Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)
oecdecoscope.blog
oecdecoscope.blog
> Finnish mental health legislation takes a medical approach to compulsory measures, emphasising the need for treatment of psychiatric patients over civil liberties concerns... Finland has the highest rates of detention per 100 000 inhabitants, about 214 compared with 93 in the UK and 11 in Italy.
> If at the end of the 3-month period it is considered likely that detention criteria are still fulfilled, new recommendations MII and MIII are filed and the renewed detention is then valid for 6 months. However, this second period of detention has to be immediately confirmed by a local administrative court.
edit: I should mention that I've seen fairly convincing cross-sectional evidence that homelessness is more related to the housing market than mental illness: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/homelessness-is-a-housing-prob... , https://www.nahro.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/NAHRO-Summi...
To the extent that people have a natural right to exist and society does not I think it should be contingent on administrators to prove the standard they're applying is actually reasonable and non discriminatory.
If you're not quite sure what I'm getting at then you should examine the practice of institutionalization that used to occur in the United States and all the many great reasons we have not continued with it. Or the many famous examples of writers attempting to become involuntarily committed so they can detail just how difficult it is to get out and prove to these often unaccountable organizations that you are not, in fact, "severely mentally ill."
I wonder about the jurisprudence of other nations that use these practices in ways which a US citizen might find decidedly uncomfortable, as was pointed out by the OP, particularly when it comes to the nature of involuntary patient /treatment/ and not just simple social separations for the good of the community.
We’re talking about people walking around shoeless covered in dirt and open sores talking to themselves or screaming obscenities in public while walking into traffic. They are public safety risks - to the community and themselves. Not to mention it truly is inhumane to let them live like this.
You have to realize in threads like this you are likely talking to people that live in a community plagued by this extreme of circumstances. Living in San Francisco I saw what I just described just this afternoon outside my own window…
Are you suggesting state guardianship is not warranted in situations like I have mentioned above? Or are you just not aware that in many US cities things truly are this bad?
"Finland has the highest rates of detention per 100 000 inhabitants, about 214"
If by detention you mean incarceration, that is still shy of half of the US rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...
Compare the decision not to let your five year old have pudding because she hit her brother and refused to apologise, versus the decision not to let her jump into the tiger pit because she might die. These are both restraints on this kids' freedom, but they come from very different places.
This is absolutely the right diagnosis. For instance, SROs used to be very affordable.[1] Placing someone into housing was well within the means of local governments and non-profits.
In Coppola's 1974 movie The Conversation, a large portion of the titular dialogue is about a homeless person Williams' character spots while walking around a crowded Union Square. That's how much homelessness stood out back then.
It's true that if it was impossible to speculate on housing, there would be less incentive to create artificial scarcity by e.g. lobbying for restrictive land use policies.
This seems like an oversimplification. Speculation affects demand, so the amount of speculation is hidden within “relative scarcity”. If there is no speculation then demand is directly related to the needs and finances of potential occupants. If there is speculation then demand becomes connected to the buying power of the wealthy, and thus demand and prices are likely to be higher.
In particular, the wealthy investing class collectively have way, way more money than the renting class, so the finances of the wealthy class distort housing prices upward in ways which dwarf the supply and demand effects from actual renters moving in and out of an area.
We’ve all decided that it’s totally fine to artificially limit the supply of real estate. Speculation is the market (correctly, in most cases) betting that that will continue.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24058...
But yes, wealthy people have more capital and leverage to participate in time-displaced arbitrage. Gentrification is a bit more productive, since investors work at making their properties more valuable at least.
It’s that correct? Consider NFTs. They are a speculative asset with no recurring revenue attached. The natural price, I think, is zero, but speculators push that price up based on the expected return from future buyers based on predictions of how the market will move. There are no other supply and demand effects, just speculation on sale. Of course there was a bubble but housing is more grounded in reality and real value. Still, it may demonstrate that speculation alone can raise prices.
> Gentrification is a bit more productive
In the dry economic sense of “production” yes, but at the expense of dismantling communities. Perhaps more productive and less destructive would be the approach to housing taken in Vienna. The government buys land and builds affordable housing complexes on it, and once residents stabilize and their income goes up they get to stay in the housing so the buildings become mixed income and they’re pretty nice. Near where I live West Oakland is gentrifying with a wall of corporate owned housing that is replacing the front stoops and back yards of local residents with parking garages and Teslas. It seems almost as though the community is being slowly eaten alive.
Housing isn't comparable to NFTs, all logic goes out the door when something doesn't have intrinsic value.
> In the dry economic sense of “production” yes, but at the expense of dismantling communities.
Yes: whenever cities devote resources to "clean up" a neighborhood, they are also doing this. Slums are ugly, but they are also a source of cheap housing; old buildings might not use land very effectively, but they are also a source of cheap housing (and that new dense apartment building that they knocked down the old housing to build is no longer as affordable on a unit basis).
> The government buys land and builds affordable housing complexes on it
This isn't a bad approach, though I'm not sure how it would scale to the USA. The problem with the US is that "affordable" is often a term that is applied to a few hot cities rather than in general. If all the affordable housing is in Mississippi, no one would be interested in taking it, if it is where people want to live, then we will have lots of lopsided unsustainable population movements, if we just somehow even it out affordable housing, then some people are still going to be left out of their preferred location for housing.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24058...
For public housing, there is also the approach taken by Singapore. This article discusses both and may interest you. What I think matters most is we understand that it is possible to have more people in stable affordable housing, and we accept nothing less.
https://www.shareable.net/public-housing-works-lessons-from-...
This country's housing and immigration & temp. resident policies are absolutely out of sync, intentionally. In 2021 they've changed the rules to add hundreds of thousands of people overnight, but did not build anywhere close to the corresponding amount of housing. Then they did it next year again, and again, and again, and they're still doing it, and the next government plans to continue doing it.
This isn't mere speculation. This is deliberate policy to manufacture a housing crisis. To not only keep the pre-existing crisis going, but to deliberately and methodically escalate it. Politicians profit both from their own investment properties and from bribes (ahem campaign contributions, speaking fees, board positions, ...) paid to them by all kinds of businesses who profit from oversupply of labour and undersupply of housing.
"Speculation" implies taking significant risk, often in an under-regulated market. But the current situation is nothing like that – there is barely any risk, when both the supply (zoning & construction) and demand (population growth) sides of the market are heavily regulated with the intent to raise prices. Capital is all you need to reap the profits, pretty much.
Asking as someone not that familiar with Canadian politics, is this "the next government" as in the Liberal one that would replace Trudeau after his resignation, or the (likely) Conservative one that would be in power after the general election?
Much of the problem is that the bourgeois class wants to live in the popular neighborhood, bidding up rents and values in isolated sections of large cities. Meanwhile, large chunks of cities have relatively affordable, but not as attractive neighborhoods with homes that could be converted to house the homeless for a fraction of what it would cost to build new housing.
Just the other day, I heard a news report in my area where they allocated money for homeless at $100,000 per bed in order to add more beds to an existing shelter in the downtown area. Yet this city has neighborhoods with cheap and unoccupied homes that could be bought to house these homeless for much less than 100,000 per bed.
[0] https://www.berkeleyside.org/2022/10/23/election-2022-measur...
[1] https://rentboard.berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documen...
The empty home tax is a great idea, but my guess is the tax/fee is not significant enough to change investor behavior. Or possibly it’s not being enforced at the level it should be?
Then they're too low. It's impossible there exist no X and Y where at $X and Y% this would make them sell.
It's not $ and % in Berkeley, its a fixed $3,000 for the first year the unit stands vacant for 182 days or more, $6,000 in the second and subsequent years.
Oakland's measure (which is older) is also a fixed dollar amount (varies by the specific kind of unit, either $3,000 or $6,000 per year), and only applies if the property isn't occupied for at least 50 days in a year.
San Francisco's new one (like Berkeley's, passed in 2023 and would have gone into effect for 2024 with payments in 2025) was struck down as a violation o both the Federal and State Constitution, so until and unless that decision is overturned on appeal, it effectively doesn't exist.
> I figured it would incentivize people to either rent or sell their unused properties which will house people and get rid of blight. Neither has happened much and these owners just take the hit.
Well, the only significant one that is in effect at all (Berkeley's) hasn't had much time to have an impact (it only applies to rental properties with units vacant for more than 182 days in a calendar year, and it went into effect Jan. 1, 2024, with the first payments due in 2025 based on 2024 vacancies.)
In places, like most countries in Asia, where crime rates are vastly lower, you'll see far greater levels of socioeconomic mixing with defacto mansions near rather modest houses. The same is also true to some degree in rural areas in the states, where you'll see a trailer on a couple of acres with a truck husk or two in the front yard right beside a house that you'd be more inclined to call an 'estate.'
If they are "relatively affordable, but not as attractive" they are probably largely housing people currently, and not available to house the homeless.
If they are "in total blight, with abandoned neighborhoods, with windows blown out", they've probably also been stripped, structurally compromised, and contaminated with hazardous materials, and already sheltering squattors, and would need to be cleared, cleaned up, demolished, and have new housing built, making it a more expensive (excluding whatever differences there are in land costs) effort to use that space for housing than other places which might still require demolition and new construction, but not the clearing effort.
> Just the other day, I heard a news report in my area where they allocated money for homeless at $100,000 per bed in order to add more beds to an existing shelter in the downtown area. Yet this city has neighborhoods with cheap and unoccupied homes that could be bought to house these homeless for much less than 100,000 per bed.
I suspect if you research what the $100,000 covers, much of it is stuff that would still need to be done after buying the units. At least that's been the case most of the times I've seen comparisons like this.
Seems like you’re looking for any and all reasons to establish such a high standard for any housing for homeless people that literally sleep on the ground on top of a plastic bag that creating housing for them is too expensive.
In my opinion, this type of analysis is that the root of the problem. There is no perfect solution, but building high quality housing meeting the latest standards of the city planning committee for 1% of the homeless while leaving 99% out on the street is not a useful solution.
i.e. already providing housing to someone who would otherwise be homeless
This drives me nuts, because the goal should be for 100% of housing to be affordable. Stifling development or shifting the unaffordability to different areas of the income distribution do not solve the problem. More housing has to get built. This is a supply-demand issue, as anyone with basic economic knowledge can tell you. There are two ways out: people relocate, or more housing gets built.
In a world where everyone had housing, I wouldn't mind if Taylor Swift built a house for herself that wasn't "affordable."
It's worth pointing out that, on a country-wide level, Finnish housing prices have been remarkably stagnant for the last 20-30 years when compared to e.g. the United States or most other European countries. That is not true of the cities, obviously, and cities are where all the work is, but it is quite possible here to find very cheap housing in the "middle of nowhere".
Government subsidies don't change that dramatically between these different areas, so it's entirely possible to rent e.g. a studio apartment someplace like Kemi or Vaasa for 500€/month or lower and then just coast if you are willing to put in some effort. If you're willing to live with roommates, who may well be running the same strategy you are, it becomes even easier. (The downside is you then have to live there. Many of these areas have record high unemployment rates, for much the same reasons 3000 person towns in the United States do. Having done something like that for a year, I can report it felt like living in cryostasis.)
So there's arguably an oversupply of Finnish housing in these remote areas, and most of the country is correctly classified as remote (seriously, look at a map, Finland is huge for 5 million people). One interesting mechanism which might help curb that oversupply in the coming decades is the 15% inheritance tax - many people who live in these areas are older and don't want to hand down e.g. a $50,000 valuation home to their kids and then force them to somehow pony up 7.5k in liquid capital. That incentivizes them to sell sooner rather than later.
The more interesting question: Has Finnish housing supply growth in areas like Helsinki, Tampere and Turku kept up with demand growth? I suspect that no matter which country we're looking at, the one which answers that correctly today for their largest cities will be the best place overall to live 10 or 20 years from now. Personally I'll always prefer Finland's massive concrete suburbs to the endless, pointless sea of single family homes I grew up in in the States, and I hope we keep building more of them!
*"snow-where"
That being said, yes Helsinki has been a magnet for employment at least since the Nokia boom years, but its population has ebbed at least once in lulls since then when rental demand cannot meet overpriced supply.
Outlying regions do have a big overstock of housing. Even with low rents, I don't think you can keep any even moderately ambitious young person out in the sticks and away from Helsinki/Tampere/Oulu. Long ago one might think that maybe the country's policy of universal high-speed internet coverage might counter that tendency, but... no.
FWIW some stats on population age by region here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/529458/average-age-of-po...
This is maybe the biggest difference between America and other developed countries when it comes to this subject. You'll find that a fifth-percentile priced home in Spain, Korea, or Australia will be in a rural area with not a lot of economic prospects, but in the US you'll have the additional burden of finding a meth lab next door or being a homicide victim.
Housing is one of the areas I do not see any problems with oversupply.
Typically, “housing” implies those amenities nearby. Obviously, a little bit extra doesn’t hurt, but building out and maintaining infrastructure is not cheap.
I imagine the calculations get even tougher when 50 year projections are for smaller populations.
Oversupply is almost definitionally a bad thing because it means 10 families are trying and falling to offload their $20,000 home for $80,000, and for whatever reason none of them are willing to lower their price to the sane level. That's an obvious market failure, even if its causes aren't well understood. And when I say "curb the oversupply" I actually mean "put or rent these properties on the market at prices where they will actually get used."
That is true for consumer goods where demand can shift to substitutions easily
It is not true for infrastructure goods such as housing. (Housing is infrastructure)
There is a measurable need that can be under or over supplied.
They may have good reasons to want to live there, including "My job is here", "My family is here", and "The only doctor in the world who can treat my exceptionally rare illness lives here". But God will not smite them if USPS starts delivering their mail to a different address. They have many options for figuring out a different place to live, either locally in Pierre, or farther away in a different state or continent.
The fact that the supply and demand curves seemingly move slower in the housing market compared to e.g. the electricity or food markets, which are arguably much more basic "infrastructure goods" (you can survive being homeless if you have food - you can't survive living in a mansion with nothing to eat), doesn't mean they stop being subject to the laws of supply and demand. At worst it means "Plan carefully, because if you miss the mark you will lose a lot of money for a long time." At best it means "Sweet - I wonder if I can make these markets more dynamic with a new company?"
> In 24 states-accounting for 51.9% of the U.S. population-591,402 emergency involuntary detentions were recorded in 2014, the most recent year with most states reporting, a crude rate of 357 per 100,000.
Notably, California with 400/100k. Florida with 900/100k. I think the why would make these numbers more interesting. How many are drug detox/recovery?
[1] https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/epdf/10.1176/appi.ps.201900...
The problem is that there are very different groups of people we're talking about, so much so that throwing them all under the "homeless" umbrella doesn't make sense. It's like saying car accidents are a traffic design problem, not an alcohol problem. Sure, both things can lead to traffic accidents, but they're pretty different problems.
People who temporarily need some assistance to get back on there feet are in a categorically different group than the people who are currently unable to function in society. These are fundamentally different problems.
I've seen how D.C. has tried housing first. It's given thousands of individuals free apartments, for life as far as I can tell, some in very expensive areas. It's been an enormous failure, since housing doesn't actually solve the very serious underlying problems that many of these people have. A lot of long-term residents to flee places that were once (comparatively) affordable because of rising crime and violence. The Washington Post has occasionally covered this [1][2].
