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Comment by jerojero | Hacker News Reader

The way homelessness has been tackled in Finland is by offering free housing, no string attached, to homeless people.

I think there is a culture of "but people need to deserve it", and I guess because housing is so expensive in San Francisco it might seem like it's unfair that homeless people get free housing whereas someone with a job needs to spend 50% of their pay in housing. But if you want the problem to be solved, this seems to be way to go about it.

Of course, governments need to also provide programs for reinsertion and rehabilitation, but people need the stability while they recover which is a process that will be full of ups and downs. For these people any barrier might be too high. So I think the rest of us need to come to terms with "giving away free stuff", that's just what works.

Free housing for the homeless, no strings attached.

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> offering free housing, no string attached, to homeless people

What if everyone wants their free housing in Helsinki? California's problem isn't a lack of homes per se, it's a lack of homes where people want to live. (San Francisco also has a massive drug-use enforcement problem.)

Should we make decisions based on the what-ifs of the helsinkiläinen or reality?

> Should we make decisions based on the what-ifs of the helsinkiläinen or reality?

What works for Finland might not for California without us acknowledging that every homeless person who wants housing in San Francisco isn’t entitled to it. They can be entitled to housing. But not where they want it.

One challenge there is that many of the factors driving the location wants aren't entirely unreasonable: That "want" to live in proximity to the VA hospital that will provide them the medical services they need, they "want" to live in proximity to family members they can get (or sadly, often harass) some support out of. They "want" to live in a place where a poor ability to manage themselves and/or their substance addictions won't result in a quick death from exposure (or arrest).

You should acknowledge the differences, because scale matters.

Finland is a bitterly cold country (in winter) with a hard to understand language and 5 million people. The local homelessness problem has some relatively low upper limit.

The US is a country of over 300 million and SF has very good weather all year round. Its migration potential is almost two orders of magnitude bigger.. If you simply give a home to everyone who turns up in SF and says that they need it, you won't have enough homes. You could deny coverage to anyone who moves to SF after a certain date; that would mitigate the "amount of homes needed" problem, but it remains to be seen if the homeless community does not grow back to its original size.

There are 4 vacant apartments for every homeless person in San Francisco, including those in shelters. The idea of a net shortage is a farce.

> 4 vacant apartments for every homeless person in San Francisco, including those in shelters

Source? (Curious for their definition of vacancy.)

A cursory glance shows many of those homes are being renovated or sold [1]. The pied-à-terre / vacancy tax isn’t a terrible idea, but it’s a band-aid on a missing limb. (Though further penalising housing development seems like a very San Francisco way to compound the problem.)

[1] https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/housing/san-francisco-saw-bi...

So if they all got clean and worked 32h a day they could easily afford housing. To work these hours little crystal never fails. The insanity might be baked into a insane situation. Even the Romans housed there slaves..

I think they tried that in SF and it did not work at all. There's definitely a subset of the homeless population that would take advantage of something like that, but my guess is that those people are not really a problem to begin with. In other words the people that could take a free apartment and then turn their lives around are probably not defecating on the streets and shooting drugs in broad daylight. If you take the latter and give them an apartment it's only going to exacerbate their bad habits. The biggest problem that happens to overlap with homelessness is all kinds of illnesses from addiction to mental issues, and those are not being addressed. These problems are confused with lack of housing for some reason, and then the problem just never gets actually solved.

The state of California alone has 8 times your population and the US will gain your entire population in refugees in less than a decade.

Do you have people from all over Europe heading to Finland for the free housing? From what I can tell, a big portion of the Bay Area's problems have to do with more and more people heading there, knowing that they won't be punished for drug use or the petty crimes they commit to fuel their habit, and a relatively moderate climate.

It really is quite shocking the changes in just the last decade. There seems to be some misguided belief that if you just stop punishing folks with drug problems they'll somehow "come out of it" and rejoin society as functioning members after some revelation. That's just not ever going to happen IMO.

It’s a great story, and maybe has some truth, but long before drugs were legalized everyone bussed their homeless to the big cities. The problem was here before the legalization.

Right... which is why I said it's gotten significantly worse and didn't say the problem didn't exist a decade ago. There is a direct correlation to the increase in open drug use and crime in the bay area with the decriminalization of drug use and petty theft. If you're arguing otherwise, I guess I'd question whether or not you live in the area or spend any significant time there.

I don’t know that there is good evidence of “more and more people” going to SF to be homeless and use drugs. There may be more homeless now, and there may be more open drug use, but the motivation and agency doesn’t necessarily follow.

> there is a culture of "but people need to deserve it", and I guess because housing is so expensive

Housing doesn't have to be complex or extravagant. A single homeless person could thrive in a small 1-bedroom studio with a kitchenette with their own shower, etc. Many hotel-style residences would be suitable for this purpose.

A key factor will be locating this in a place that doesn't feel like a concentration camp and putting it near the city center with working public transportation so they can access employment options.

They can help "pay" for it via optional community programs for housekeeping, landscaping, trash removal, and so on. Many homeless individuals will not take handouts because of pride and they don't want to feel any more of a failure than they do.

It'll be better than being homeless, but not as good as having your own place (paid for by your own income).

Sounds great but there would need to be a no drug policy in this housing. Otherwise, these places will just become drug dens.

No drugs and mental health and drug counseling with job placement would be the dream situation.

The problem is, what jobs? There just aren't jobs for people of that sort. Those days are gone

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