules imposed on them by the shelters and preferred the freedom of doing as they please. One of these individuals has been homeless since the late 80's and seems quite content with his lifestyle. I'm not claiming this is typical, but there are certainly more people like him out there.

Many homeless reject shelters because they would have to give up much of their personal possessions, can't have a pet, live under tight restrictions, and deal with theft from other homeless people in the shelter.

Giving people small, secure apartments would solve many of these issues along with many emergency hospital visits and many other issues.

Many shelters in the US are run be religious organizations and discriminate against gay people, too. This is particularly a problem because LGBTQ make up a sizeable chunk of homeless youth (think: kids getting kicked out by parents).

>because they prefer to get drunk instead of spending it on food and rent.

After a certain point, alcoholism is no longer a choice or preference, it's a debilitating disease. And before that point, it's frequently self-medication for untreated mental problems. Consider this: alcohol is the only mood-elevating drug sold freely, of course a percentage people will jump on it if they have massive problems.

Not going to criticize the Finnish system as I know nothing about it, but probably the only way to get to those people is give them homes, food and clothing and try (again and again) to get them to reduce alcohol intake and/or get psychiatric treatment - and accept you won't be able to get all of them to accept that.

They already have all of that. The next step is forcing them, which is unpalatable as you can imagine.

Mood-elevating? Isn't it the opposite.

Interestingly, perhaps, I rather feel it might only be poverty - the need to afford food instead - that's kept me from affording enough alcohol to abuse. I'm in a much better place now.

The point is that "give poor people food, clothing, and a home" is not an answer in general. One needs people who are equipped and who care for you ... finding people who actually care is beyond democratic governance.

Alcohol is a central nervous depressant, but its affect on mood varies wildly from person to person and instance to instance.

The point is that giving poor people clothing, and a home is the start. It's the first step in a process that allows you to target narrower segments with more specific needs and it's both better for society and cheaper than locking them up.

I lived in Helsinki for a while. It's not a great place to be homeless because despite recently mild winters, it's just not a nice place to be living outside when most of the year it can drop to freezing temperatures (or well below) at night. Having people on the street freezing to death in the middle of the winter is not something that is very practical. And of course the whole system ensures that people are mostly taken care off regardless of their issues (alcohol, drugs, psychological issues, etc.). Food, shelter, medical care etc. are easily accessible.

> Such people are very rare in Finland in reality however,

Given the severity of Finnish winters, I'm not surprised.

Try a similar approach in, say, Hawaii or the Bahamas, and see how many homeless you'll see roaming around.

We have real life data. Cities in California are spending north of $50,000 a year per homeless person (higher than finland's median income!) and the problem is still as bad as ever. The climate is also dry and warm 330 days a year.

With that kind of spending, how can it be that homeless people have trouble finding shelters? Sounds like a lot of that money is going to middlemen and outsourcing companies than the actual people that need it.

Unless things changed since I last looked, that number is obtained by taking the budget and dividing by the number of people still homeless.

So, for instance, if you had 100 potholes and paid $1 million to fix 99 of them, leaving a single pothole, this statistic would read: you spent $1 million per pothole.

You can use other metrics (eg the NHIP count[0]), but they point to the same thing. Under the NHIP count metric, SF is doing better than most metropolitan areas in the US, but even with huge spending on the problem, the number of homeless people continues to rise year after year. The per-capita count of number of successfully sheltered homeless people in SF (per city resident) is the highest in the country, but even still, I see dozens of completely unsheltered people walking to Bart from my apartment.

Eg Chicago winters are very hard to live through if you don't have stable access to warm housing, and the West coast offers a reprieve from that.

[0] https://sf.curbed.com/2020/3/4/21152501/san-francisco-homele...

I wonder if any of the factor is that affordable housing in SF is extremely difficult to find? Especially if you don't have access to a vehicle for commutes and have to find housing in an area well served by public transit?