I watched a neighborhood meeting recently about the issue. The city does wellness checks on the people in the program - but they can just completely ignore them, and nothing happens. Long term residents have been forced out after people in the program have attacked them or threatened to kill them and the city doesn't do anything, and doesn't even remove them from the program. A councilmember was taking part in the meeting, and had nothing to say other than he was looking into ways that the city could provide more help to people in the program.
The linked article is bordering on misinformation by not mentioning Finland's compulsory commitment, and also ignoring the failures of housing first in the U.S. like D.C.'s that haven't included that aspect. That's why a lot of these programs end up failing - people try to pick and choose the elements that they want, and ignore necessary elements that they find inconvenient. In the end, that doesn't help anyone.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/dc-housed-t...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/08/08/dc-paid-h...
An actual effective policy would mean the privileged giving up some of their privile. Keeping one's privilege is a far stronger motivator than ending someone else's suffering or doing good.
As long as there is steadfast refusal to recognize what got us here, and instead focus on red herrings like speculators and crisis counselors, we’re going to be stuck with the problem.
Don’t feed the pigeons.
Wow those numbers seem high if they're counting unique people and not admissions and re-admisisons.
There is the brutal reality that the climate in Finland and being homeless are not a great combination in the winter. And the summers are short. Getting people off the streets saves lives. If it's -20 during the night you can either lock people up or collect their corpses in the morning. Most people will seek shelter by themselves or not reject shelter when it is offered to them. But people with serious psychiatric issues, that are maybe a bit self destructive and under the influence of alcohol or drugs are going to have trouble doing rational things. So, yes, Finland does the pragmatic thing here. I don't have good statistics on this but I bet there are more than few corpses being collected in the US and the UK on a yearly basis.
I've lived in Finland for a few years. It's a friendly place that is mostly safe and nice to be. There's a level of pragmatism and compassion with much of what they do that other countries could learn from. Including the business of incarcerating people. The US and UK are maybe a bit lacking with that. Finland has prisons and psychiatric wards (not the same thing) of course. But people don't stay in those endlessly. Prison sentences are generally short, and rehabilitation is something they put a lot of effort on. Most crime there relates to people doing stupid shit because they are drunk, mentally ill, etc. The solution usually includes addressing those issues after they serve their shortish prison terms. And with some level of success.
Or put floor heating under the streets like they did in Jyväskylä!
Anyway, sleeping rough in Jyväskylä sounds like it would be tough. Although you might have enough material (snow) to try to make an iglo. Some people do that for fun even. Of course technically if you make an iglo your home are you still homeless?
Note, this was 20 years ago, maybe it all changed, either the system or the reasons. I can imagine that if you have a zero homeless strategy, it's weird to say that the street heating is for the homeless.
My experience with Finnish people is that it can be hard to tell when they are joking and they have a dark sense of humor. Great poker players too.
I'm not personally a fan of that, but it's quite common in post-soviet countries and very normalized (people are actually surprised when I tell them that not every country does that)
[1] Ultimately for their own good, not as a punitive measure. They are watched by medical personnel and don't risk dying of hypothermia. Still it's not something I'd like to experience.
In San Francisco studies of their populations revealed lots of segments of homeless people
The one that stuck out to me the most was the most distressing: people that were homeless within last 12 months of the study, a huge percent of them were just people that left a relationship. That was a housing price problem.
I knew so many people that had broken up but still living together, and its crazy that the ones on the street were “the strong ones” that actually left
(Since I was not poor and exempt from consequence, I ended that relationship immediately and got a place I actually liked. we had done all the talking I was over it.)
What do mean, that other single professionals will better succeed renting in Berlin or Munich, or afford renting in Warsaw or Prague? My experience is that even less so.
> It's not too difficult to rent a room in a shared house/apartment as a single person
In Berlin or Munich absolutely not, even shared accommodation have some absurd castings. Some people really smell their advantage and squeeze every drop of humiliation they can.
It has its issues and is definitely not ideal, but whether you accept these has less to do with age and more to do with culture and economics.
I've shared a house with people in their 40s (or more) when I was in my 20s in London. I'm sure they would have preferred their own place, but it was much, much cheaper for them to share.
https://freopp.org/whitepapers/reimagining-the-policy-approa...
Scroll down to "The Homeless Have Moved from Hospitals to Prisons"
The graph in the linked article shows a reduction in homelessness from about 17,000 to about 4,000, a reduction of approximately 13,000 people.
So I think it's fair to say that Finland's mental health changes have been responsible for the overwhelming majority in the reduction of Finland's homelessness problem. This is consistent with the point that I was trying to make elsewhere in this thread [1].
I'm from Ottawa where the cold is obviously deadly, as it is in Finland. I do feel that we need to take shelter more seriously in public policy compared to warm areas because of that. Last week someone froze to death overnight a few blocks away from where I was crashing on a couch with family. Walking through downtown Ottawa and seeing the huge empty, lit, warm buildings with people freezing to death right outside is striking. Any practically minded person can see the problem is political and philosophical, not practical.
I can tell all the posters who think people choose to be homeless that I'm certainly not one of them. The comments about the importance of avoiding a downward spiral are certainly correct. Searching for work is hard enough normally and becomes increasingly difficult without access to things like a kitchen and toilet.
What I see in this Finnish policy is the starting assumption that doing nothing is not a good option. After reaching that point there can a rational discussion about what to do with whatever money is being spent - do you pay more people to hand out blankets and conduct surveys or just use it to buy housing units? As a homeless person I would really like to see Canada have a policy like I'm reading in this article instead of what we are doing now. The crappy temporary shelters and bureaucratic spending strategy obviously isn't working.
Even just economically, to have a government pay for years of schooling and subsidize advanced degrees then just be ready to let that person die on the street when they are ready to work but can't happen to find something seems like a waste. I'd rather see a functioning "social safety net" as described in this article.
I went to college in Ottawa, and now I live in Austin Texas. It's similar in size, although Austin has been growing more lately. Curiously, they are also both capitols, college towns and they have a river flowing through them.
A major difference is that Austin has a new development with 200-400 unites on every block it seems. Cranes are everywhere downtown, and even in random neighborhoods they have huge new developments. Ottawa has no shortage of land, there's a huge amount of available land to develop in either direction, but they evidently aren't building nearly as much.
The result? I'm looking at 2 bedroom apartments, and they are 1000$ cheaper than they were 3 years ago when I first moved here. Rent has gone down and continues to go down. I'm seeing studio apartments in the middle of the city renting out for 800$ now!
In a functioning economy, more immigration will just result in more housing being built, as long as the immigrants are working. Especially since the cost of housing construction is largely the cost of labor. Immigration is a distraction from the core inability to build more housing.
It's not. If you have a narrative for how immigration could explain why there's record-high home prices and yet there isn't a corresponding spike in construction, then please post it. Because this is pretty obviously a problem of suppressed supply.
However, simple supply/demand would suggest that immigration AND 0% interest rates both affect demand quickly while supply requires securing land, building homes and getting approval to build homes takes significant time. Migrations are happening at a faster rate than housing can be built so it definitely has an impact on prices.
But I don’t think that’s really true, I think that’s very simplistic. The missing observation is that housing has become an asset class in a way it wasn’t in the past. Large numbers of people purchase houses to rent seek as landlords, and the only limit to the demand for rent seeking is the ability of those landlords to borrow money. So a major determinant of rent is now the ability to borrow money, the interest rate, and the number of people wanting to be rent seeking landlords.
Increasing the housing supply by the amount physically practical in say the course of a decade is probably unlikely to make much difference to rents if the primary driver of rent prices is the ability of rent seekers to borrow to buy the new properties. First time buyers can’t compete on borrowing because they have smaller deposits or less access to capital, so they are forced to rent, which means the rent seekers can continue to buy up properties.
In the UK, buy to let mortgages have become a substitute for pensions for the baby boomer generation. Encouraged by the government, housing as a yielding asset has essentially taxed the young to pay for the boomers retirement.
Whilst housing can be used as a rent seeking asset, it is very unlikely building new houses is going to lower rents. Landlords will simply always be able to outbid renters, so rent will remain at the height of whatever the renters can afford, I.e. extract the maximum rent possible. There is an endless demand for housing from rent seekers, provided they can rent out that property.
Couple this with the fact that the government in the UK at least has used the property market to hide the reality of the economy - that the economy is basically collapsing - there is so much vested interest in maintaining the status quo that no regulation will be introduced that will cause rents to drop, such as limiting the access of rent seekers to capital, or preserving properties for owner buyers etc.
Tl;dr - rents are expensive not because there is too little housing, but because we need them to be expensive.
From the houseowners' perspective, if they can only own one that they stay in, what alternatives the government needs to structure to balance the restriction, assuming the restriction is put in place? Should everyone put their savings in stock market etc and be subject to losses due to it? Because they too need a stable and inflation pegged income for their retirement.
Well, mainly the answer to this in public discourse is the same reason people say "we just need to build more flats" --- because people believe in the magical powers of "markets", like there's some natural law that leaving things to the market will lead to desirable outcomes.
But the actual politics of it is that if you did this, then where are you going to get the boomers pensions from? And where is the economic "growth" going to come from? See my other comment.
We're all in a big ponzi scheme because we exported most of our real welath-generating activity.
I would guess Austin might be seeing a drop because it was "the big thing" for a while but now the consensus is it is not going to rival San Francisco. The rent seekers are moving elsewhere because there are bigger capital gains to be made? Just a guess, but you can probably verify it by checking house prices in Austin vs San Francisco.
Like yeah, it probably is less profitable to speculate on housing in Austin, where pricing is improving because of increased supply, you need to do a little more than hand wave of your argument is that the causation goes in the other direction.
The reason it's the same everywhere is that this model magically creates "growth" and "wealth". My house is worth £100K. House prices increase. So now there is more wealth in the economy (there isn't, but economists think there is). Now it is worth £120K.
I remortgage and - voila! I have £20K to spend. Now I can spend that extending or upgrading my house, now the plumber and decorator have jobs, and Amazon or whoever sell new curtains, and everyone is happy.
This is a particularly useful model to follow if you don't actually produce any real wealth, because you exported all your manufacturing jobs abroad and whilst we like to pretend an economy can run on services, in reality we run a massive trade deficit and are selling off assets to pay for it (guess which assets we sell --- we export house ownership to rent seekers from abroad! My last landlords were based in China and I live in the UK! The system works)
Why were you allowed to / it was a good idea to remortgage under ~20% inflation ?
If we reduce the minimum lot size, then we reduce the minimum land purchase required in order to construct housing. And of course, lower upfront investment means lower risk and more newcomers are financially capable of buying in in the first place.
Lowering turnaround times for approval would also lower costs, and broadening the range of housing that gets by-right approval is a common way of doing that. Another is to just set a cap on the approval period, e.g. after 100 days, if you haven't received a response rejecting your application, then it's approved by default, and any rejection must be accompanied by a specific stated reason for rejection.
The overarching problem, though, is that there needs to be a political will to reduce housing costs (as you implied). But even that is partially missing the point, IMO - plenty of NIMBYs are acting for rational non-financial reasons - they're afraid that higher local density will increase local traffic and take up the finite local free parking spaces. Free parking is especially problematic, because paid parking will never satisfy people who see other people getting free parking in the same area. And of course the whole car-traffic problem is driven by cities being especially car-centric, with car traffic fundamentally not scaling up well compared to public transport.
Can I create a small company of a half a dozen new immigrant trades, buy single family homes, tear them down and build new fourplexes? Nope this is largely banned (though ever so slowly changing in some areas).
The severe regulation has distorted the market and created a housing shortage that is legally prevented from being addressed no matter what available new immigrant talent is at hand.
Growing up in a prairie city I heard this sentiment from people who simply don't like other people constantly, and I'm like "When did you try growing, you stagnant deteriorated shithole!?", and sprawl doesn't count. They hate ambition, they hate people, they hate taxes, and have no interesting ideas. They hate traffic, but refuse to do anything but drive. Their healthcare system and infrastructure is failing, there is no new economic activity happening; get busy growing or get busy dying. It doesn't work though if you stop for 70 years and then try to catch up.
Where I am we are trashing the waterways and the land in pursuit of money. You can't swim in most our rivers anymore - the recent numbers look good though, as the government redefined 'swimmable' and now it's 'safe', despite the contaminants. https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/explainer-new-swimmable-water-...
Housing the people is great, but encouraging immigration while being unable to house the current population is not.
For immigrants themselves, it is usually an issue of self-determination and freedom.
I can't say I'm fully privy to the immigration debate in Canada, but framing it as an issue of "growth" could not be a complete view of the advocates of immigration. Especially with the level of acceptance of refugees in Canada.
The not enough housing aspect is completely incidental to immigration. In my city, the overriding reason that we have not built enough housing for even our own children is that people show up to block any environmentally friendly housing proposal, largely arguing against growth. In other words, using the framework you are right now! And it's a rather twisted version of the "we can't have growth" framework because it ignores the underlying reason for not allowing growth: environmental sustainability. So instead, the only housing that gets built is the most environmentally disastrous type of housing: sprawl far away from the locations where people need to be for their jobs and everyday life, causing massive environmental destruction.
I would argue that there are few more counterproductive ways to talk about the environment than to bring up a "need for growth." First of all almost nobody actually cares that much about growth in 2025 and secondly it has disastrous consequences when the rubber meets the road.
Yes we are.
1) standard sigmoids, which never stop growing yet are also finite
2) standard ecological growth, where growth is never ending but so is death. This is much more typical of systems like capitalism than sigmoids growth. New upstarts experience exponential growth for a whole, then peak, and then die.
Of course be careful of mentioning these standard scientific observations around those in the degrowth cult, as the cognitive dissonance may cause an unpleasant explosion.
I guess it depends on your precise definition of "growth" but I am having trouble finding one that can fit with your assertions.
I say that as a member of both groups.
Land/space, while not an infinite resource, is hardly limited on the scale necessary to house people outside of extremely small niches. Views of central park are always going to be expensive, but there are a lot of square miles <45minutes to times square where someone would very profitably build and run (e.g.) an SRO if they were allowed to.
Canada has PLENTY of free space for construction, and modern construction is pretty cheap and efficient. But economic forces are concentrating the growth in a few areas. Well-intentioned efforts to force "affordable housing" and "walkable neighborhoods" make these forces even worse.
The root cause fix is to stop the economic forces that pack people into ever smaller areas.
And their family members, and the money they work for stays in-country and is not sent overseas.
Not commenting on your stance of the costs of construction, that's ridiculous to be left there on its own.
Get more out, to get a reality check.
Over-supply is even harder to reduce because housing is amortized over 20 or more years.
Developers are well aware of the cyclic nature of the housing market and thus reluctant to invest in many cases.
That's not a result of new construction. It's a result of the Austin population declining in absolute numbers: 978,763 in 2019, 975,418 in 2022. It bounced back a bit to 979,882 in 2023.
Travis County grew a little bit, but all the growth is in the suburban areas.
That 2023 number is roughly a thousand larger than that 2019 number. The changes to all of the numbers you're quoting are in the noise as far as considering changes to the cost of housing.
Relatedly, post-amalgamation Ottawa is very big:
https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/fb3tzy/the_size_of...
This is also an interesting (if less relevant) Ottawa size comparison:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Suburbanhell/comments/ov59fv/round_...
