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Comment by HissingMachine | Hacker News Reader

This is fake news, almost nothing about this article is accurate or factual, homelessness is a problem in this country that usually is unearthed by investigative journalists because apparently we don't have homeless problem so we don't even keep an official record, but we get articles like this to pat ourselves in the back which makes this even more embarrassing. t. a 40yo finn

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Are you sure? The graph in the article seems to match a graph on the ARA's website: https://www.ara.fi/en-US/Materials/Homelessness_reports/Repo... (the ARA seem to be the organisation in charge of housing in Finland).

Not that it's completely reliable, but Wikipedia also has information which matches the article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Finland), no discussion on the talk page, and no signs of an edit war in the history.

Lived in Finland a decade now. There are drunks and drug addicts hanging around on the streets all night and in parks, but I have never once seen someone sleeping on cardboard, or in a sleeping bag on the street. Not once.

They are in the forest, not on the streets. Makeshift or real tent, sleeping bag. I've seen a bunch of this in Espoo and Helsinki, admittedly more in the 80s and 90s than later on. (Whether this development is due to my own situation or that of the homeless people, I don't know.)

Maybe. I mean there's a lot of forest here. But at that point isn't it more of a choice?

I tend to think of the homeless as sleeping in bags or on cardboard in cities, trying to get money for whatever it is they need. I really saw the true meaning of homelessness when I was in Austin.

Links of that investigative journalism would be nice to support your claims of this being fake news.

The Y-Foundation exists https://ysaatio.fi/en/home and they have reports too.

> apparently we don't have homeless problem so we don't even keep an official record

There is an official record by the Housing Finance and Development Center of Finland: https://www.ara.fi/en-US/Materials/Homelessness_reports

More information can also be found at https://housingfirsteurope.eu/countries/finland/

Saying something is fake with your only reference being your claim that "you're a Finn", is pretty much meaningless.

I used to be one of those homeless people that officially don't exist about a decade ago, we didn't exist then and I'm sure they didn't exist now either.

Could you point us to a resource where we can read more about this? Perhaps a source pointing to data being covered up?

what's the general sentiment about homeless in the population ? is it more like "chase them out, i dont care" or "we would like to do something but nothing ever happens" ?

Generally finns want and expect the government to offer everyone in need free housing. When this does not happen everyone is surprised.

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