Lots of reasons. A short list includes:

* Shelters not allowing pets - many would rather remain homeless than give up their dog * Shelters not allowing drugs * Social services officers looking too much like cops (many homeless have had bad enough experiences with cops to keep them away from anyone cop-like) * Spending on 'discomfort' measures (eg deliberately-hostile architecture to discourage people from being homeless) * Effective mitigations being politically unpopular.

For instance: cold-calling people who have just separated from their spouse to offer counseling substantially reduces the number of people you have to lift out of homelessness at very little cost. However, "free therapy" is a wildly unpopular suggestion in the USA.

99 Percent Invisible had a great episode on hostile urban architecture: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/unpleasant-design-hos...

> However, "free therapy" is a wildly unpopular suggestion in the USA.

This is strange. I'd guess that free therapy, or at least government-subsidized mental health initiatives, would be pretty popular on the left. That leaves me with the right. But therapy doesn't really seem like something that's easy to get jealous about. Are people going to get mad at articles about "therapy queens" that see a dozen therapists per week?

I wouldn't resent destitute/at-risk people from receiving free therapy, especially if it lessened the tax bill that I will eventually pay anyway, but it's not hard to see why better off people might be irritated by this. therapy usually costs somewhere in the range of $60-120/hr, and it can be quite difficult to find a good fit that is in-network. I get paid decently, but if I went to therapy four times a month, that would already be my largest budget category after rent.

except we also have additional data from overseas. Australia has comparatively mild winters and my family is originally from Queensland where some of the "worst" towns for unemployment and disadvantage clearly have a bit of a "paradise" effect (that is to say, if you're going to live on unemployment, you might as well live where there's good weather, fishing and swimming year round and prices are a bit cheaper than the urban centres).

Australia does provide public housing, but I'll take a stab and say it's cut back from its peak amount.

When you travel through California (and the US in general), i'd estimate homelessness and poverty to be at least an order of magnitude worse in the US (I want to hesitate to say two orders of magnitude worse) compared to anything I see at home. Clearly there's something about society and/or the structure of social safety nets that has a real and measurable effect on poverty and homelessness overall.

/ before someone jumps onto Google to try to disprove me: I've been to both countries (several times in fact), and worked with both homelessness and official national statistics. One of the things internet pundits misunderstand is the definition and measures of homelessness/poverty between the two countries: I think my estimate is pretty fair napkin math, it might be a 4 or 5 multiple instead, but I think we're quibbling by that point.

It sounds like you're aware that, according to official statistics, homelessness is higher per capita in Australia than in California or the US as a whole. I'm open to the idea that this might be due to definitional or measurement problems, but you've gotta explain what those problems are, not just assert that they must exist.

The obvious alternative explanation is that Americans might simply be less tolerant of measures to decrease the visibility of homeless.

sorry, but HN isn't a great medium for long technical posts :)

The basic issue is that Australia naive measurements and numbers carry a three tier definition of homelessness: at the lowest level you have what we call "sleeping rough" which is probably the concept closest to what most people and Americans think of as "homeless". But the Australian definition also includes the likes of insecure accommodation and inappropriate accommodation: couch surfers, people living in accommodation with inadequate living conditions, people sleeping in their cars, in socially provisioned homeless accommodation and emergency/crisis accommodation (domestic violence, youth, men and aged issues were the traditional breakdown of most services in my day).

To compare between the two nations from official sources you have to bring them back onto a somewhat comparable basis.

That makes sense. I'm gonna have to dig into the exact definitions at some point, but I agree HN comments aren't a great place to really get into that.

there's also a couple of sources and differences: the main one commonly quoted is the ABS source, derived from the census taken every 5 years, and with specific practices implemented to try to accurately enumerate homeless populations. thankfully there doesn't seem to be enough variance for the relative infrequency to be an issue, but the other quirk is that census is done in winter, and contrary to some popular impressions, homeless populations can be highly mobile and show seasonal effects.

Another source include homeless service provisions, but last time I looked at those they didn't always tend to be on a individual natural person basis.

lastly, homeless service provision, with a few caveats, is one of the only things that might locally and empirically show behaviours of what economists call a "giffen good". And, somewhat paradoxically, provision of homeless services can, to a point, increase the percieved systemic demand for homeless services. increased supply can also create more (real and percieved) demand. the relationship these complexities have with trying to measure homelessness is tricky to say the least...

https://www.sbs.com.au/topics/voices/culture/article/2017/07...