I have the sense that if these suburbs had to figure out they're own shorter term scaling strategy, especially without being able to infinitely kick the infrastructure can down the road, things would be required to change a bit more rapidly. What they have instead are these miserable little cabin-esque bungalows with deer running about, concrete that is literally crumbling to gravel, and a very weird thread of prejudice against apartments of any kind.
The housing situation has clearly severely declined post pandemic at the same time that immigration was restarted and increased, but I gotta point out that Vancouver has had a severe homeless crisis my entire life, long, long before this recent government changed immigration rates or even came to power.
As far back as 2007 I was reading articles about how Vancouver was net losing the sort of affordable housing that those most at risk of homelessness depended on. Unsurprisingly the amount of homeless in Vancouver has continued to increase.
https://thetyee.ca/News/2007/07/10/SRO-Losses/print.html
But you're absolutely correct that the core of this problem is a severe lack of building. Both a lack of construction of market product and below market publicly owned housing. Building more homes is the solution to get our way out of this crisis and end homelessness.
If there is any real villain here to blame IMO it is Jean Chretien, who with the severe austerity budget of 1993 completely got the Federal government out of all social housing development and building of housing plunged to near nil for decades.
The chart from this article is remarkable. https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/04/22/Why-Cant-We-Build-Lik...
Minneapolis abolished the single-family zoning and parking requirements in 2018. And it worked, developers swarmed the city like vultures attracted to carrion.
Madison did no such nonsense.
Can you guess the impact of these policies on housing costs?
The house price growth in Minneapolis _accelerated_, just like in the nearby Madison. Here are the price growth charts: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1COwL
There is too much complexity in that single example and the law of supply/demand has been proven too frequently for it to not make sense that increasing demand to meet supply would reduce cost.
1. For clarity, this phrasing is from here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vrHRcEDMjZcx5Yfru/i-defy-the...
Sorry. The reality doesn't care about your defiance.
Upzoning does not lead to lower housing prices. Even the most extreme urbanists admit that: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-might...
> and the law of supply/demand has been proven too frequently
Ah, here it is. Have you considered that there, you know, might be "too much complexity" for "Economy 101" to fully explain the situation?
The _only_ way to decrease the housing prices is to BUILD MORE SUBURBS. Or even new cities entirely.
You don't have any other options. Sorry again.
Well, maybe one more: the Detroit route. Reduce the city population and the prices will go down.
From your linked blog post:
> Freemark finds extremely mixed and uncertain evidence for the effects of upzoning, and one of several reasons he identifies is that the link between upzoning and actual housing production is tenuous. In other words, “Are they allowed to build it?” is a different question from, “Are they building it?”
Secondly, building more suburbs and more cities increases the supply… which indicates agreement that the price problem is one of insufficient supply.
EDIT: To be perfectly clear, the data I disagree with is that increasing supply in Minneapolis failed to impact price. This is the contention of the comment I responded to, and it is fundamentally different from the claim that zoning changes fail to increase supply.
Yeah. The misery pushers (urbanists) can't admit outright that their ideology is leading to disaster, can they? So they now need not only zoning restrictions lifted, but the state must also build housing and give it out to "deserving" people for cheap.
> Secondly, building more suburbs and more cities increases the supply… which indicates agreement that the price problem is one of insufficient supply.
I'm not arguing against supply-and-demand in general (I'm not a communist idiot). I'm arguing against the _density_ increases.
> EDIT: To be perfectly clear, the data I disagree with is that increasing supply in Minneapolis failed to impact price.
But it did. The real estate transaction index clearly shows that there were no positive effects from the new construction.
Moreover, I analyzed all the real estate sales in the US, Canada, and parts of Europe since 1995. I have not found a single example of a large (>100k population) city that decreased the housing sale prices by increasing density.
Even during the crash of 2007, the dense housing crashed less than comparative nearby sparse housing.
The scholarly literature is also unambiguous. The best effects of density increases are either mild (transient effects on rent), or indirect (migration chains).
Your chart shows two lines that seem to represent sales of something over time in nearby cities, which may or may not be relevant, but are at most a narrow slice of what one would need to look at in order to understand what's going on over in Minneapolis if anything.
You then create a strawman who thinks the removal of zoning restrictions will automatically lead to a utopia in which we have no other human problems or economic systems to contend with, even going so far as to dismiss someone on the basis of a lacking argument against a claim that nobody made.
That's an apt description.
> in the same breath doing as much as you can to create an association between increased density and all these hypothetical negative possibilities.
Why are they hypothetical? Density has long been associated with worse outcomes (higher crime, etc.). I can provide plenty of citations to scholarly literature.
> Like how does it happen that you lived in no specific place in Europe for example, then to where you are now
I grew up in Russia (Izhevsk), moved to Germany (Karlsruhe), then to Ukraine (Kyiv), and (briefly) to the Netherlands before coming to the US. I did not have a car in any of these places.
> and one thing gets built which convinces you that actually every city in Europe is and has always been wrong.
Yes. I'm able to compare the life in the US and in Europe first-hand. And Europe has plenty of dark secrets of its own. For example, Copenhagen in Denmark became the world's most liveable city by ruthlessly controlling its population. It still has not reached its peak number in 1970-s. Bet you didn't know that?
> Your chart shows two lines that seem to represent sales of something over time in nearby cities, which may or may not be relevant, but are at most a narrow slice of what one would need to look at in order to understand what's going on over in Minneapolis if anything.
I have real estate data with street-level information. It's not a public dataset, so I'm replicating my results using public datasets.
> You then create a strawman who thinks the removal of zoning restrictions will automatically lead to a utopia
No. I'm saying that removal of zoning limits to allow increased density does NOT lead to lower prices. It leads to increased density and increased misery as a result.
Minneapolis is simply a good example of this. There is another very good one: Seattle (where I live now). It increased its density by 25% over the last 12 years, many times leading the nation in the number of active construction cranes. The result? Faster price growth than even in SF.
I never made that claim.
> It's not a public dataset, so I'm replicating my results using public datasets.
You'll need to do better than just comparing real estate sales. If you're going to make a coherent argument based on data, it should at least attempt to show the relationship between more datapoints than just arbitrary sales and time, especially with only a 6 year timespan. Whether there's something there or not, you're not providing a substantial enough analysis to be compelling here.
It's fine if you don't like denser areas. Plenty of people who grow up in denser cities move out because they feel like they're sick of people, but cities wouldn't be cities if they're wasn't a reason to be there, and many people prefer it. There's not a chance in hell I'd move back to a car dependent hellscape, because I grew up in one, and that's true misery to me.
> It increased its density by 25% over the last 12 years, many times leading the nation in the number of active construction cranes. The result? Faster price growth than even in SF.
Again, weird cherry-picked comparison that wouldn't surprise anyone who's aware of the two tech hubs.
Preach brother. Might I also add the possibility of encouraging migration from Metropolises to regional 100k - 200kish cities?
I think that 300k is the threshold for a good city size.
But it turned out that my prediction was correct because the Austin population went _down_ during the pandemic.
Population:
2019 - 978,763
2022 - 975,418
2023 - 979,882
The overall Travis County population went up a bit. And the prices, in the places other than Austin, are also up.
I can also give a prediction, if Austin population growth recovers (not a given), the price growth rate will quickly outpace the surrounding Travis County.
In every comparable city in the country, housing prices are up. In Austin, they are down.
Now compare the population. Travis County population (sans Austin) went up, so the prices are also up. And Travis County actually has _more_ new units than Austin proper.
The driver for the price decreases in Austin is the population drop, not the new construction.
If your point is, "construction has to outstrip population increase in order to decrease prices", then well, yeah, we agree fully.
If your point is that huge amounts of new units going on the market in Austin does not have a significant impact on prices, I don't think that's supported by any evidence or makes any sense.
https://streets.mn/2023/10/24/mapping-minneapolis-duplexes-a...
Most of the new units are in massive multi-apartment buildings. And these buildings have a huge disproportionate impact on the quality of life.
It's now going to be sliding into shittier and shittier conditions. More crime, more congestion, higher housing prices.
The street parking is now oversubscribed, so my friends often have to circle around the area for quite a while to find a spot when they visit me.
These changes actually made me look into the question of density. Before that first-hand experience, I used to be a pro-urbanist victim of propaganda. And yes, I lived in Europe and I got my driving license when I was about 30.
> higher housing prices
Have you ever heard of a market?
The usual misery pushers are already celebrating the win.
I'd be pretty annoyed about only being able to own something that had to have a dedicated parking space. What a waste.
You are missing the point. Its not how much land there is, or there isn't. Its what regulations will prevent you from building anything.
Contrast what's happened in the last 2 decades in Austin, TX vs Boise, ID for example. Both cities with huge amounts of land available. Both cities attracted major migration. Yet, only one of the 2 has very little building code preventing things from being built. Boise rents for a single family house (2 bed 2 bath) went from $500 per month in 1995 to ~$3100 in 2022, for example.
The market is correcting from that thing that was in full swing three years ago (the pandemic) and drove prices way up for a number of factors, basically none having to do with construction:
https://www.reddit.com/r/texas/comments/1grxqur/the_austin_t...
The same thing is happening in many cities that do not have the same policies as Travis County.
Does it really? In a about a week of searching, I was able to find a number of rooms in downtown Toronto for less than 1500 including utilities.
I know this is just my experience, so I could be way off, or not filling a criteria you expect. (I'm a student, so my standards are low.)
Can you say more about these 1200 $/month rooms in rural Canada?
I always find it hard
Wouldn't it be better devoting 100% of your spare time to getting back on your feet, and then volunteer, or donate?
Working a job: you spend 8-12 hours at the job and then spend your leisure time doing other things, like studying or meeting friends or watching tv.
Finding a job: you spend 8-12 hours trying to find a job, and then you spend your leisure time doing other things, like volunteering.
The question you posed earlier was, why wouldn't someone just spend all available time (let's say 16 hours per day) trying to find a job, instead of doing anything else, like volunteering. The poster above you was responding to that, trying to demonstrate how the same suggestion would be ridiculous in the context of working a job, and it should be equally ridiculous in the context of finding a job.
With that knowledge (despite not knowing specific circumstances), it sounds like a highly effective way to cope with the situation as an individual.
I've wondered if this is something adopted by the homeless already? and if not, look into it.
You still need proper insulating layers on top of the heating ones, and many of the cheapest chinese varieties might have undersized heat pads that might not use the quick charge ability and merely provide warmth as opposed to heat. But I'm welcoming every extra watt of heat whenever cold.
How have you not been able to get even a low-skill minimum wage job despite searching since May? I'm not trying to insult you or anything, just trying to understand your situation.
Anyone is welcome there. Including homeless people, unemployed people. Anyone. You don't see people camping out there (they have other options so they'd be kicked out) but they do provide an environment that welcomes anyone that wants to to come and learn and develop themselves and can behave themselves.
It's a good example of Finnish pragmatism. It might be a bit socialist/idealistic. But it also is a good idea that might actually work. If you find yourself in Helsinki, it's called Oodi and is right next to the train station. Beautiful building. Worth visiting for the architecture alone.
My point here, the Finnish approach is not fighting symptoms but fighting the root causes: mental health, poverty, education, etc. Those things go hand in hand. If you are out of a job, you get poor. If you are not educated, you can't find a job. If you are poor you might develop mental health issues, become homeless, and become even harder to employ, etc. Breaking that cycle is the key. Get people healthy, teach them stuff, house them.
It's a mix of ideology, compassion and pragmatism that drives Finland to do these things. You don't have to buy into the ideology. But most people are not cold sociopaths and are capable of having empathy. Pragmatism is what makes the difference here.
Especially when ideology gets in the way. Which I would say is the main challenge in many harsh, capitalist doctrine dominated societies that are leaving people homless. There's plenty of empathy and charity there but it's mostly limited to giving people access to shelters and soup. People donate but also oppose real solutions. So, things get worse.
Oodi is a pragmatic solution. So is the Finnish way of addressing problems with people being homeless. And realizing that education is part of the problem.
The transition to using the word "homeless" has resulted in transforming something we can't easily measure -- "drug addicted or mentally ill people being a public menace" -- into something that we can measure -- "people without a good living arrangement".
Sure, the latter is important in a lot of ways too. And there housing is a tolerable solution.
But the former is the actual problem that we care about. It's nearly impossible to measure. It's nearly impossible to fix. The horrors of involuntary commitment vs. the horrors of not having involuntary commitment vs. the horrors of using the criminal justice system vs. the horrors of not using the criminal justice system.
The fact is that we have no real model for treatment of severely mentally ill people. We have a number of effective drugs, but they rapidly become ineffective if not taken. Our ability to treat or "cure" people in these conditions is essentially non-existent.
The question I would ask of Finland before considering this data or analysis to be interesting is what is their state of involuntary indefinite commitment.
If I want to get a homeless person off of drugs, it sure as crisps is not going to happen until they have a roof over their head. The core issue is the lack of affordable housing. That should be priority number 1.
"Finland’s success is not a matter of luck or the outcome of “quick fixes.” Rather, it is the result of a sustained, well-resourced national strategy, driven by a “Housing First” approach, which provides people experiencing homelessness with immediate, independent, permanent housing, rather than temporary accommodation (OECD, 2020)"
I have multiple family members who fit this pattern and it's absolutely godawful. The addiction literally rules them. They will perpetually ask for money for "needs" then spend it on drugs. If another family member houses them, they will sneakily maintain their addiction and steal from family to support it when necessary. If you offer them housing on condition of getting sober, they will choose addiction and homelessness. If you offer them housing without condition, they will use it to stay an addict in perpetuity, who everyone else is paying for. I don't think this last is a remotely viable solution with the number of addicts out there, which is only growing.
I'm not saying this to condemn addicts/mentally ill people. I just want to give an idea of just how hard this problem is to fix.
The problem is that people can end up homeless for all sorts of reasons, and even if that reason is some sort of mental illness, being homeless is an often-traumatic experience that easily exacerbates and worsens a person's mental condition.
There was a period of my life where I slept rough (long story) and I can personally confirm that a lack of sleep security (not to mention "stuff security", the fear of having my meager possessions stolen) will start someone on the path to mental illness; some amount of paranoia and mental fog seems almost inevitable in those conditions.
providing active junkies:
1) completely free units to destroy 2) 24/7 emergency care teams 3) completely free healthcare and mental healthcare 4) no sobriety expectations of any sort 5) no possibility to be kicked out of the program for any reason
is going to be cheaper than putting them in jail or an institution? wow sounds almost too good to be true
it would be interesting (or funny) to get a summary on exactly how they are deriving the cost metric for this. i would just about guarantee they've taken creative liberties to make the numbers fit.
according to HUD[0] infestations, flooding, and fires are "typical behavior problems" in housing first programs. only in "extreme circumstances" does this warrant switching them to another unit. there is no way these are cheap damages to fix.
housing first programs are often mixed into ordinary developments too. i bet families living near or adjacent to these units really enjoy living next to completely unstable addicts. housing first programs explicitly prioritize the least stable, most mentally ill addicts too. but it's the humane thing to do at everyone else's expense.
a lot of cities in the US have a housing first program, among many other programs in a similar vein (ie safe injection sites). take san francisco for example. they spend billions of dollars every year on programs for the homeless. from what i hear the situation is still terrible. there are even businesses moving out of SF directly citing quality of life.
the cost of living in my city is so expensive that there are adults that work full time who have to have roommates to live at subsistence level. there are also housing first programs here that give junkies units for free to continue getting high in indefinitely. this is a ridiculous situation. either way i would rather it cost more to have people institutionalized or put in jail for breaking the law. this would also do good for actually having resources to help the ones who are actually down on their luck.
