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Comment by Cloudef | Hacker News Reader

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)

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>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.

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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"?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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)

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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...

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 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.

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.

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).

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 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.

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.

> 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.

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).

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).

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.

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.

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).

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?

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".

Thanks, I edited my post.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

True, this is widespread and not unique to Romania.

> 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.

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.

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".

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.

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."

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Are you American?

No.

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