"Homelessness then, in Australia, is more than lacking a roof over your head, it is also the absence of those features associated with “home”: permanence, security, and the freedom to come and go."

"If the world were to accept Australia’s definition and include everyone with inadequate shelter, the number would exceed 1.6 billion – roughly 20 percent of the population. Also excluded from official figures are the world’s 65 million displaced refugees in temporary accommodation."

I spent ~10 years moving about annually from apartment to apartment. It wasn't due to lack of resources. I had no sense of permanence, but I would definitely not have said that I was inadequately sheltered.

as long as you had some form of legal tenure over your resident property (this would include rental agreements and long term stays), and the property was deemed suitable by Australian standards for human habitation, you would not have been included in the homeless numbers.

merely being mobile or moving a lot is not likely enough to make you considered homeless by the Australian definition.

however, if you were mobile BECAUSE you were unable to obtain a secure residence and tenureship, or the residences you inhabited were of such a low standard that they didn't meet community standards for acceptable habitation, then you probably would.

I'm struggling to remember, but there would likely be a means/ intention component as well: so FIFO workers, mobile executives are not homeless, but couch surfing students or young people may very well be (even if they spent recent time sleeping under a roof). people camping (or glamping), grey nomads, for example, aren't considered homeless.

that being said, even if these people were counted, it's more of an argument that Australian official numbers should be even lower (though i'd recommend most people to focus of the primary/ first level homeless count for the common "popular" view of homelessness if we're going to reduce a complex phenomenon to a simple digestible stat: but it has the downside that people can then tend to misinterpret low homelessness for other arguments: say, how much poverty there is or how much social housing we need.

This is what I thought... I suppose living on the street in such a climate can be deadly even. Definitely reduce life expectancy.

It is. Same in Canada. Typically in April a number of bodies turn up that were buried in snowbanks.

The climate isn't the only factor. Any comparison of homelessness between the US and other countries that doesn't take into account the opioid crisis (which is almost entirely US-centric) is missing a primary driver of homelessness in the US right now.

This is literally what people say about San Francisco as well: "They don't want the help" etc. etc. It's like the same thing.

Except in San Fransisco there are tens of thousands of homeless. The entire country of Finland has a fraction of that number.

There are indeed some homeless who would prefer to be on the street. There are also tens of thousands who are mentally ill, or just incapable of taking care of rent/ electric/ water, etc.

There is another category of homelessness rarely brought up: Finland is having a tiny crisis over moldy buildings. There are apparently people aggregating in tent villages who are unable to enter almost any building. Like, hyper-allergic to mold.

Construction techniques changed after the '60s to make buildings more airtight, cheaper of course, and built quickly; Moisture was often sealed within structures (from rain or snow) because it costs money to wait for things to dry (especially in winter). This has resulted in catastrophic instances of entire brand-new apartment buildings collapsing in value. Then there's that one particular fungi that loves growing under those plastic carpets that were popular (cheap..). I've personally lived in multiple moldy buildings. Frequent eye and ear infections, strange irritability and headaches, etc. My whole neighborhood was just renovated because they found microbes, since these houses were built quick and cheap.

In my city there are not less than two public libraries where the architect thought it a good idea to put a water fountain inside the interior. One was shut off because it leaked water into the building; the other still runs to this day. Misty moisture among paper books. Yikes.

Recent cost-cutting measures of public schools shutting down their air circulation systems for the night have raised concerns over the air quality exposed on children. Teachers and nurses infamously suffer chronically from related issues since they spend most their time within these buildings.

And the worst part is perhaps that owners of buildings and apartments don't want air quality inspections because they'd have to pay for the damn repairs. People get stuck in moving spirals where they have to get quickly out of their moldy homes only to move into another one. I personally know one person whose business failed leaving her with $100k in debt because she got super ill and the doctors couldn't officially acknowledge that mold was the problem.