In terms of cost, we need to look at the total social cost. If (big if) we were to assume that property destruction in housing units costs money, it is no strech to think that any marginal decrease in for example medical expenses (much more expensive in total social resource terms) more than make up for it. And a marginal improvement in a long-term expensive social problem would easily justify a high initial upfront cost.
I'm not saying you're wrong for asking the question, just that I have no problem accepting the findings that housing first is a cheaper solution in the long run if it gets more people clean and off the streets--as the evidence indicates.
why would there be a decrease rather than an increase? they're linked up with a full time care team as well as paths for more healthcare services. they also are allowed to continue to destroy their body with drugs. a local newspaper just ran an article here about how many health problems they have when they get into the local program.
yes i am very bias about the topic, and it wouldnt matter to me if it were much cheaper. but it truly doesnt sound plausible. i do not think setting up society so that people can comfortably get high all day, for free, at everyone else's expense, is a good or fair setup. there are many people struggling to stay afloat. maybe we could focus on solving that first. or focusing on the sober homeless.
So is what the US is doing right now working? Just the in healthcare, the US pays more per person when addressing this problem than anywhere else in the world, and gets nearly the worst result. Isn't that alone worth trying something else?
The fact that you're paying for a drug user to be warm and safe may stick in your craw, but it helps more people get clean, and so is good for them, their families, society and even your neighborhood as they return to be productive members of society. The money spent on their childhood and education isn't "wasted". They are less likely to be a nuisance.
Your feelings of disgust towards these people is a natural reaction. But if you can manage to see past it and realize these are human beings no different than you, by far and away mostly people who want to get clean but find it impossible in their circumstances and need help doing so, then you could be part of the chorus of voices pushing for positive change.
Let's all pull in the same direction: strong social safety nets, community building and mental health care to prevent people falling to drugs. And if they do, the care and assistance they need to pull themselves out of it. Not everyone's going to manage to do it, but eveyrone deserves a solid second chance.
> 1) completely free units to destroy 2) 24/7 emergency care teams 3) completely free healthcare and mental healthcare 4) no sobriety expectations of any sort 5) no possibility to be kicked out of the program for any reason
> is going to be cheaper than putting them in jail or an institution? wow sounds almost too good to be true
Both of those are very expensive (about $100 a day for incarceration [1] and up to around $1000 a day for psychiatric treatment [2]) – and obviously a housing first program is not a drop-in replacement for them either as being homeless in itself is neither a crime nor a mental illness. I would also wager a destructive addict in their own home causes less property damage (on average) than one in temporary housing / on the streets. A 24/7 emergency care team is not a thing in assisted living facilities in Finland, and the housing provided by housing first programs is not at all limited to assisted living facilities – it is often just a completely regular rental apartment. And healthcare and mental healthcare are (nearly) free for anyone, not just "junkies". And the other two points are not even related to costs.
> housing first programs are often mixed into ordinary developments too. i bet families living near or adjacent to these units really enjoy living next to completely unstable addicts.
Actually I think it's beneficial if addicts are not lumped together in a stigmatized "housing first development". To maximize chances of rehabilitation and integration in society addicts need to be surrounded by well-functioning people, not other addicts. Otherwise you're just creating a slum where being an addict is normalized, and the problems continue to spread and get worse.
> housing first programs explicitly prioritize the least stable, most mentally ill addicts too.
Of course sufficient resources must exist to help everyone so the prioritization does not mean some people get no access to help they need. In Finland we use a broad definition of homelessness which includes people staying with relatives or friends. Providing housing to those groups helps prevent long-term homelessness. [3, p. 13-14]
> the cost of living in my city is so expensive that there are adults that work full time who have to have roommates to live at subsistence level. there are also housing first programs here that give junkies units for free to continue getting high in indefinitely. this is a ridiculous situation.
I agree the situation is ridiculous. An essential part of the housing first approach (that seems to be entirely neglected in the US) is to build enough affordable homes.
[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/11/19/2019-24...
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22588167/
[3] https://ysaatio.fi/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/A_Home_of_Your...
i have seen estimates saying 50% are addicted to substances. in any case housing first prioritizes the most unstable and mentally ill to give immediate housing. this is a very typical feature of the program. if you are finnish, you should check out some videos of what our homeless are like. it's obviously not the same for multiple reasons.
>Actually I think it's beneficial if addicts are not lumped together in a stigmatized "housing first development".
again, to everyone else's detriment.
>An essential part of the housing first approach (that seems to be entirely neglected in the US) is to build enough affordable homes.
this is a funny statement considering wages in finland vs real estate prices. ive been told by a top 5% income finn that buying a house is not really possible for most people there currently. you can only inherit. the wages are lower, the taxes much higher, and real estate more expensive. of course you probably mean the technical "affordable housing" definition which just means housing for anyone making under median area income. the money to fund these things comes from somewhere, and it seems to typically always be the middle class.
Income is lower but actually taxes are fairly similar in the lower income brackets thanks to progressive taxation (and I'm not too concerned about the top earners starving). Buying a home in Helsinki – which is the only place in Finland where real estate prices are actually a problem – takes about 9 year median income, quite similar to cities in the US. Outside the Helsinki metropolitan area real estate prices are not bad at all. Either way if you're top 5% income you can easily afford to buy a house.
> of course you probably mean the technical "affordable housing" definition which just means housing for anyone making under median area income. the money to fund these things comes from somewhere, and it seems to typically always be the middle class.
Abundance of apartments affects prices for everyone including the middle class. The only ones not benefiting from affordable housing are (literal) rent-seekers, the people and companies owning real estate purely as an investment.
outside the area where 30% of the entire country lives? ok. the actual number of years for helinski metropolitan area appears to be 10, and is higher than boston and nyc which are both INCREDIBLY expensive places to live. note that is generously comparing the actual cities to the metrpolitan area of helsinki.
the next largest metropolitan area is tampere, which is 6.9 years at median salary. this is very slightly cheaper than where i live which is also a very expensive city to live in. the city i live in is straight up not affordable to buy a house in at median salary.
>Either way if you're top 5% income you can easily afford to buy a house.
they are able to, but this wasnt the point of what they said. you have to be top 5% to comfortably own. doing some number crunching with chatgpt (lets pretend its accurate) to own at median salary in tampere requires more than 50% of your post tax income. that's with a 20% downpayment on a 300k house.
if i got any of those numbers wrong, feel free to correct. in the interest of time, they were done with chatgpt. i believe the prompts and data asked for should be simple enough to be accurate.
>and I'm not too concerned about the top earners starving
should also be noted that this top earning income is the equivalent of 80k USD. if they lived in the US they would be making double that. in the us, this is near median in a lot of places, and quite attainable in most.
Not understanding how homelessness (or poverty generally) leads to mental illness is remarkably disconnected.
Finland also is rather aggressive with involuntary detention of those deemed to be a potential danger to themselves or others.
We know that the longer psychosis goes untreated/the more times someone goes off the meds, the harder it is to treat, and that what happens in the first few years of someone developing a psychotic disorder makes a huge difference in long term outcomes.
An American might develop psychosis in their mid 20s, end up committed for a few weeks and placed on antipsychotic pills until they're no longer floridly psychotic, and then go home, not follow up with doctors/refill meds, and end up on a cycle of this with more and more brittle symptoms until they're homeless and have no real chance of recovery.
The same person in Northern Europe would likely be hospitalized for longer initially, started on an injectable that only needs to be given once a month, and they leave the hospital with fewer residual symptoms. They're then followed by an ACT team with a nurse visiting to check on them and make sure they're eating and keeping housing, and ensuring that shot goes in their arm every month. They don't necessarily fully recover, but a lot of them end up being able to do some kind of schooling/employment/volunteering and they are either stable enough to keep housing without being evicted for disruption, or are shuffled into staffed group homes.
In the US the system broke down in the 50s and 60s and collapsed completely in the 70s and 80s due to bad treatment options and often very inhumane conditions and cases of misdiagnoses. The widespread misdiagnosis problem only stretched the system further and compounded the existing problems. I would be curious to see where Finland's trajectory in this regard lies.
I thought that it broke down due to a Supreme Court decision (O’Connor v. Donaldson, 422 U.S. 563 (1975)) but perhaps they were interrelated.
In old books you read about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catatonia
being intractable, now it usually clears up in 15-30 minutes with benzodiazepine medication. In the 1950s we got the Phenothiazines which were the first hope for many patients, there has been a huge amount of progress since then and managing most of these people outside the hospital is possible. People also came to see involuntary commitment as immoral as described by Thomas Szasz, depicted by the movie "One Flew out of the Cuckoo's Nest" and shown by this experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment
The trouble isn't that we tore down the old system but that we didn't completely build a new system to replace it. There are deep issues involving people's agency. Right now we are in a society that thinks it is wrong to make people to take drugs they don't want to take, a different society (maybe even ours in N years) will think is it wrong to not make people take drugs for serious mental illness.
It can be exasperating to care for an elderly person with dementia, they can range from very agreeable to rather disagreeable but most of them have had enough experience with caring for people and being cared for that they can have some empathy with their caregiver -- even if they have a hard time remembering it.
People with serious mental illness have disturbances in those relationships (remember how Freud asked "tell me about your mother?") and are much harder. And if they want to kill you because they think you are something other than what you are they're more able to do it.
Communities that adopted "housing first" early on had great success with it. In the fentanyl age there's a lot of fear that a volunteer or someone who isn't paid nearly enough will open a door from time to time to discover a dead body.
IMO, I'd rather have to mitigate that hazard if it meant we got actual, effective treatment for folks with super fucked-up brains than have what we have today in the US... but I'm in no position to change the country's policies.
On the other hand I'm still a touch angry that it was missed in a psych eval I had in school that, I'm told, was a really superior psych eval for a kid in the 1970s. (Kohut's Analysis of the Self was a major discovery for me when I did a round of research trying to understand an crisis at work circa 2006 but I missed the literature connecting his work to schizotypy in the 1980s; a really good monograph came out in 2013 which fell into my hands a year ago... and I think "now it all makes sense" but "I lost so much time") It's hard to come out because (i) so much about it is offputting, and (ii) I find schizotypes on YouTube to be so annoying I can't stand to listen to them for more than 30 seconds. Those of you who think there's something weird about what I write here are right... It's what you get when you mix verbal intelligence too high to measure with a good measure of line noise. At least I find it easy to emphasize with people with schizophrenia and schizoaffective because "thought disorder" doesn't seem so strange to me.
I was at risk but dodged the bullet to get schizopherenia but I worry about psychotic dementia.
At least in the US, it's basically seen now as a violation of due process to be imprisoned like that without committing any crime. Psychiatric services are on offer, but can be refused.
To clarify, I don't know much about Finnish mental health in particular as opposed to the general trends in Northern Europe.
If using the technical term, I think you might mean “Continental climate”.
From the very Wikipedia article you shared:
> The north temperate zone extends from the Tropic of Cancer (approximately 23.5° north latitude) to the Arctic Circle (approximately 66.5° north latitude). The south temperate zone extends from the Tropic of Capricorn (approximately 23.5° south latitude) to the Antarctic Circle (at approximately 66.5° south latitude).[4][5]
In Europe such a policy might make sense, but in America where being dumped on the street is rather common the situation is different. Also, in America the general social situation is quite different from life in Finland.
Is this a studied phenomenon I can read about? I'd appreciate any literature suggestions if you have them.
I asked her where she slept. She said "you don't sleep". You don't even have to run an experiment to know that sleep deprivation, even in your own home, causes psychosis. Now add the shock of being exposed to filth for the first time, poor climate control (homeless don't walk around with multiple layers of Patagonia and a nice backpack to stash them in as it warms up), the very real threat of sexual or physical assault, the shocking awareness that you are now "one of them" and know that a sizable percentage of your acquaintances would immediately distance themselves from you if they knew your plight. We're not even talking about food and vitamin quality here.
It's popped up in the news (and in the comments here too) a bunch about how parts of the US's prescribed 'solutions' to this is to put people on antipsychotic medications. One big effect is that these medications sedate. If someone has passed out and has an inability to be roused and can hardly function if roused is an insane risk for homeless people. People aren't getting no sleep for funsies. Antipsychotics being used to chemically restrain the inconvenient is just abhorrent. Making them considerably less safe as a result is just inexcusable.
Not to mention the extrapyramidal side effects of antipsychotics that compound chronic health problems like metabolic syndrome. I'm sure that the nurse who's hardest science class was in high school who's now allowed a prescription pad after an only only diploma mill 'masters' is prescribing complex medications appropriately and managing overall health impacts of such meds when even experienced psychiatrists fuck it up (but NPs are a rant for another time.).
Having been homeless and on antipsychotic medications (thankfully not at the same time) it's just nuts to me that it's even considered a possible solution to homeless people having mental health issues (arising from circumstance or not) or being 'nuisances' is to just sedate them and leave them for dead.
Disclaimer: Antipsychotics are a tool and they can greatly impact a person's life in positive ways. Also in negative ways. They're also not just used for psychosis. I just wanted to clarify I think there's nuances in my anti antipsychotic rant here lol
> The transition to using the word "homeless" has resulted in transforming something we can't easily measure -- "drug addicted or mentally ill people being a public menace" -- into something that we can measure -- "people without a good living arrangement".
> the former is the actual problem that we care about
The word homeless is pretty old, not something people have 'tranistioned' to any time recently.
I haven't seen anyone trying use 'homeless' as a euphemism; they are actually concerned about people without housing. That is the big problem.
You apparently believe "drug addicted or mentally ill people being a public menace" is a comparable problem, but your comment is the first time I've heard that. Nobody is conspiring to hide it; they just don't think about it like you do.
I spend a lot of time in cities and know others who do too. None feel menaced by people who are unhoused - why would that be menacing? - or high. High people generally don't know you are there, and are easily avoided. I've had zero problems; I don't know of anyone else who has.
Also, the subtext is about eroding human rights. You have no more rights than a homeless or high person. Feeling 'menaced' is not sufficient to compromise someone's freedom. That's what freedom means - of course people can always do things that others don't mind; freedom means doing things other people don't like. I find your comment menacing; who decides who gets locked up?
"Nothing ever happens" says person nothing happened to. Meanwhile, these are just some examples that made the news:
* https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-67386865 "A suspect has been arrested two days after former US Senator Martha McSally reported being sexually assaulted while on a run in Iowa [...] The suspect, who is thought to be homeless,"
* https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-65569357 "Derby homeless man raped women who offered to help him"
* https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41484206 "A "manipulative" homeless man who turned on a family who befriended him has admitted the "frenzied" murder of the mother and her 13-year-old son."
* https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/life-sentence-for-... "A severely mentally ill man was sentenced to life in prison on Friday for beheading a Hollywood screenwriter [...] a homeless former Marine described by his lawyer as "very, very mentally ill", pleaded guilty [...] in a crime without motive."
* https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/long-beach-woman-sex... "Long Beach woman sexually assaulted by homeless man in broad daylight"
Fortunately I haven't witnessed any murders or rapes, but the most shocking for me was that I've visited Vancouver twice in my life, and on both visits, lone women walking down the street in broad daylight were chased after and opportunisticly molested by drunk vagrants hanging around on Robson Street. Broad daylight. They had absolutely no shame. And other than the molested women fighting them off and running away, nobody did or said anything.
