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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

This Guardian story gives more detail on how the program works:

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle...

Common objections to applying this policy elsewhere seem to be “We’re bigger than Finland” and “We’re not ethnically homogenous like Finland.”

On the first point, 5M people isn’t really that small. It’s roughly the median population of an American state.

On the second point, well… It does sound a lot like “minorities don’t deserve housing”. I don’t know how it’s supposed to be a blocker.

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Just IMO, many Americans probably don't think homeless people deserve free housing, because they have (the taxpayers) have to pay for their own housing and also contribute to homeless housing via taxes.

"Fuck you got mine" is real here. Just see the nauseating argument against discharging student loans.

Even from a selfish perspective, I expect "solving" homelessness would ultimately save money for taxpayers, when you consider all of the police and healthcare resources that go into it now, as well as the negative effects on communities. But it would take a lot of time and consistent effort to get there, and the costs would be a lot more obvious and direct than the benefits.

Not sure I agree on student loans though. The main reason I struggle with that one is because it seems to me to be a regressive policy: most people with student loans (though certainly not all) are better off that people who didn't have the opportunity to pursue higher education at all. So forgiving student loans benefits a chunk of the population, but does nothing for those who are even more in need (some of whom might have chosen a different path if they'd known they could have their debts forgiven). I'd rather see policies that can benefit everyone in financial need proportionally.

This kind of selfishness is not about yourself getting more, it's about others getting less. As harsh as it sounds, this is the center of many political ideas. This is what happens when you start from "we should do X", instead of "I want things to be Y, so let's find out how to best get there". Just think about the droves of people fighting to teach abstinence in schools, although studies have shown time and time again it leads to more abortions!

You don't even need to get into the second order social costs. SF spends about $70,000 per shelter bed per year, or $5,800 per month. Rent in SF is expensive, but not that expensive.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s-f-report-puts-a-1-4...

>Even from a selfish perspective, I expect "solving" homelessness would ultimately save money for taxpayers

If saving money were more important than putting down poor people, the US would have universal healthcare by now.

Well that's the core (or one of the cores) of modern US society - everybody for themselves. Maybe its not written on dollar bill, but if you look closely enough you can see it in various aspects of society. Gun wielding (for protection from other folks but government too, very common mindset in gun culture), having right to shoot folks that enter your property, whole health insurance system, whole social system, and definitely higher education. Basically a class system based on wealth/income.

I just named basic pillars of any modern society. Yes economic approach is very effective in open markets and due to historical reasons gives US top spot in global economy, but society as a whole is much more selfish and less humane. Not something future generations will look and judge kindly, unless we reverse massively due to some catastrophes (and then nobody will care about the past anyway).

One of the reasons very few people from richer western Europe strive to move to US, its just a bad quality of life overall and more 'primitive' cruel society, which define actually important stuff in life much more than just raw paycheck amount. And yes its cruel, walk among homeless folks in LA that should be in professional psychiatric facilities, and not dying slowly on streets in front of everybody, without much care, for decades.

Original draft of declaration of independence had “life, liberty, and pursuit of property”

More so than "fuck you got mine", my impression is that a lot of it comes down to at some level believing in "karma" or the Just World fallacy. That is, the notion that you get what you deserve somehow. Even if you don't consciously say it, if you deep down has some troubling sense that someone homeless must either be lazy or otherwise have done something to deserve the situation they're in even when there's no direct causal link, it's easy to think that they either don't deserve the help and/or will mess up even if you bother. It then becomes a lot easier to do the bare minimum to try to prevent homeless from being a nuisance to others even when helping them properly might be cheaper and better overall.

A lot of social dysfunction makes a lot more sense if you assume a large chunk of people actually do go around thinking that both good and bad outcomes must have been earned somehow and so are deserved whether or not you can establish a causal link.

Student loans argument is not 1:1 at all.

Every student loan forgiveness proposal I see suggests that taxpayers foot the bill and the counterargument is why should those who did not attend and/or those who paid off have to foot the bill.

I agree with that counterargument and will never vote for forgiveness.

However, send put a proposal in front of me that seizes assets from the universities selling these degrees that apparently can never pay for themselves and sell off their assets to pay down student loan debt? You'll get my vote.

Not to mention it was the fact that we are giving children loans that are risk-free to the lender due to the government's guarantee is what resulted in the costs skyrocketing to begin with. Colleges were always going to use that consistent free cash flow from indentured young people to enrich themselves.

A lot of this would solve itself if people in student loan debt could discharge it through bankruptcy. Colleges that can't produce degrees where students can pay their loans off would close and many people wouldn't be able to get student loans, and I argue that would be a good thing.

It seems 1:1 to me. With your counterargument logic then, why should the taxpayers have to foot the bill for homeless people? It's not like it's your fault they're homeless; you pay your own rent/mortgage so why should you foot the bill for others?

I think both are valid points: Finland has less inhabitants than London and besides maybe from Swedes, Russians and Lapps no large minority groups, of which the aforementioned most likely don’t instill ambiguity about how they obtained their citizenship and why. Studies show that homogenous countries have less objections to social welfare programs aka income redistribution [0].

[0] https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/working-p...

What does size have to do with anything? Nobody's saying you spend the same amount or provide the same number of houses - you can scale it up to meet the larger population eh?

Of course size matters. Finland’s homelessness likely coalesces around its largest urban areas, as they provide the most foot traffic and anonymity (and homeless services) with the least annoyed population. Like in every country.

So most likely Helsinki.

If your pool of possible homeless is 5M and they gather in a city the size of 600k it is a hugely different situation than say San Francisco, which is 800k and draws from 330M possible homeless

Do homeless people not congregate in cities in the US? So just scale up the effort, I don't get it lol. You may have to do more in certain cities than others, and yeah the program may need to span states.

> If your pool of possible homeless is 5M and they gather in a city the size of 600k it is a hugely different situation than say San Francisco, which is 800k and draws from 330M possible homeless

I'm struggling to follow your logic here.

The 'possible homeless' would not be total population of a country - if it is, you've got more urgent problems.

I think in the USA the number's around 500,000, or about 0.2%, yeah?

There's more than one city in Finland, but even if there wasn't (but there really is!) there's definitely more than one big city in the USA, so I don't understand that extrapolation to 'all the homeless will move to San Fran'.

And even if they did, you've still got the considerable resources of the USA [0] that could be brought to bear on the problem. The fact that the problem is distributed quite widely, and definitely not exclusive to large urban centers[1] should make it easier.

[0] https://www.nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/category/military...

[1] https://www.security.org/resources/homeless-statistics/#regi...

>less objections to social welfare programs aka wealth distribution

Welfare programs are not wealth redistribution but income redistribution.

Sorry, not a native speaker and in a hurry. Edited it. Thanks

If your country has 5M, it means your largest city is fairly small, or cannot compare with the cities that have 10M inhabitants alone. Scale creates totally different problems, I'd thought that people on HN understood that kind of things.

Then highlight what kind of magical new problems it creates where the solution does not also scale (e.g. sure, you need more funding, but the number of taxpayers to pay for it scales at the same or similar rate). The "US is too big" argument gets used for everything the US struggles with, even with things that are easily subdivided. It's a lazy argument.

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