Well, there are fewer homeless in Finnish cities than in many other European big cities. Note that there are only 5 cities in Finland that are big enough for homeless people. I don't think homeless people live in small towns anywhere in Europe.

On the other hand a Finnish newspaper wrote just yesterday[1] that the amount of street children (teenagers mostly) is increasing all the time and nobody really cares. The phenomenon goes mostly unreported, because according to the law it's impossible to happen. Authorities would be obliged to take care, in reality they are incapable. Mostly understaffed and to some degree also incompetent.

[1] Don't remember which one, read 3 of them.

I come from a German town with ~25.000 People, far away from any major city and there definitely are homeless people. It's not a lot in comparison to big cities like Berlin, but they do exist.

Lots of random thoughts but no conclusions

* How much does the government have to spend per person?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...

* What are the government's expenses?

From that wikipedia article the USA has 80% of what Finland has per person. But I'm only guessing 50% of that 80% goes to the military (we can argue if that's good or bad. I'm just guessing that most countries get to use more of their $ per person for other things?)

* How much does weather play a role?

Being homeless in Los Angeles is probably much more doable than Finland? Does this influence the number of people who are homeless?

* Does Oil play a role?

I think for Finland no? But Norway and Denmark apparently get lots of their budgets from oil. What happens to their social programs as we switch to renewables? (not sure it's relevant to a story about Finland but also not sure if there is some similar way government gets money or not. It does seem relevant to the general stereotype of countries in that area doing well for their citizens. If they've got a free money supply. Of course I'm totally uninformed about any of this.

All of Scandinavia have similar programs but only Norway have significant oil income. USA has more oil per capita than Denmark so they don't count.

1) Drugs are bad. The mushrooms you do at burning man every summer do not make you an expert on the effects of meth and heroin on people who are living under a bridge.

2) Placation will make it worse. Living under a bridge near other homeless people is the problem. Efforts to decriminalize "the unhoused" make the problem worse. Look at Portland, SF, Austin, and ever other city that tries this. It gets worse EVERY TIME. STOP DOING THIS.

To solve the problem:

1) Hold humans to a high standard. No, you can't live in the park. That isn't an option. No you can't do drugs. No you can't rob the walgreens. No you can't stand in my front yard at 2:00am screaming. Doing these things will result in your spending your time locked in jail.

2) Get a job. Places like Albuquerque have program where anybody can show up in the morning and get work doing things like cleaning the parks, cleaning the sidewalks, picking up trash, etc. This is good. More of this.

3) Our understanding of human psychology does not need "disruption". People who spend their time depressed and doing drugs while living in a ditch are going to develop serious stress related mental health issues. People with structured 9-5 jobs which result in them having a house and food, and something to work towards are universally more mentally healthy. And it isn't the house and the food making them more stable, it's the structure.

The efforts to fix this stuff: closing the mental health facilities, letting people sleep in their own filth, letting people commit petty crimes: these things make the problem WORSE. Stop it. This stuff might make you feel good, but it is at the expense of the people you are exploiting for your good feelings. Stop being so selfish and accept that the solution to this problem isn'g going to be happy and fun and worthy of instagram posts.

>This stuff might make you feel good, but it is at the expense of the people you are exploiting for your good feelings. Stop being so selfish and accept that the solution to this problem isn'g going to be happy and fun and worthy of instagram posts.

I think a lot more people need to hear this.

https://archive.is/viQQG

It is probably much harder being homeless in Finland than in San Francisco just from the weather. San Francisco is relatively mild, even in winter. Finland in winter gets pretty cold, and people are in severe danger of death or loss of body parts from frostbite.

https://archive.is/viQQG

There is also the matter of weather. Finland is cold. When I lived in Minneapolis the number of homeless people was staggeringly small compared to Chicago which was nothing compared to San Francisco. All the jokes about the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco aside, -20 degree temperatures at night (no windchill bs) will force even the craziest of homeless to seek shelter. Eventually they get help of somesort

Housing first is an approach conceived in the U.S. but for political reasons not as widely adopted as it should be. 99pi did a fascinating podcast series about the homelessness problem in oakland and how housing first fits into the picture. My preconceived notions of why people are homeless were definitely upended.

https://99percentinvisible.org/need/

Santa Clara County recently did a random assignment intervention to offer chronically homeless people free housing. There was no measurable difference in health outcomes (in fact, those provided housing died at higher rates). I am not convinced the housing first is as great as its proponents claim it is, though it does have an intuitive appeal (by definition, it’s the solution to homelessness! But what if homelessness is a symptom, not the disease?).