Everyone has a right to walk about in public unmolested, and I would want the police to arrest those men and prosecute them for sexual assault.
You're delusional or misinformed if you think this doesn't happen. Of course it happens.
On the other hand, you can be molested or assaulted by drunk and beligerent homed people. And, more importantly, homeless people are much more at risk of assault or rape by the homed, than the homed are of being assaulted and raped by the homeless. For all the articles I linked above, they are dwarfed by news reports of homeless people being shot, beaten, stabbed, set on fire or raped.
So, overall, homeless people as a whole are neither saints nor devils. They are who they are, and each individual has a different situation. We should feel a lot of empathy for them, and want to help them into a less precarious position... but we also want to do it because we're mindful of the danger to the public that untreated mental illness poses.
Maybe """ "Nothing ever happens" says person nothing happened to.""" is honestly telling the truth that they don't concieve of anything happening to them because they live outside of this insane bubble we're in that it's just accepted for cities to just have a violent homeless population that "we can't do anything about". Maybe we're the idiots in this situation.
> you can be molested or assaulted by drunk and beligerent homed people. And, more importantly, homeless people are much more at risk
I don't know enough to say "much" more, but I think those are good points. There's nothing special about being homeless, in terms of crime, except you are much more exposed to it.
> on both visits, lone women walking down the street in broad daylight were chased after and opportunisticly molested by drunk vagrants hanging around on Robson Street. Broad daylight.
How do I spend so much time in cities and never see anything like that? I'm sure some of these stories people tell are true, but wow.
This is completely detached from reality. I find it hard to believe you are being truthful unless you're doing some sort of gotcha where you carry a gun or are some sort of jiu-jitsu master. Here's an example of people being afraid of the homeless and another of drug addicts, just from last year in NYC but there's thousands of examples.
- Why throngs of NYC’s homeless are choosing Penn Station over shelters — and leaving commuters in a constant state of fear https://nypost.com/2024/08/28/us-news/nycs-homeless-cheer-pe...
- Business owners and residents along Midtown Manhattan’s “Strip of Despair” are so frequently robbed and harassed by drug-addled “psychopaths” that they’ve stopped trying to resist — or even bother calling the cops for help. https://nypost.com/2024/06/17/us-news/horror-stories-from-ny...
I don't mean to say with this that ALL of them are dangerous, but you trying to portray that you never even heard of someone being afraid of homeless or drug addicts and the trouble they sometimes create is like saying you don't know which color the sky is. Like you honestly never seen an aggressive person who is high?
Anyway if not, I can tell you I've had a drunk homeless guy throw a bottle at me for no reason other than walking home. The next day I talked to him and now I know Cyril, my local homeless drunk and high Russian guy, and sometimes give him socks, but even he admits that when he drinks and huffs nitrous he gets a bit crazy.
what's completely detached from reality is that the problem is so bad in (US) cities like NYC that it seems inconceivable that it isn't a universal truth that cities just have an indigent population that regularly threatens and sometimes follows through on threats of violence to passersby.
How did we let the problem get this bad‽
You don't know how ridiculous that is. Stop watching propaganda and just visit NYC. I'm tempted to buy you a ticket. Or just ask someone who lives there.
Makes you wonder how badly social media is distorting the rest of our lives.
As someone who has lived in San Francisco, CA for the past long-ass while, I agree with the paragraph that you're objecting to. I own no firearms, and can hardly throw a pillow, let alone a person.
Maybe try, like, talking to more homeless folks? Or at least observing them from a distance? They're folks like anyone else, and most of them (like most folks) simply don't want police attention, so doing anything more to regular folks than asking for spare change isn't in their repertoire. Honestly, I'm a LOT safer in the parts of the city where there are folks out on the street than I am places where there's noone. [0]
[0] The only times I've gotten mugged or robbed were when I was in the fancy parts of town where there's noone on the street to provide assistance... and my assailants were groups of folks who looked to be doing well for themselves, rather than rough-looking folks looking for cash for a score.
Bitcoin bros!
Well if you say so, but it's reality. Have you lived in a city? I think you would know.
> https://nypost.com/...
The post pushes right-wing propaganda; it's a Rupert Murdoch publication, the same as Fox News. Ignore it.
Manhatten is so safe it's dull. It's lost its edge, its variety, its lifeblood which is the dynamic people. Really, I'm not kidding you. Look up the crime stats. Or just go visit - if more people would stop believing the right-wing nonsense and just see things for themselves, they'd be much happier (and how about holding the the NY Post, etc. accountable?).
> Like you honestly never seen an aggressive person who is high?
No, or if they are aggressive, they are aggressive to the empty air around them - I don't engage in conversation. But people high on opiods, which is most common by far, are quiescent. Some are basically asleep standing up, drooling in place. Very scary!
For your argument to be valid, homeless people and drug addicts would need to be some special breed of human that is much more peaceful than everyone else. I don't demonize them but I also don't think they are angels. And they certainly are more desperate. Only a lack of understanding of human nature could tell you that people aren't afraid. Remember your argument isn't even that they are more dangerous. Your argument is that people don't ever even feel afraid of them, that is ridiculous.
I agree that it's an often implied issue, but I think the sub-subtext, the point of it all, is far more serious: whether you can do things to other people - via the state or personally - for arbitrary reasons. That is, whether people have universal human rights. That is the elephant they are hunting.
They have found their best test cases, their best steps toward destroying universal human rights, with homeless people, people without legal immigration status, and those engaging in progressive protests.
They won't stop there, of course. It's either human rights for all or for none.
Only when we meet people in the fearful place they're at, and they feel heard, can we start to try to make them see that the fear is not justified or rational compared with the actual risk posed by the homeless or mentally ill or what have you.
I do agree, it's human rights for everyone or no-one.
I recently visited NYC and understand your specific angle, but "homeless" actually can just mean "person without a home" without connotations of mental issues or substance abuse.
There are extreme cases where people willfully live under bridges or something but that's super rare.
What will you do with this person after you've committed them? It turns out that forcing people to detox isn't effective. Addiction is a disease with no reliable cure; you can't just give someone a round of antibiotics.
But if you think it's possible, demonstrate it to the world: Get yourself addicted, then detox, and you should be fine!
If your assertion is that getting someone off of drugs in the short term plays absolutely no role in getting someone off drugs in the long term, then I'm not really sure what to say to you. It's my understanding that people primarily get and stay sober out of fear of losing absolutely everything and dying. The trouble with rehabilitating the homeless is that they've effectively lost everything but their lives, and yet remain addicted. In this sort of situation, involuntary commitment would necessarily have to involve serious attempts at community building to show them they can have things in their life again - if they stay clean.
Respectfully, your glibness and the borderline denial of reality makes it difficult to have this conversation because I don't feel as if I'm typing with someone who legitimately wants to improve the situation. Most seriously, your suggestion that I get myself addicted to drugs (which demonstrates that you've completely neglected to consider that you could be typing with a person who has had substance abuse issues - it hasn't even occured to you) indicates that you're not taking this seriously, but rather attempting to appear virtuous by banging on about freedom and being totally unafraid while preventing any possible consideration of solutions to a major humanitarian crisis.
That is the wages of fear. It results in attacks on the things that alarm us, including other commenters, unhoused people, and addicted people. Unhoused and addicted people are nothing to fear.
And on top of that, fear doesn't justify hurting other people. It's a very different thing being afraid and vulnerable, and being afraid and in a position of power. You have a position of power relative to unhoused and addicted people. Power corrupts; powerful people don't have a check on them; they think their hunger or fear or lust or whatever are important, are the natural priority. Your fear isn't a priority over the freedom, rights, and welfare of addicted people.
The only thing to fear is fear itself, according to someone who was smart, courageous, and who had led people through danger we can't imagine, and held positions of great power.
Your theory of how addiction and homelessness work conflicts with what I've heard from many experts I've spoken to and that I've read. That doesn't make you wrong, but look up the research.
It is telling that your opinion isn't based on talking with addicted and/or homeless people.
> How disappointing that you are resorting to the ad hominem attacks; we could have learned from each other; we could have connected.
I think you should still consider learning from what Boogie_Man said.
If you don’t think it’s a problem then give me your address so I can yell at you through the window and poop on the sidewalk. Part and parcel of living in a big city, right?
I’m Finnish and I have a close family member with a severe mental illness, so I should be reasonably well positioned to answer your question. But it doesn’t make any sense to me.
How does any of this relate to homelessness?
To get people off the streets, you give them a place to live. Then you can start solving their other problems. It’s common sense.
This misguided moral compass outweighs even sensible practices like harm reduction. People would rather see junkies die on the street of hepatitis than give them free housing and needles. It satisfies some primal need that, eventually I hope, our species will be better off with less of.
you should use some of the superhuman empathy you have to explore other perspectives on the issue. even for just a minute.
Because, if so... let's just sit with that for a second and think it through.
it's important to note that it's probably not a very large set of them that dump their needles publicly. this is outright sociopathic and evil, which i don't think most of them are. this distinction is important because the sociopathic homeless do make it a much more taboo issue to deal with.
Housing support with social services on the side can be done well enough to help some fraction of the drug-using homeless recover. Some fraction may remain drug addicted, but now have a safe space, which is also an improvement. Some fraction may have lasting mental illnesses they struggle with, but even then a safe space for that struggle improves both the prognosis and the surrounding community.
the original context was a ridiculous characterization of anyone being against a needle program. i am giving you one context of why someone might be against one, from the perspective of how it has been going in my city. whether standard protocol or poorly implemented, that is how it has been going.
>You spend a lot of time accusing others of dishonesty and condescending, but your own comments read much more in that spirit.
the condescension is hard to avoid when replies are posing snarky rhetorical questions which make understanding or addressing anything difficult. if you felt i've been dishonest, feel free to point it out. but preferably not in the way you did a second ago which took the form of "SO WE SHOULDN'T DO ANYTHING TO IMPROVE EVER?" which was clearly a good faith interpretation.
I don’t know how you get from that to “ridiculous characterization of anyone against a needle program.” Needle programs aren’t even the most important thing under discussion here, housing is. As you’re pointing out, knowingly or not, needle programs in isolation reduce some harms but increase others. Housing is often the root issue in harm reduction, but also one of the most expensive and politically charged.
But there's no evidence that drug services increase drug use.
The state implemented the vaccination program and transferred responsibility to the insurance pool system with its own financial interests. The pool system determines assessment criteria and makes evaluations without external oversight. Initially, there was talk of "million-euro compensations." The government guaranteed to finance the remainder if pool funds were depleted.
Legal cases have been fought against LVP regarding time limits of confirmed cases. Compensations have remained a fraction of original expectations. Narcolepsy patients are too small a minority to influence Parliamentary politics or re-enter public discourse. This special group has been left alone to defend their rights within the pool system.
The compensations were based on Käypä Hoito Guidelines for accident injuries, which are unsuitable for narcolepsy: narcolepsy doesn't necessarily cause clear cognitive deficits despite its severity, and comparison to brain trauma is not medically possible. The drafters would probably agree if asked that it wasn't intended for this use. A person with narcolepsy can be formally capable of work, but this might consume all of their alert hours & energy, leaving nothing for actually having a life. The system may equate narcolepsy, in permanent damage, with injuries similar to a broken finger in workplace accidents, hence the permanent disability compensations are insufficient for dignified life.
The wage compensation issue is more significant. The determination basis for loss of earnings compensation is problematic as it's based on achieved education and work history, although the illness has impaired these opportunities. The same neurological illness produces different compensations depending on onset timing, as those with established careers may fare better than those who couldn't compete for university placement. This particularly affects those who became ill in childhood/youth, as it doesn't account for lost opportunities. In practice, even those from educated backgrounds with academic potential (e.g. top grades or plans for university before narcolepsy) may receive compensation based on average or low income.
Opportunity cost compensation appears unlikely. The state has not promoted reassessment of applicability of Käypä Hoito criteria.
There is insufficient monitoring of equality in compensation decisions and appeals, inadequate communication about compensations (the question whether all victims are even aware of their rights seems open), and questionable document management and decision-making transparency. LVP defines compensation terms, makes compensation decisions, and handles appeals, creating a conflict of interest as LVP has financial incentive for strict interpretation.
Permanent damage compensations are treated as earned income by Kela, requiring their use for basic living expenses, though they're meant as lifetime compensations for an incurable neurological illness.
(this is partly machine-translated from personal notes)
Their education system is pretty interesting, and their policing system has some approaches to interacting with the community as well. If I can find the links I'll share.
Skepticism is fine, but it shouldn't be a reason to discount or dismiss something, nor does it mean to accept it. Take it in as a data point.
A major upside: if you lose your job, you won't be at risk of becoming homeless! it would allow you to take a much stronger negotiating position with your boss. It would allow you to take a much stronger position with your landlord regarding rent increases too.
I think, frankly, and I base this on experience with family undergoing involuntary commitment in Europe... we really are still a bit collectively traumatized or basing our takes on what happened prior here in the US from past abuse of involuntary commitment systems.
It can be compassionate. It can help people get psychiatric and psychological help they didn't know how to access. It can help get people back on their feet and transition them into a return to normalcy. It can work.
If your country is small and rich, government can be highly functional. But please stop comparing it to a larger place, it's apples to oranges.
This may not be exactly the quote, but it was something like "Disorder is domination of public space for private purposes."
As an SF resident, that really resonated; day-to-day quality of life here (for me, at least) feels much more impacted by that type of "disorder" than "homelessness" generally (obviously we need housing solutions too)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/18/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
The first thought I had on reading this was ‘the world has a car disorder’.
The housing first initiative in Salt Lake City provides ample evidence that if people have a stable living situation it is way easier to get them to take their medication, get into rehab, keep them out of dangerous situations. It’s actually more cost effective in the long term to house the chronically homeless instead of kicking the can down the road.
If you actually care about what you claim to care about you should be supporting housing first.
That means 1) get people housed with minimal red tape and basically no conditions 2) treat mental health and drug addiction
The evidence is clear that it works and that it is more cost effective than dealing with the fallout when homeless people unravel.
Unfortunately politicians who had preconceived notions about this topic ignored the evidence and revoked funding for the program. Your statement that it is impossible to treat or cure mental illness and drug addiction (which the evidence does not support) places you in that camp. You, my friend are the worst part of the problem. Because the evidence exists to disprove your stance, but you hold a strong opinion without having bothered to check the science.
The "visible" homeless, ironically, are extremely difficult to measure. They often don't carry or won't present identification, they often have no family or support structure, they often make little to no attempt to use services.
The "invisible" homeless are the opposite, and can be easily measured, because they have all of those things.
When you see numbers trying to measure homeless people, it will almost always be the "invisible" homeless. Sending people out with clickers to count the homeless people on the street is nearly impossible, so the best we can do is various sampling approaches with huge margins of error.
It's foremost NOT about mental&substance issues treatment but general financial aid to anyone in need.
I think this phraze from the article summarizes it well.
"The Finnish experience demonstrates the effectiveness of tackling homelessness through a combination of financial assistance, integrated and targeted support services and more supply: "
It's a holistic system that actually kicks-in way before one is in danger of being homeless, and if someone would suddenly find themselves homeless, the state security blanket is available to all. So 1. direct assistance 2. support services and 3. supply.
On the first order, this is not related to substance abuse or mental illness, and should not be viewed as such. They are just a way to make sure nobody freezes to death.