Indeed, overdoses in SF are way up, at least partially due to putting the homeless in empty hotels.

Anybody know about initiatives to build cabins instead of letting people sleep in the cold ?

It’s too cold so everyone figured out another solution?

>Still, in a small, wealthy country to which few poor people move, it appears that homelessness is solvable.

I think this is the main takeaway of this story.

Why is France taking in more migrants than it can support? It seems cruel to have your migrants homeless and living on the streets.

paywall link: https://outline.com/JV4xXe

edit: no longer working, apologies.

The link doesn't work, it just shows "None."

https://archive.is/viQQG

Anyone who thinks that just giving the homeless shelter fixes the problem doesn't understand the problem to begin with.

The evidence, from Utah (Salt Lake City also attempted and was somewhat successful with Housing First) to Finland says otherwise. Housing the homeless is cheaper and gets them stability to address the core issues (addiction, job placement, etc) with social services (which is incredibly difficult when folks are transient and sleeping rough).

With that said:

> Meanwhile, illegal immigration creates a homeless population many countries are unwilling to house. That is sabotaging the shift to housing first.

You can't house everyone who comes to your country with no means to support themselves. Resources are finite.

That same issue applies to different states. It always makes me roll my eyes when conservative pundits point to blue states' homelessness as a reason why socially liberal policies fail; no, but social policies will attract people needing them from anywhere accessible that doesn't have those policies. Hence why it needs to be done at a national level.

Not to say the general approach is bad, but I think the cost side is overplayed. It depends a lot on what the cost/structure of your existing response is, and critically, whether you can actually realize any savings after the shift. Both because it is hard to reduce staffing/infrastructure, but also because many costs are not actually born directly by the city (eg medical costs are born by the hospitals).

> Not to say the general approach is bad, but I think the cost side is overplayed.

Not sure why I, as an immigrant to Europe myself, should pay cover the cost for illegal aliens while I cannot provide properly for my own relatives in my home country. It is unconscionable.

We live in an imperfect world with many constraints and trade-offs. Why did you have to emigrate, while others were already born into lucky countries? Why are some people denied the right to emigrate?

Life is various shades of unfair and we're more likely to make a better world if we optimize for well being rather than fairness (of which there are multiple competing and contradictory definitions).

> Why did you have to emigrate, while others were already born into lucky countries?

A lot of people worked very hard to make the place I immigrated from the place it is today, most of them are still there. No luck about it.

> Why are some people denied the right to emigrate?

As far as I know all EU countries give everyone equal rights to immigrate. Maybe you should check your facts.

> Life is various shades of unfair and we're more likely to make a better world if we optimize for well being rather than fairness

How exactly is it optimizing for well being to ignore the corruption, injustice and bad governance in Africa?

Europeans should open their eyes, the world is collapsing around them while they sign treaties with China which is actively destroying Africa while committing genocide in their own country - and Europe does not care. Russia is busy oppressing their own people and it's neighbors while Germany is building a pipeline to them. This behaviour of Europe is pathetic cowardice, grow a backbone. Spending my tax money on illegal immigrants does not make the world fairer.

it's 3 areas: -income inequality -low cost housing supplies -mental health -job inequality

Finland seems to be tackling some of the others in some fashion via their approach to democratic socialism government initiatives.

No, but it's almost impossible to get out of homelessness without it. It's really hard to do anything more with your day if you have to spend most of it making sure you have enough calories and a "safe" place to sleep.

This doesn't fix everything, but there is a not-as-small-as-you-might-think subset of people for whom the only reason they continue to be homeless is they can't do anything other than figure out what they're gonna eat that day

"for whom the only reason they continue to be homeless is they can't do anything other than figure out what they're gonna eat that day"

I'm not sure I believe this. Why did they become homeless in first place? With most there is an underlying issue. It might be that they are a felon, addict, or other medical issue. It's not that hard to ask for a job while also asking for money or food. Especially if you're already going to food establishment dumpster or begging outside of them.

The person I know the best who homeless had a combination of issues. He was in a coma and lost his job. He was also required to pay child support and the bank account ran dry during that time. A warrant was issued and he was arrested. You can't find any "good" jobs with a record and warrants being issued. He basically gave up on the system and finds it easier to just let family support him.

> Why did they become homeless in first place?

I think you are vastly underestimating how easy it is to go from poor to homeless. There was a ~3 year period of my life where all it would have taken is one bad month. Just one. And it wasn't for lack of trying, or because of laziness or mental illness. Just real bad luck and starting out in a not-great place within a not-great system.

Homelessness is a hole that is easy to fall into and damn hard to crawl out of, and not to be insensitive but the assumptions you're making are part of the problem.

When you assume that homelessness is fundamentally caused by a fault in the person, that person is basically dammed to stay homeless. The things you say here are the same reasons people give to not hire a homeless person. "They must either be crazy or lazy, neither of which is an employee I want".

That's not to mention the fact that there are a surprising number of homeless people that do have jobs, but just don't make enough money to save up to get anything better (which, yes, is a failing of the system). Most people don't realize this if they haven't lived it, but being poor is very expensive.

> He basically gave up on the system and finds it easier to just let family support him.

Some people don't have a family that could support another person.

"When you assume that homelessness is fundamentally caused by a fault in the person, "

When did I say that? The stuff I listed, like addiction, other medical issues, and the failings of the system aren't personal faults.

"I think you are vastly underestimating how easy it is to go from poor to homeless."

I've made no such claim. My claim is that finding food is probably not the main problem keeping homeless people homeless. You're talking about poor -> homeless, I'm talking about other direction of homeless -> poor (in response to the parent comment). Food may be a component, but I think it's more likely issues in the system like not hiring people with a record, medical or addiction issues, or just not being able to afford housing due to lack of good employment, property taxes. These are quite expensive compared to food and lack the level of charity and government support that is given to food (SNAP, WIC, food pantries, etc), not to mention individuals are more likely to give someone a meal than a place to stay or a job.

There are a lot of reasons to be homeless and not want to stay in a homeless shelter. A big one is security. When I was homeless and learning to code, I couldn’t afford to replace my laptop. People told me that if I stayed in a homeless shelter, there was a good chance my laptop would be stolen. I chose not to stay in one for that reason alone.

A few years later, I offered to let a homeless coding student stay with me for a couple weeks while she got housing lined up. She didn’t have one of her own, so I gave her my old MacBook Air. She made arrangements to stay in a shelter, left my place, and her laptop was stolen within a week.

Safety & security matter, and any solution that is going to effectively address homelessness needs to take this into account.

That's kind of a strong statement to make without some explanation. I'm curious, what is the core of the problem you are referencing that free shelter doesn't "fix"? Mental health, addiction, something else entirely?

Could you be a bit more specific? People end up homeless because they are cut from society, have no social support to fall back to, no way of supporting themselves. Most commonly they get to that situation due to mental illness and addiction/substance abuse is an ever-present comorbidity with that.

But the fact is, not having a shelter, running water, a way to cover their basic needs is what amplifies their suffering and dispairs to level where they simply can't get back on their feet. They can't get a job if you smell, your clothes are dirty and you're desperate and hungry. A shelter is a necessary condition I think for getting out of that cycle, and thus a very important first step.

The model used in Finland is anything but "just giving the homeless a shelter". It's accompanied by a lot of social work, together with medical, mental and substance abuse care.

The reason for providing housing (not just a shelter, although those exist too) is that social work and care are ineffective when a person is homeless. When someone spends all their energy on staying warm, clean, safe and fed, they are unable to help themselves to a better life.