The way these policies link with mental&substance issues is that before 90's you were denied housing if you had ongoing substance abuse issues. This policy was dialed back to allow all housing regardless of any other issues, specifically because it was considered being homeless does not help in any way to resolve the above matters.
So viewing this as "something only for ill people" is the wrong lens. It's a system for everyone. Of course mentally ill and those suffering substance issue are often without financial means so they are represented in the population receiving support.
But the actual treatment to the above issues is a separate policy matter (after nobody was excluded anymore).
The downside is that unless a polity has similar wide cover social security system in place, I have no idea what learnings you could get from this.
US is rich. Vastly richer than Finland. PPP GDP for US in 2023 was 73k $ and for Finland 64k $.
The systems are quite different. But it’s not about total wealth as such. If we use GDP as rough back-of-the-envelope estimate (problematic I know!) us could implement similar system economically but politically probably not.
The gini coefficient gives some hints about these differences (US 0.48, FI 0.28). In Finland people are taxed until there are very little income differences and then that money is used for social policies and healthcare. So everybody gets high quality healthcare for all of the serious stuff (until you reach best-before-date and government pulls the plug), you never need to freeze to death, go hungry (in theory at least) and your kids will have free education. Based on my limited understanding of US politics and social structure I find similar arrangement improbable.
But it’s not about country’s total wealth!
> us could implement similar system economically but politically probably not.
But they won't. Spending significant amounts of money on your poor is a decision made by politicians and society as a whole. Some countries choose to do it, some don't.
> But it’s not about country’s total wealth!
Again, the existence of more billionaires does not make a place rich. In fact it could prove destabilizing in the long term because billionaires use their money to lobby against policies for the poor.
The answer I suppose is that both Finland and US are rich by global standards, but the US has a middle class only because of policy decisions it made post WW2 (GI Act, housing, education, etc.) that are quickly eroding.
So yes, Finland is "richer" in the sense that a greater % of its population live better lives.
So, yes, if you want low homelessness, you build a lot of housing and make sure that rents are low. This is true, and a good strategy.
Otherwise it’s zero sum and you create a homeless for every homeless you remove and disincentivize work.
This has happened in several US cities.
Not sure if you intended to phrase your question as you did, but if you give cash to the unhoused to rent housing, that takes supply from the bottom of the rental market if you don’t build any more.
Builders tend to build for those that can afford to pay and don’t target the bottom of the market.
Most stock of low-cost housing is due to building neglect or depopulation rather than being purpose-built, in a free market anyway.
Even if there are 10 beds and 10 people, if 9 people can afford to pay 2000 for their beds, and that last one can only afford 500, that last one is still going homeless
Because the person selling the last bed is going to want around 2000 for it, just like the other 9 are paying
Edit: and no, telling them they have to give up that bed for 500 is not a real option
More supply means their rent goes down too.
No, they aren't. They are generally run by local housing authorities with state and federal financial participation, and, in any case, there have been basically no major new public housing projects in the several decades, with many existing projects decommissioned, and public housing assistance shifting from project-based to tenant-based vouchers.
Traditional government housing projects started falling out of favor in the 1950s and 1960s as the new projects were often both viewed as worse than the slums they were supposed to replaced and failed to even replace most of the housing units that were destroyed in the urban renewal efforts that created them, and support for them was essentially completely halted by the Nixon Administration in 1973, though it is possible (though, again, rare since the 1980s) for project-based subsidized housing to be created under Section 8, as well as the (far more common) voucher-based aid under Section 8.
The world is larger than the US - state and federal level public housing can be done and it can be done well, and at a scale it's only way it can be done. The fact it hasn't in the US doesn't mean it's impossible.
It’s more complicated than that. I’m massively pro public housing. I hate living next to it.
A poorly managed emergency housing facility is just a shit show. Violence, noise, rubbish, human and animal abuse, property damage, police attendance, debt collectors, smell, rodents, animal attacks, threats, overgrown plants etc, all within the last year, at my neighbouring house. If it was ever managed properly, people might view it differently. Managing it costs money, and then people oppose the cost when it doesn’t come with more housing.
people tend to hate on the decades old, usually cheap because under heavily financial constraints Eastern bloc version, but Finland relevant to the topic of the thread to this day is heavily inspired by that kind of architecture, and a lot of modern neighborhoods being built are basically the same thing... just nice and with a bit more cash on hand.[1]
It's an eminently sane way to house people, and I'm pretty certain a lot of people everywhere would take a nice, central apartment if they could actually see that it cuts their rent and energy bills in half. In places that are used to sprawl and high costs there's just too much inertia.
[1] https://cdn.thedesignstory.com/editor/editor-fflo-1645278651...
Yeah I do agree we should build better housing now than post WW2 economies. The main point I want to make is that affordable housing is already solved.
The other - even more important issue with all these approaches, however, lies in treating all homeless individuals as a single category. This is a common flaw in most homelessness strategies. In reality, there are at least 5 to 10 broad categories—such as former convicts, individuals with substance abuse issues, those with mental health challenges, people who lost jobs or income, refugees, and more. Each of these groups requires a unique approach tailored to their specific circumstances. A one-size-fits-all solution simply doesn’t work.
That said, simplifying the issue makes for great marketing, which is why we often see oversimplified strategies being proposed and success reported (as in this report).
Unfortunately, this also means we’re unlikely to solve the homelessness crisis in the U.S. anytime soon.
Every homeless person, regardless of mental state, still needs housing. It is the one unifying aspect of homelessness.
Due to the complexity and diversity in economic, cultural, and social value networks. For example, the approach which is working for Modesto will probably not work for San Francisco.
Our government is not more complex than Finland's because we have more people, it's because we chose to make it inefficient and complex.
Removing local cities' power to be different for the sake of complexity would solve the issue quickly. If the Bay Area had a regional government rather than tiny fiefdoms devoted to allowing wealthy people to extract the maximum economic value from shared business interests, while willing away their own tax dollars in tiny enclaves that are protected by minimum lot sizes and apartment bans, not only would we have far less homelessness to begin with, but we could solve the leftover homelessness much better, refuse crime and poverty, and have a far better functioning society.
Everything else you mention is just wishful thinking that could be applied to any government regardless of size or scope.
Name an efficient government of a country with hundreds of millions of people.
https://www.surfsantamonica.com/ssm_site/the_lookout/news/Ne...
The desire to exclude, the refusal to permit enough housing, and the rejection of density are the fundamental cause.
The scale of the US has nothing to do with it. It's merely a cultural choice by a prior generation that younger generations have not yet been able to overrule. But they will.
Why doesn’t this happen? Because developers will have to do more work for less money.
The impediment to housing in California is capture of land use policy by homeowners and landlords. We should expand the category of home builders beyond developers, but developers make zero money when they are not building. So developers are not holding back housing in California. The few remaining developers in California tend to be more land bankers than developers. But if we made the process for decelopnrt straightforward, then small builders and contractors could build all sorts of projects. At the moment the process is so complex and difficult that getting approval to build on a site is a hugely valuable financial product that increases the value of a parcel of land significantly (though necessarily less than the cost of getting that approval).
The reason we do not have enough housing all comes down to that NIMBY neighbor who doesn't want to allow apartments anywhere nearby and who has also been given lots of wrenches to throw into the process of approval. We don't have that sort of approval process for single family homes, it's a night and day difference. Anybody is allowed to build a massive mansion without any community input, but for anything more affordable, neighbors can veto it, and do.
Otherwise, what's Finland's secret? Are they building houses for the homeless in the middle of nowhere? How do they manage to build public housing in the city without it ballooning into a $1M per unit boondoggle?
Being lot smaller helps, but it seems in large town new build pretty close to downtown is 150k€ for tiny apartment(23m^2).
4 and to a lesser extent 3 above are the biggest differences with the non-profits that build below-market-rate housing in California. In California, the non-profits must fight like hell to get any permission to build, and that process can easily take years upon years, with uncertain delays along the entire process. In the meantime, funds that might go to the project will have deadlines on them, and any project will actually be assembled from a large and diverse set of sources that vary from grants, to loans, to LIHTC tax credits. And for the funding that comes from an application process to other organizations.
All this means that the entire build must be 100% subservient to the needs of getting local build approval and funding gathered all at the same time. Any project that focuses on minimizing costs is going to fail because the other parts are so hard to pull together.
IMHO there should be changes to local approval such that when plans are submitted, the city has 90 days to give final approval or rejection, with zero, absolutely zero extensions. And if the city rejects projects that follow the rules, or takes longer than 90 days, then that city loses any control over permitting for a year and a disinterested state board takes over, with the city paying the state for that cost.
The one thing they all have in common is how much more expensive it is to house them than it used to be.
An interesting case might be Israel. While it has a Jewish majority, there’s significant diversity within that cultural framework: religious, ethnic, and ideological [1].
> According to 2021 figures from Statistics Denmark, 86%[21][22] of Denmark's population of over 5,840,045 was of Danish descent.[23][21] The remaining 14% were of a foreign background, defined as immigrants or descendants of recent immigrants. ... More than 817,438 individuals (14%)[21][22] are migrants and their descendants (199,668 second generation migrants born in Denmark[22]). ... Of these 817,438[21] immigrants and their descendants: 522,640 (63.9%)[22] have a non-Western background (Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Thailand and Somalia; all other countries).
522.6k non-western background peoples for a country of 5,840,045 is not really what I would call homogeneity. The big cities (like Copenhagen and Aarhus) probably are even less homogenous.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/DNK/den....
It's definitely more likely to scale than any other solution that has never been implemented.
With what legal basis?
Things aren’t magically legal and viable in the real world just because an HN user imagines it.
You are asking highly vague implementation details about a small hypothetical. It comes off as incredibly rude and like you're fishing for some answer you already mentally dunked on.
Even if you believe my previous questions were too opinionated, responding with even more can only be detrimental, and it is not going to lead anywhere productive.
For example, try making a substantive argument as to how a credible enforcement system would come into existence. Otherwise the default assumption is that it will not turn out any better than already existing government systems.
And why would the number of users expressing opinions even matter?
Edit: I’m not here to score points, so it seems irrelevant in any comment chain whatsoever.
What do you gain from doing this?
(Speaking in my own words again: I am going to be very, very explicit here. You have a habit of asking super vague questions which require people to do a massive amount of work for you to explain their position while you can sit and continue at little cost to you: a sort of verbal DoS. Except we're not computers, we are people, and nobody takes kindly to this. When they inform you of this you retreat to "ok, and why should I listen to you?" which is even worse. I think you should take a good look at how you communicate with other people and see if you frequently leave them upset and unwilling to continue talking to you. Maybe you should direct one of your questions at yourself for why they keep doing that, such that you have to keep replying like this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....)
I’m not going to pretend your past comment doesn’t exist.
So the number of users opining in a comment chain is relevant… how…?
Edit: If you don’t like someone else asking questions, just leave the comment chain, otherwise don’t waste people’s time.
This is of course a lot of words to say the more straightforward thing, which is that you are the one wasting people's time here, and they don't really appreciate that. You can't really ask people to leave a comment chain while also asking them to respond in a certain way that is very expensive for everyone else.
You do have leeches, but well it is probably lot cheaper in long run than not paying. Like for example my car has never been broken into. And I haven't heard theft being any way rampant.
Funny story, I was sitting in a pizza place in Spain talking with a coworker about the high cost of rent in Hawaii and the homeless people who wander around Waikiki. Some guy (also an American) overhears us and butts in, blaming the Liberals for all the social programs that make homeless people want to move there. My response: how'd the homeless people buy tickets to Hawaii? He didn't have a good answer for that one.
The latter ruins it for the former.
As a taxpayer, I would be willing to provide free housing in a lower cost of living area, in exchange for the receiver maintaining the home, no issues with the law and perhaps helping others build their homes, etc.
The street is where they panhandle for money and get their drugs
I doubt your supposition. Once you create free housing you reduce your tax base. You are creating a positive feedback loop of costs, lost revenue, leading to more costs, leading to more lost revenue... and so on.
You've also not explored alternative means of solving those other problems on a more direct level or have any information as to what that might cost. You could just as well increase direct funding for small businesses and approach anti monopoly law with a renewed vigor.
To me it's putting a bandaid on your eye when you've cut your finger. So very nearly the right idea it's a little painful.
In my opinion this free housing should be built within an acceptable commute ride from city centers, maybe up to 30' ride? And scattered all around, not creating any slums. Hard problem to solve, I'm sure.
Nowadays there are years long waiting lists for city housing because they have flats available in expensive areas, which I feel is not the best bang for buck from taxpayers perspective.
So it was always possible. We just didn’t care to do so.
Is there every a system of any sort that someone doesn’t try to exploit?
Housing homeless people in hotels is not sustainable. (It's also overkill, as adequate shelter doesn't need to be a motel with a queen bed. It can be a much smaller room and still be humane.)
I was in Japan recently. A choice was made there as well.
Do you force them inside?
A bit of a strawman, social service doesn't have to mean homeless shelter, so no, no one is forcing anyone to do anything. Problem is in many places at least where I live, there just isn't enough money to serve all the people that need the various levels of help.
In my city they wanted to end homelessness 25 years ago. They had enough money to do so and went ahead. They found a 1/3 refused to come in even on the coldest days for various reasons. The fight became do you let them stay and sleep on the street or do you force them into shelters/jails.
What is more humane? The let's leave them on the street but send people to feed them approach won over the forcible removals.
So homelessness remained.
When people say they want to end homelessness I don't think they realize they need to jail some of them.
For example, Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations. If you get into the gritty details, you'll find that they have a whole bunch ofloopholes that seem to favor larger trucks & SUVs. Many people will point to these regulation as causing people to buy light trucks & SUVs, but the data seems to suggest consumers prefer to buy these vehicles and auto manufacture prefer to sell them (they are extremely profitable). I postulate that, if CAFE requirements were eliminated, the best selling vehicle in the USA would continue to be the F-series and other trucks and SUVs would continue to dominate the top 10, because the regulations are influenced by consumer preference, not the other way around.
I think the same logic applies to zoning. People largely want to own single family homes (SFH) in the suburbs; builders largely want to build SFHs in the suburbs. There's no reason to believe that changes in zoning will cause a meaningful shift in consumer and business preference. In the handful of ultra expensive metro areas, sure it might move the needle because economics trump preference, but in most of the USA, there's plenty of space to build housing. It's hard to imagine a developer in Pittsburgh choosing to build housing in an industrial area in the city over some empty land on the outskirts.
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/...
As per econ 101, high prices are a function of scarcity relative to demand: we can reasonably claim that regulations which restrict housing development, which by their nature must increase scarcity and therefore housing costs, therefore also lead to increased rates of homelessness.
> In the handful of ultra expensive metro areas, sure it might move the needle
That's a good point, but those are exactly the places which have significant homelessness problems.
In general, this is not a housing preference issue, because opposition to upzoning does not come from people who aspire to live in single-family homes, but from people who already own them. This is a typical example:
https://www.change.org/p/whittier-neighbors-against-seattle-...
As usual with these things, the complaints include a cloud of nitpicky nonsense surrounding a central concern over "neighborhood character", which is a polite way of saying "we don't want apartment-dwelling poor people coming to live near us".
NO, it is most definitely NOT that.
It is overwhelmingly exactly what people say it is — maintaining the character of a neighborhood that everyone there has paid higher cost of entry, cost of taxes, and cost and time of maintenance and upgrades to maintain. Don't make claims in areas where you have zero knowledge just because you think it helps your point.