Providing housing was found to be more effective than adding the same amount of funding to social and medical programs.

Extensive research has been done with this, I'm sure you can find some in English language too if you find the article too hard to believe.

I highly recommend listening to 99 Percent Invisible’s new 5 part series on homelessness in America. Saying shelter doesn’t fix the problem is misleading, as it is typically a required component to solving other issues that person is facing.

https://99percentinvisible.org/need/

There is outstanding evidence that giving the homeless shelter does in fact fix the problem.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H9oD3zeBPua7r5wFoHVrMZmmiqK...

If you give homeless people a home they aren't homeless anymore. Just in deep poverty which is a completely different type of problem.

Homelessness does not beget homelessness. It is most important to note that. Our society is so focused at solving the primary symptoms without ever diving deeper into the root cause of things like this (looking at you Sf).

To experience homelessness one must have first experienced a reason to now be homeless. In modern western society we have many failsafes that prevent people from becoming totally dislodged from a place of shelter. But more and more people are losing such shelter and are ending up on our streets. Why?

The answer is often rooted in the human condition. Solving that is almost impossible... but it’s worth trying.

It should be pretty elementary to solve homelessness, as Finland has shown. There's also no reason we can't have full employment. The Soviet Union had it.

The USSR ran enterprises at a loss and kept workers idle though. And then their economy and government collapsed.

Not exactly a recipe for success.

I’ve lived in LA, SF, and Boulder. Most of the homeless in these cities are not interested in being apart of society. They are perfectly happy with their lifestyle of mental health and drug addictions.

Yes, there is a minority of homeless struggling to rejoin society, but the (pardon verbiage) worst people have no interest or empathy for society.

You're already coming across as very judgmental of these people. Have you actually talked to them? Do you know why they prefer their lifestyle? I mean you just implied that mental health is a lifestyle or addiction (??? maybe check your phrasing), and that drug addiction is a lifestyle choice instead of e.g. a coping mechanism because society failed them.

> Have you actually talked to them?

yes. Everyone has their own story. Checkout these interviews on Youtube:

LA - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6ZFzEW7_Q4 Seattle - https://youtu.be/bpAi70WWBlw?t=877

The homeless I talked with in Boulder romanticize camping forever along the creeks and being free from society, while trying to leach off of public services.

> Do you know why they prefer their lifestyle?

Drug addiction, mental health, and in some cases lack of family support.

> that drug addiction is a lifestyle choice

Drug addiction is a choice. Based on my very limited personal experiences, you gotta commit to making a change (see above videos). Many addicts just aren't ready to leave their vices for a better life. No amount of rehab will help someone if they aren't ready to commit to a change.

> society failed them.

Sorry if this sounds conservative, but trying to blame other people for your problems doesn't really get you any where. Society throws problems at everyone, some more than others. Laying around complaining or rejecting it doesn't improve anyone's situation.

People need to apply critical thinking skills and tackle their own issues (hence the need for an addict needing to commit to the idea of solving the problem of their addiction).

Ex-homeless/addicts getting together to correct "society failed" them problems via AA meetings is an excellent example of people that apply critical thinking skills and try to help.

> Sorry if this sounds conservative, but trying to blame other people for your problems doesn't really get you any where.

The person you are responding to is not homeless and is not talking about own problems at all. Much less blaming own homeless problem on somebody else.

Instead, he is someone who is trying to talk about strategies people like him, non homeless people, can push for so that other peoples chance to become homeless is smaller.

Basically, compete opposite of your accusation.

> Most of the homeless in these cities are not interested in being apart of society

maybe they are not interested in being a part of our society because of how our society is organized, and if we changed our societal structure, they would be more willing or able to participate.

Woop, there's the "socialism is a slippery slope to communism" argument.

Isn't socialism supposed to be the stepping stone to communism (but usually ends up in totalitarianism instead)?

> Isn't socialism supposed to be the stepping stone to communism

The “socialism” stage of Marxist Communism, which in Leninist practice (which differs sharply from the dictates of Marxism from which it was adapted, but shares this and some other elements of theory) is totalitarianism (not a stepping stone to it) is supposed to be a stepping stone to the perfected end state in that theoretical framework. But neither the Marxist nor especially the Leninist form of that is the same thing as the “socialism” pursued by non-Marxist socialists, and in non-Marxist socialism there's no consistent role of socialism as a stepping stone to something else, whether utopian Communism or some other end-state.

No. Communism was supposed to be abrupt revolution and transformation. The democratic socialism was seen as enemy, because it made people calmer, happier and less likely to commit to revolution.

Actually the answer is much more often rooted in capitalism, which is a lot easier to solve.

I'll say this as someone who's been evicted twice, the number one reason the vast majority of people end up homeless is because they don't have money.

This can happen for a small array of reasons, let's say you're in a bad marriage and your spouse leaves. You simply can't make the rent anymore, you're now homeless.

19 years old, and you're getting into really bad fights with your parents, you're now homeless.

Develop a medical issue in your mid-30s which prevents you from working, you're now homeless.

In my fantasy world we wouldn't even have evictions, instead a social worker would advise you that you're legally entitled to effectively a dorm of some sort.

>In modern western society we have many failsafes that prevent people from becoming totally dislodged from a place of shelter.

You're kidding right, when you're released from prison they give you 20 bucks. Awful hard to find housing with $20 you know, especially when you have a criminal record. A ton of people did do things which warranted a sentence, but we make no effort to reintegrate these people. So you did something bad when you were 20, you being 35 years old out on the streets without any hope isn't healing anything. If anything at all you're much more likely to resort to another crime of desperation.

I think there are generally accepted to be 2 categories - those that fall out temporarily and the long term homeless.

Your situation is more the former. It's really common and that's what basic safety nets are for.

The longer term folks - serious drug addiction, mental illness, excessive abuse etc. etc. - those are the harder cases.

>Your situation is more the former. It's really common and that's what basic safety nets are for.

Like a 10 year Section 8 waiting list ?

Sorry for the snark, but no social safety net really exist in America. If you don't have a place to go, you don't have it.

In many states if you don't have kids you can't get effective aid. And even with you can still end up sleeping in a car .

Oh yes, sure I don't doubt there isn't much there in the US. But certainly in Finland, Europe etc. there is.

In California, you have: Social Security, re-entry services provided by the CCDR, EBT, Medicaid, cash through county assistance programs, and a large number of non profit providers of aid.

Then why does California have so many homeless ?

Popular answers: Good weather and high housing costs.

Less popular answers: Extensive services for homeless serves as a magnet to homeless. Greater benefits for the homeless incentivizes homeless across the nation to move there.

>Homelessness does not beget homelessness. It is most important to note that

But is this really a fact? I agree with your later reasoning that homelessness is a symptom of deeper problems, but I'd argue that our societies should have one more failsafe in place: housing for the homeless.

I've never been sleeping rough, but I'd think it would be pretty traumatic. This would kick some into seeking help, but would make others fail even more.

> In modern western society we have many failsafes

The US called, they want you to pay your hospital bills.

Or when it comes to SF, rent.

> In modern western society we have many failsafes that prevent people from becoming totally dislodged from a place of shelter.

the US has much weaker social safety nets, and the ones it does have are often conditional on applications or proof of work.

to say solving homelessness is almost impossible when US homelessness is orders of magnitude worse than countries like Finland's is nonsensical

In areas of the USA with the population density of Finland there isn't much (any?) homelessness either.

It doesn't make much sense to look at the average population density of Finland. Homeless people don't really roam the empty countryside, they are in the cities, probably much like in the US too.

In areas of the USA with the average temperatures of Finland there isn't much (any?) homelessness either.

And your point is...?

I mean I guess culling the population to make the price of housing drop is one solution, but it's a bit strong don't you think?

The point is its easy to fix homelessness when land is cheap and building materials are cheap. It doesn't really help our problems in big American cities.

As soon as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25903259 was posted, two posts in /new, it helped bring this one, got to the front page:

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