I'm in a small sub-/ex-urban town with a rural character which has zoning, and have been involved in local issues. I've never met a single person who feels the way you claim (although there are surely a few examples somewhere). No one looks down on the low income ppl who are here because their families were here before housing started to get tight and expensive. Most everyone either grew up here or came specifically because they WANT to live in a quieter area, have some wildlife, maintain gardens, etc. No one is avoiding poor people, they are SEEKING quiet and green spaces where you can do outdoor activities.
Moreover, saying that zoning in locales like this should be changed to accommodate low-income high-density housing is just stupid. Yes, the current homeowners could get rich subdividing their properties, razing the trees and putting up condos. Great, maybe you get a lower-income population. But getting ANYWHERE useful from here, even groceries or convenience stores, is a 5-10 mile car ride, and the rail station to the big city is 25min away by car. Any low income person is now condemned to replace housing expenses with car expenses, purchase/lease, maintenance, insurance, fuel, etc.. And, they now have a big commute reducing their time available.
It is really simple to just blame other people and yell "they're just greedy!", and it surely makes you feel better and more righteous.
It is much harder to actually figure out complex problems and create solutions that work.
I'm sympathetic to your plight seeing the character of your neighborhood change if public housing is built, but society has to balance it against the plight of people who are forced to change their neighborhood due to poverty, and on the balance their plight is simply worse than yours.
Unlike them, in such a scenario, you get to sell your land whose value now increased and go somewhere else with similar attribute.
Any society that cannot make this obvious decision to inconvenience some to save others is doomed to failure.
I'm sorry, but that's not how that works. not if you really want it to happen. There's conversations between high level government officials and corporate execs to make things happen. negotiations are had, and contracts are signed. theres a city planning agency that has a CPC.
All of that is to say, there's entire industry just in the planning of cities. while we're building housing for the homeless, let's also engage them and build a viable town and start with that, and not just build the center square with hope and wishes. (Hope is not a strategy.)
It's just a simple fact that if you have a large population center, and market demand for it, basic things like grocery stores and convenience stores will pop up. Not every grocery store and convenience store is run by a large chain that negotiates with the government for a location, if you believe that's the case you are missing knowledge of that industry.
This isn't a hypothetical, things like this have been done. Just because we are overcomplicating it doesn't mean it has to be.
So, you will have just condemned every poor person you transplanted to now buying, maintaining, and insuring an automobile or several for each family. A constantly depreciating asset. Which may well cost more than they saved in rent.
"Oh, just put in public transit", you'll say. Have you ever looked at any suburban/rural bus service? They only run infrequently, and often unreliably on time, and are so now the poor people must squander massive hours of their day just waiting on the busses, or configuring their schedule around the busses.
No one else is overcomplicating it. You are massively oversimplifying it, waving your hands about, and being very loud about proclaiming your virtuous non-solution. Stop it, and think more.
There is basically nowhere a family can pay less for rent that the price of upkeeping a beater car - the residents were going to have a car either way. There's just not enough public transit in the US to avoid this reality outside of cities with high rent, especially for apartments large enough for a family.
It is not only the price of purchase, insurance, maintenance of a car, it is also the TIME you are condemning them to spend on commuting everywhere.
The solution is to make massively more residential development/redevelopment IN and NEAR the cities, such as now converting underutilized office space to residential, and not only passing regs favoring and encouraging such conversions (as is being done noe in Boston), but ALSO passing regs encouraging Remote Work.
And, where there IS public transit, encourage development there. Massachusetts is doing this, specifically encouraging conversion of offices to residential and overriding zoning laws within X distance of commuter rail stops.
Those are both good moves. But arguing for merely blanket 'develop anything anywhere' is literally stupid and will do more damage to society than any gains. There are reasons zoning was developed, and while a small part of it was racist/classist, most of it has very good reasons to exist. Simply overriding it is statist authoritarian, and saying people in their locales have no right to determine how they run their LOCAL affairs, from environmental, to historic preservation, to traffic patterns.
Plus, it's already been proven that cheap housing away from the city doesn't work. People can buy a trailer for $10-$30K and as spot for $400-1000/mth, or rentals for a bit more. But the locales are all away from the city. There are very few people who actually do it BECAUSE it is impractical to live so far from jobs in the city. If you want to house people more cheaply, it needs to be done NEAR their jobs. Destroying everything else for a bad idea will merely leave the problem unsolved, and destroy value.
I've watched towns have zoning, abandon it, then reinstate it a decade later because they saw what an awful idea it was to have none. I've seen towns that rezoned to "modernize" and destroy their character, and towns preserve their character and grow steadily into desirable locales. NONE of it is as trivial as you think.
But NO, you obviously do not understand, let alone have any sympathy for, preserving environment and habitat. It is not merely inconvenient, what you propose is death for everything from the insects, birds, flora, fauna, and 50-year-old endangered turtle living in the wetland behind my neighborhood. Paving paradise and putting up a parking lot is not a solution.
Beyond that, you are proposing to literally steal uncounted millions of dollars of built-up value. Everyone in this area has willingly paid large amounts of extra costs and far higher taxes to maintain its character, purchase lands for greenspace preservation, trails, etc. It is not mere inconvenience you are talking about, it is literally stealing all of that extra value, and handing it to the developers who will strip the land and put up (almost universally shitty quality) buildings and pavement. You need to compensate the residents who will be displaced, not merely hand their value over to the developers, destroy the habitat and "inconvenience" the current residents.
Moreover, even if grocery and convenience stores "popup" with demand, they will still require cars to get to for almost everyone. It also fails solve the problem of where will be the JOBS or any other supplies. Most things will still be a significant drive away, and you've just solved one problem (lower housing cost) to add another — the requirement to spend money on multiple automobiles per family. And the added pollution and resource usage.
Your problem is you think there is a single simple solution that applies everywhere. You are wrong.
In some cases, it is a great solution. In others, you are literally destroying everything to gain nothing, because you can't be bothered to think about it more deeply. Any society doing that is doomed to failure.
It's a good thing I am not talking about locales like yours, then; unless your small town has a demographically-improbable homelessness problem, akin to the ones you see in big cities whose history of inadequate development due to strict zoning regulation has created a persistent housing crunch, nothing I said pertains to you.
> It is overwhelmingly exactly what people say it is — maintaining the character of a neighborhood that everyone there has paid higher cost of entry, cost of taxes, and cost and time of maintenance and upgrades to maintain.
You're not making this point of view sound any more appealing by defining "the character of a neighborhood" entirely in terms of money.
Well, the current town has no homelessness problem, but there ARE most definitely laws in place (Massachusetts 40B) that specifically seeks to override local zoning and mandate low-income housing in ALL towns.
So, while we agree that what you said should not pertain to me, the people making the actual laws most definitely apply it to me.
I don't know why there is the disconnect, perhaps some misguided "it must apply to everyone everywhere" cop-out to avoid the actual complexity, but the fact is that the rhetoric is very destructive.
>>defining "the character of a neighborhood" entirely in terms of money.
The DEFINITION is "quiet, low traffic, wildlife, gardens, etc.".
The COST is defined in money as well as work.
The point is that those things are not free — they cost a lot of work and yes, money in both taxes and improvements and maintenance. More importantly, it is not cost-free to decide to destroy those valuable things. Especially when the result will not help the people you are intending to help.
Here in Washington, the state legislature recently passed a law overriding any local zoning which would forbid multi-family housing, but the law does not apply to cities under 25K population, and its strongest provisions only apply above 75K. Oregon has had a similar law since 2019. This approach seems more reasonable to me.
I had literally to take three weeks off to kill a proposed development literally in my back yard. It is a wetland habitat, so enjoys some protection from good Massachusetts environmental laws, but they can be overridden by 40B. It is also a hilly and inaccessable site, and the developer was proposing to raze the whole site and put in 300+ units of warehouse-type condos. They literally did not even have sufficient access for fire trucks because of the terrain, and would have eliminated the habitat of an endangered turtle (found by required survey/trap-releasing).
We dug hard into the laws and process, and rallied hundreds of neighbors and political influencers in town to literally make the most packed planning board hearing they ever had, but a factor of at least 10.
This ended up killing the project, for now. But the absurdity of blanket zoning overrides literally destroying highly valuable (and costly) environment to literally solve nothing except transferring some of that value to developer's pockets has not left me. I understand it is still sad to replace brownstones with 10' square garden plots out back with high-rises, but I'm fine with that, since there really isn't any wildlife habitat and there is infrastructure to move the new people around the city. I'm not fine with doing it everywhere, particularly where it will destroy habitat and where there is no good people-moving infrastructure.
[0]: https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf (page 4)
Those are not people you can just stick into a house and wish them well, they need serious help for many years. In most cases that help isn't there, or comes with strings (no drugs, no alcohol) that they refuse to accept. Homelessness in the US is in many respect a mental health and substance abuse issue, exacerbated in the post-Reagan era when our mental health system was gutted and weakened.
If you want to reach those people and keep them off the streets, you need more than just empty houses.
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2023-...
They don't represent the same kind of societal problem that poor students, broke divorcees, and people moving through rough patches do. They also don't represent a single population that needs help they aren't provided with already, unlike the chronically homeless.
Same with homelessness.
So we have 350k open units and 700k people without homes, average rent is around $1500..
just looking at the data my guess is that we have about 700k people who don't have an extra 2 grand every month to put into housing. (and I think it's way higher personally, maybe not counting the couch surfing relatives who can't afford their own place, and others who are living in over crowded situations of basements )-
I'm sure there is much more to it than the averages, like a lot of the homeless are in areas where the average rent is much higher and 1500 - and the few places where rent is $800 likely has less homeless, (and also has less other things like jobs and public transit) -
and really if it is 10 million or a quarter a million empty places, I don't see how that matters if no one can afford any of them.
Does the government eminent domain the houses, arrest the homeless, and then ship them out to Detroit or wherever the surplus houses are?
We will exit an era where housing prices always rise, because both taxes and insurance will become unaffordable. I see a combination of publicly managed apartments (like Germany or Austria) with a much smaller private market for houses. The end-game is housing managed like infrastructure, with most of it publicly managed but a few privately managed/owned houses for unique or highly desirable spaces.
There is also a crisis in affordability of apartments, with a report [0] showing a collapse in lower-cost apartments that is partially driving homelessness. It is especially hard for fixed-income folks.
> arrest the homeless
Most homeless are working homeless. They crash with friends and family, or they live in their cars/trailers. Others are pushed to the periphery or out of their job market entirely; San Fransisco's struggle for service workers is a reflection of this trend, but it's hardly unique to the Bay Area. We need workers for just about everything, and those workers need a place to stay.
While this won't solve street-level homelessness, right now most homeless programs cannot move recovering people into permanent housing due to affordability and shortages. There are long waitlists right now for Housing and Urban Development subsidized housing because of the shortages. There are camp grounds or shelters, but those are only temporary. Having more stock available also means these homeless programs can provide much needed stability for recovering people and get them away from places/people that might cause them to relapse.
> Does the government eminent domain the houses
I see a collapse in house prices, and that might cause private equity to dump a bunch of housing stock into the market. To prevent a total collapse government would step in and be a buyer-of-last-resort, which will kickstart the publicly managed housing initiative. Another is insurance, where private insurers step away leaving governments to either rebuild after disaster or face a new homeless crisis. There's also banks holding a lot of mortgage paper that can go underwater forcing another intervention.
I see plenty of cases of market dysfunction that requires government to step in without explicitly eminent domain, which is why I see housing-as-infrastructure becoming the 21st century solution.
[0]: https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/press-releases/new-report-shows...
The raw number of empty houses is irrelevant. Especially when some of those houses are temporarily uninhabitable, e.g. houses being renovated, or houses in LA right now near the wildfires.
Immigrants are a tiny fraction of the homeless [1]. And we’ve tried criminalising homelessness; incarceration is forced shelter and incredibly expensive.
Whether or not a large percentage, or a large number or small number of immigrants are homeless or not,
one must assume that if 11 million people left the US next month, the price of rent in many places may go down a bit, and some currently unhoused people might be able to afford a cheaper place.
Of course another side is that wages in some industries will rise, and that may put more people into a position where they can afford an apartment.
What I'd like to see is how inexpensive optional housing can be made.
Is there data someplace that shows it?
> I believe it is highly like
I believe that angry gods cause rain. What does it matter?
https://housing-infrastructure.canada.ca/homelessness-sans-a...
There was a 400+% increase in 2023.
https://www.toronto.ca/news/city-of-toronto-update-on-shelte...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/globalnews.ca/news/10933673/tor...
The first to solve it is punished with tens of thousands of newly arriving homeless who, as you might imagine, will find a way to get there if it means not being homeless anymore. But budgets are finite and the cost per homeless must he higher than zero, but in a practical sense the number of homeless aren't entirely finite.
If you start from the other end, with the feds, then you might as well hold your breath. Homelessness is so far down the list of priorities, that even if it somehow did bubble to the top, the polarization in Congress will sabotage any effort, and we'll end up with boondoggles that both sides can criticize and that won't really help any homeless at all.
This isn't a choice being made, it's just the complexity of the real world that some are still blind to even after graduating college and (theoretically) turning into grownups.
There's actually a technical solution too, but since it's dry and boring, most leftists (and quite a few of the rightists) find it too boring to ever want to try. Obviously the solution is either love and compassion (from the left) or maybe "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps" (from the right).
You're not wrong in the fact that America is a shit country designed to intentionally to use homelessness as an implicit threat against the working class. You are wrong in the sense that all the things you listed aren't reasons, just excuses to cover up the intentionality of homelessness, and that homelessness could be solved if there was the political will to do so. Which there will never be in the USA because again, the homelessness crisis is intentional.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
Will politicians ever do it? No, they're in the pocket of the military and the 1%. Will voters ever vote for it? No, they're fed a steady stream of propaganda that tells them that this would be "socialism". But that's how the problem would be solved.
California has 30% of the US homeless population, but 11% of it's total population. It is dramatically disproportional, period.
https://shou.senate.ca.gov/sites/shou.senate.ca.gov/files/Ho...
I think housing prices does make the homeless problem worse, but it didn't create it. Good climate and numerous public services did.
Finland got to 0 by giving everybody a place to live, not by kicking the homeless out of their country.
I've seen nothing to support this claim. It does fit the right-wing disinformation pattern of demonizing people, encouraging division and hate between people, undermine social programs, and making baseless claims to put others in the defensive position of having to disprove them.
Can you support that claim?
Here's some evidence to the contrary, from another comment: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30739834/
Japan's culture is why those things are the way they are. It's not due to funding. It's because people raise their children differently than we do in the west. The family's obligations are also greater.
And, yes, there are homeless people in Japan. But they typically are invisible by choice because of their cultural norms around discretion.
I have a friend right now who is in a precarious housing situation who has schizophrenia but does not have a DX and has no insight into her condition. If my wife tries to set a time to pick her up and take her out to our farm, odds are 1/10 that she will really be there, will really get in the car, will not get out of the car for some hare-brained reason or otherwise not make it out. You've got to have the patience of a saint to do anything for her.
If she had some insight into her condition she could go to DSS and get TANF and then get on disability and have stable housing but she doesn't. No matter how I try to bring up the issue that she does have a condition she just "unhears" it.
Indians and other people from traditional cultures have stronger "family values" and won't wash their hands of intractable relatives the way people who grew up in the US monoculture will. (Or if they do it, they'll do it in a final way)
1) I have.
2) There are plenty of homeless or impoverished people in India, they just don't come to the US. Immigrants need a visa or permanent residency, and that usually comes with a requirement to maintain a job or have some level of financial security. Later generation Indian-Americans are, hopefully, kept out of poverty by the work their parents and families put in to establish a foothold in the US. But none of this is guaranteed; homelessness can happen to just about anyone if they have the right run of bad luck, and one's culture is only a small part of that equation.
Homelessness goes down in places where housing is cheap and also in places where the government intervenes sensibly.
The people of India started from even worse poverty and have generally made progress (especially since recently-deceased PM Singh). I'm not criticizing. But holding forth India's culture [1] as a model of preventing homelessness is pretty incredible.
[1] India may have the largest, most diverse collection of 'cultures' within one national border in the world, so which one are we talking about?
Why might it be rare to see a homeless member of a group whose members make up less than 2% of the population in the US to start with and are largely recent immigrants (15% immigrating within the last 5 years!), often under work-based visa programs targeting highly-skilled workers that are well paid?
Could it be cultural superiority of the cultures from which they are drawn? Could it be some other thing that makes them rare among the US homeless?
Hard to tell, I'm sure.
I'm shocked when politicians in America blame our homelessness problem on poverty. Poor people do not behave this way. This is a breakdown in culture.
It's weird growing up in the 90s as an American and visiting India and thinking that America was better than that because we are so rich and no one is that poor, but 30 years later, it no longer seems that way. While India is still very poor, I think even the homeless there might have a more stable life than what I physically see on the streets of west coast America. I mean.. it may be a slum, but at least they have a permanent house, their kids are in school, etc.
Meanwhile, in Portland, I see human feces on many streets, and the homeless are drugged out zombies (Portland has enough beds for all homeless but no ability to force usage of shelter beds, and few homeless person accepts the offer).
I hate to say it, but maybe just allowing a 'proper' slum would be a better option.
https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/1235140/
I can't help but think that homelessness in downtown San Francisco is a spectacle.
For one thing, there has been a decision to concentrate people there, which is why people think homelessness is worse in SF than LA, whereas I understand there are more homeless per capita in LA. If you tried to "live outside" in a residential area I think the authorities would deal with you as harshly they would deal with anyone who tried to build more housing.
The messages are: (1) you'd better not stand up to your jackass boss because this could be you, (2) you'd better not ask politicians for a more generous welfare state (especially in the bluest state in America) because we'll never give it to you.
That only took a few thousand years and still isn't really there yet.
They delivered the results, and there's nothing you can say that changes the facts. You seem to really want to believe, and everyone to believe, how hopeless you are.
It’s very difficult to address culture in the US without being accused of victim blaming or bias.
But the uncomfortable truth is that some cultural practices simply do produce better neighbors and coworkers and compatriots than do others.
For example:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain...
The major issue with US even in blue cities is how apathetic they are to build new infrastructure (homes, roads, hospitals, schools) e.t.c
At the end of the day demand-supply dynamics dictate the price.
Finland (pop 5.5M) Norway (pop 5.5M) Sweden (pop 10M)
I look at WA state with a similar population 7M , and higher GDP from tech boom at ~$700B
Seattle & Bellevue should have solved homelessness, but that is not the case. Millions are spent on homeless but little towards long term solving of the solution.
There is a lot of money to be made by many problems not being solved.
Many drug addicts don't want to be addicted, and would try to go through treatment if provided. But some are inveterate, and don't want to quit. What do you do with them?
In which case you're essentially saying "meth users decide everyone's housing status".
I'm saying reaching the state of "no homelessness" is dependent upon finding something to do with the worst of the homeless.
For a tech analogy, imagine you've architected a system that has 99.5% uptime. You might be able to imagine a way to get to 99.9% up time.
With enough resources, you might even be able to get to 99.99% uptime. With laser focus and a giant dedicated team and an immense budget, maybe you can get it to 99.995%.
But what would you do if some exec came in and said we need 100% uptime, and we are a failure as a company unless we reach that?
Drug addiction and mental illness is another story.
You skipped a step or two in there, but I will note that if you had real health care, the homeless adhd and such would be on their vyvanse prescriptions rather than self-medicating with meth.
First, the general stupidity: I didn't assert a single thing you claimed I did.
However, there's a reason stimulant medications are monitored by a doctor: escalating dosages due to normal tolerance needs to be distinguished from escalating dosages due to use and abuse of the medication for (initially) spurts of productivity and (eventually) avoiding the need to sleep. I can assure you that you can stay up 4 days on Vyvanse™ (i.e., fancy amphetamine) just as easily as you can on methamphetamine; the difference is the doctor and pharmacist keeping you to a sane dose, even if everyone involved is winking and nudging about whether you actually have adhd.
Imagine if addicts got a limited amount of their fix for pennies with very basic oversight, instead of screwing around with random chemicals that seem to make life bearable for a short period, but which quickly result in escalating dosages, health impacts and antisocial and criminal behaviour ultimately resulting in homelessness and incarceration with all of the social and economic costs involved in that.
You seem unwilling to say what you actually want to say. I'm more than happy to dance around it if you are.
And, to be quite blunt: If someone wants to be a meth-head, there's plenty of ways to consume it that don't create hazards for other people.
Edit: I think it's perfectly acceptable, in guaranteed housing situations, to say "If you create a hazard you will go to jail."
I don't know that at all. People in public housing that I know and see are not especially from South America.
> people removed from homes for domestic violence by court (divorce)
This is classic why the husband moves out, have you ever dealt with family courts as a male in Poland, nothing rings the bell for you? So a male homeless must be violent alcoholic, right? I'm happy that your life and family are doing okay. Once your life will turn more difficult, Polish society will dismiss you as a violent alcoholic and no help or support will be awaiting. Will reveal you one more secret, Polish male homeless are in Germany and Netherlands. Occasionally you hear about them in media when someone beats them to death or sets them on fire.
They'd happily sell but for 1mln PLN.
> people looking for something better they already have, preferably free money
They'd rent but they are also aggressively sly, dismissing every perfect tenant. In the end they indeed end up renting to another non-paying sly who will tell them exactly what they want to hear.
At this point of the real estate the market, it's the owners who want free money.
It's funny, I was as well and saw homeless everywhere, for the first time ever.
I was recently in Scandinavia and while i've seen homeless there as well, there was a noticeable increase.
Being homeless is not inherently wrong. But I feel when a society makes camping on common ground a crime - like native Americans did, it owes it to them to a) give them land to camp on or b) give them housing.
It shouldn’t be a crime to sleep, ever. It horrifies me that the “conservative” Supreme Court could deny the most fundamental right to existence, literally jailing people for sleeping.
Homeless people are not necessarily completely shelterless, in a survival sense. They're associated with tents for a reason.
I have family who are poor (3rd world) and I think about how it's fair for me to b here and they are over there but yeah etc etc idk. Why does it feel bad to be. I do help (virtue signal) donate but I'm also in a shit ton of debt but I'm not technically poor/homeless. I have a car/apt/toys. Still thinking about it.
Oh yeah giving money isn't a fix it turns out because people fight over it/demand more. Next thing you know everyone is your relative hunting you down online. My personal gmail chat pops up "hey man..."
It does piss me off when I pull up to a light and there's a guy right there with a sign. How do I know he's homeless? I'm coming out of a grocery store at night somebody's like "sir, sir, sir..." trying to get my attention. I guess it shouldn't be a problem to just hand em a dollar. But then they say "that's it?".
Again I donate to a local food shelter, NHA, etc... just funny is altruism real idk why do I feel annoyed (greed?). I can't even ask people for money without feeling shame but other people don't care. Alright rant over I am privileged I know.
I'm gonna live a life though, mid sports car, land, not give up. I'll continue to donate too whether in cash or open source work but first I have to get out of debt, been in debt for 15 years now crazy. That's why I have my tech job, drive for UE, donate plasma and freelance to speed run my debt off. Thankfully I'm single so it's only my own life I gotta worry about.
Their approach of building flats and committing to getting homeless people into them absolutely worked and should be an example, but not without a relatively fixed homeless rate. This is the general issue with the nordic social model. it was the model of functioning social programs, but in a vacuum of relative isolation and homegeneity.
> national strategy, driven by a “Housing First” approach, which provides people experiencing homelessness with immediate, independent, permanent housing, rather than temporary accommodation
Homeless --- pardon me, unhoused --- from America, would trash that shit faster than you can "vodka, tar and sauna".
Inconceivable! Who would have ever thought of that?
Those commonist Scandinavians, they just don't understand the "power of the market"...
Why would anyone even live indoors if it mitigated investor ROI?
Could timing have something to do with it? Maybe if the cycle is broken right at the start, when one becomes homeless, it prevents some of the mental health issues and addiction issues that come from living without support for too long. People here in NA often have lived on the streets for years or decades. That's so much trauma, many say it's impossible to heal at that point.
What fraction of the homeless addicts or mentally ill started out that way?
Getting paid 250k/yr with 20% downpayment isn't enough to afford a house with 2 kids, so providing a "free" or "afforable" housing to those who aren't currently employees is only going to upset those who are working hard
IMO govn't need to relax the regulation to build more houses and drive the cost down
I completely agree with Finland's approach though. Permanent housing is the minimal requirement to reduce homelessness. Without placed to stay, mailing address, security, it's difficult to get out of homelessness
You can't execute a Housing First strategy effectively without adequate housing supply, which is the most fundamental problem in a number of locales, including the Bay Area. But additional market supply alone is not sufficient to address the urgent homelessness problem.
> IMO govn't need to relax the regulation to build more houses and drive the cost down
That absolutely needs to happen, and that helps with prevention, but except for the fairly-well-employed homeless (a group that actually exists and is often ignored, but isn't a big part of the homeless problem), adding new market rate supply alone does not provide significant assistance to the currently homeless.
Edit: Just to be clear, I'm very pro-immigration. I just think that studying rich homogeneous societies doesn't result in many useful takeaways for countries like the USA.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Finland#:~:tex....
That said, the evidence is mixed [1], with fairness and economic inequality [2][3] seeming to matter more than racial homogeneity. (Lots of tiny, racially-homogenous societies–high trust or not–bordering each other also have a one-way historical track record.)
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000169931772161...
When someone raised in a culture where cheating to win by any means is acceptable (most of India) or where bartering, persuading and microfrauding in trade (most of Middle east and sup-sahara Africa) is not frowned upon, it is not a stretch to imagine that the introduction of such cultural elements will lead to dilution of the overall interpersonal trust in let's say, Swedish society.
If you had actually read the paper (which I have), you would realise that the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust is inverse.
While homogeneity may play a factor I think it's dwarved by other things. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Romania
https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/finland/romania
In my central European country with high ethnic homogenity the unhoused are also stemming from majority population. There is a Roma minority who are often struggling with poverty but are rarely unhoused.
Correct.
"There was no significant difference in rates of lifetime adult homelessness between foreign-born adults and native-born adults (1.0% vs 1.7%). Foreign-born participants were less likely to have various mental and substance-use disorders, less likely to receive welfare, and less likely to have any lifetime incarceration." ("The foreign-born population was 46.2 million (13.9% of the total population)" in 2022 [2].)
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30739834/
[2] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/foreign-...
citation needed
Meh. They've got two different official languages. It's not as ethnically uniform as a lot of other European countries.
I just don't think Finland is a great example of what the post was talking about (a mythic country where everything works because it is an "ethnically homogenous high trust society" - although on reflection I'm not even sure what that all means). It's a way of lazily discounting what their government might or might not be achieving regarding homelessness, and it's not even true.
I'm not any sort of expert on Finland, but they have had some real political and social divides over the years and (I think?) nevertheless manage to care about the effectiveness of their welfare state. They'd appear to be a counterexample to the notion that everybody in a country needs to be the same in order for this stuff to work.
“Let’s first figure out if the homelessness is actually the person’s own fault. If we can really be confident that they’re repentant and sober, then we should perhaps consider helping them find housing.”
This is the approach that Finland had in the 1950s! And it didn’t work. Hundreds of young WWII veterans were dying under the bridges after years in the streets drinking illegal booze (and many also abusing stronger substances, since e.g. amphetamine was given to soldiers during the war). Post-war Finland was not some socialist wonderland but a hard, poor, unforgiving place.
Finland’s U-turn on treating homelessness came after the dismal failure that left so many of these deeply traumatized men and women to die. For the past decades, the policy has been to try to get everyone off the streets into safe and private housing, and then sort out the rest. And the numbers show it has worked.
Many of America’s homeless are also war veterans, just like 1950s Finland. They deserve better.
"We have limited resources. Lets identify the most impactful places for our $$."
Presumably, people with social disorders will be much more expensive to house than someone that is more recently functioning in our society.
Remember that not everyone has good opportunities. If my other choice was working a dehumanizing job to afford a tiny room with several roommates and no leftover money.. can’t really blame them for not wanting help.
As penance, here’s a bonus fun fact: wtf is 0F???? It’s the temperature saturated brine freezes at! (It’s very close but not exact, because Mr Fahrenheit wasn’t perfect)
I do remember -32 or something is the same?
2. Remove them from the homeless count, because they now have a house.
3. Reach zero homelessness!
4. There are still people living on the streets... But we don't call them homeless!
Types of homelessness | Living Alone | Long-term homeless
----------------------+--------------+-------------------
Temporarily living | 2 773 | 522
with friends and | |
relatives | |
----------------------+--------------+-------------------
Outside, in | 721 | 186
stairwells, in | |
temporary | |
shelters, etc. | |
----------------------+--------------+-------------------
In dormitories | 489 | 195
or hostels | |
----------------------+--------------+-------------------
In institutions | 358 | 151Both groups have people who want to be homeless, so they can be left alone.
What happens is that people are unwilling or unable to accept the terms of housing offered, like for example strict sobriety, or not allowing pets. Family housing is also rare, and I don't think it's fair to say someone choosing to be homeless with their spouse over housed separately miles away from each other "wants to be homeless."
If people are consistently declining the aid we're offering, that's a problem we can address. It is our fault, not theirs.
It may be possible to "solve" homelessness for some majority of people. But I doubt 100% is ever humanly achievable. At least, not without some massive breakthrough in understanding and intervention for mental illnesses.
Why can't they be left alone in a home?
A working mom with a 2 year old doesnt want to live next door to violent actors and drug dealers.
More specifically, I think the US is unwilling to distinguish between lawful and unlawfully behaving poor, and segregate them accordingly when providing shelter.
Maybe it's not actually a problem. Maybe it's another way to promote fear, hate, division, and cynicism about social spending.
So stop holding these countries with insignificant populations up as beacons of light. I think the problem with the US is very clear to me as an outsider observer. It's a vast country that is so big that technically it's still being colonized. And in order to speed up this process there is unchecked capitalism. And you can never rely on a benevolent billionaire to solve your problems. Only the government can be held responsible for its citizens.
I took it for granted for most of my life, and I idolized the US for all their music and cultural output. Until social media brought me more and more real stories from real Americans and I realized how lucky I was to be born where I was born.
In other words, you better be welcomed over there, or you'll die, literaly.
And with climate change, I wonder if the current weather computer simulations on the new climate we are creating will generate extreme cold events in more southern countries, long enough event to kill many homeless if not all.