Finland applies the “Housing First” concept (2020)
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However, the number of people begging on the streets is still rising sharply, so I don't think it is the silver bullet everyone thinks it is.
NB: some people are there by "choice" because some shelters are so chaotic it is better to be out on the streets. Some have lived outside for so long that they do not like living inside. I'm not saying that the situation couldn't be improved, but the core issue is addiction IMO to get rid of 'visible' "homelessness".
There is also a huge problem that so many people are living in "temporary" accommodation for years waiting for social housing.
The key point I'd say is the problem with homelessness is addiction treatment (and the lack of it). You can give these people houses but without treatment they will still be begging on the street. One alternative would be to prescribe heroin which I think could work, but crack/meth is different - very hard to keep people on any sort of maintenance dose of those drugs and most of the "chaotic people" are addicted to an opiate and a stimulant.
I've started doing volunteer work in this space for the past few years and it really has opened my eyes to the real problems with it. Housing is a prerequisite to the solution but it is not a solution itself, unfortunately. I didn't realise this before volunteering.
I used to work in housing homeless people around 4 years ago, so things may have changes since then, if you're volunteering now you can probably tell me if any of these practices have changed:
- Own accomodation was only possible after a proven track record in hostels
- Many hostel accomodation places only possible after being "counted" homeless (need to be verified as sleeping rough)
- Housing benefit paid directly to the tenant, and if they fail to manage finances (including if there benefits are paused due to missing a form or not filling in a letter in time) they are liable to be evicted from social housing
- use of drugs is normally evictable in hostel situations causing a vicious cycle
(I don't want to imply the UK is the worst country for social housing, there's some great work, but also some really sad realities that often go unadressed)
This is an important bit that people will usually fail to consider. I've read so many stories where living on the street can be the safer option for both your bodily health and general well being. I don't know how it is in the UK, but in the US, shelters will often require people to allow the shelter to hold their belongings for safe keeping.
What often happens is the shelter staff will throw away, lose, or downright steal those belongings. I've read stories of IDs, phones, and notebooks that have been held onto for years going missing under the watch of the shelter.
In shelters that don't require this, your things are now at the mercy of your fellow shelter borders. And things can go missing just as easily.
It makes sense people would want to avoid shelters and sleep outside if this is what happens when they choose the shelter.
These kinds of losses are extremely demoralizing and damaging. Same deal with Homeless encampment cleanups. People will lose their medicine, documents, cell phones, etc and have to start back from square one, often destroying any progress they could have made. It basically makes the homeless "problem" even worse and pushes people down worse paths. This kind of stress causes all sorts of mental illness in return, creating a cycle of poverty-> homelessness -> stress -> mental illness.
This is explicitly covered by Housing First, which does not involve shared shelter accommodation. Instead, the point is that every homeless person gets their own apartment, without preconditions.
Pretending that guaranteeing shelter where you are at significant risk of being raped and robbed is almost the same thing as guaranteeing an apartment of your own is dishonest. There isn't really another way to describe it.
We generally accept the principal that making something cheaper and easier results in more of this behavior. Few examples
- subsidize corn results in more corn products like corn syrup in our food
- make school loans cheaper and more available to students results in more people going to school
- make guns more available and easier to get results in more guns on the street
But when it comes to making it easier for people to fuel their addiction and live a more comfortable life centered around a dangerous chemical, some question that this relationship exists. I've watched videos where someone interviews people on the streets in Philadelphia which provides a lot of services around facilitating drug use and they're just living their life as addicts and pretty much okay with their status quo.
Doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to make the lives of addicts more comfortable. But we should accept the proposition that subsidizing a behavior or lifestyle makes it more common on the margin.
The fundamental principals of supply and demand assume that the agents participating the market are acting rationally (or approximately close to rational). Those assumptions are strained to their limit when analysing black markets and addictive substances.
Do you still believe that relationships I originally mentioned are strained?
Perhaps you mean that people don't behave in a way you deem "rational" and that therefore the outcomes are different from what you expect.
That is an issue with your model of reality not being accurate, not with the concept of supply and demand.
The point is to remove the activity from the criminal underworld. A pharmacist dispensing a medication is much less likely to sexually assault their client than a street level heroin dealer.
Your account is pretty new and seems to be mostly arguing with people.
I don't really want to interact with that, so I'm writing this to politely tell you that I'll pass on this discussion with you.
Have a good one!
Anyways, just as an aside, I went through your account too and it's mostly just you arguing with people and litigating whether or not you've insulted them.
Forums like this largely exist for debate and discussion. It's all encouraged so long as you don't insult people, which some people seem to feel is a line you cross.
I also wish you well, though I am a bit weirded out just generally as I'm not used to certain interactions.
Someone got upset on someone else's behalf when I told them the difference between rogue and rouge. I wasn't insulting anyone, lol.
I hope you learn and grow beyond this petty lifestyle.
<3
It saves me from engaging in energy-draining time-wasting arguments.
Last I heard, a typical daily dose of medical grade heroin/diamorphine costs 10-20 pounds from the NHS's existing suppliers (yes, the NHS has suppliers - heroin is used in NHS hospitals for pain management; if you've ever been prescribed diamorphine, it's heroin).
All but the very worst affected heroin addicts can lead relatively normal lives if they don't need to worry where their dose will come from.
There are significant societal benefits to prescribing heroin as cheaply as possible.
Unsurprisingly, addiction is a complex issue where the motivations (to start, and to stop) change from person to person.
There is a good balance point in the middle in most cases, but in the case of homelessness and drug addiction one sides cause usually amounts to not helping anyone and in many times criminalizes their existence making their situation worse and more costly upon them and society as a whole than it already was.
This is no one side. (one sides is grammatically incorrect so if you meant plural you need to explain yourself better).
People are complex and most people not helping are more centrist or populist, not on some extreme. You can find examples at all extremes of people who help the down and out in significant ways, and others who are doing things that (either directly or indirectly) harm the down and out.
Yes, didn't they do just that and cause the recent opioid epidemic with prescriptions? (I know it wasn't Heroin)
This could have been prevented by Prescribing to addicts while being more selective about new patients.
This is the opposite to the policy in most councils in the UK, which generally only offer temporary shelter and only with preconditions. The Finnish housing-first policy was implemented as UK-style policies were failing, as they are failing now in the UK.
> However, the number of people begging on the streets is still rising sharply, so I don't think it is the silver bullet everyone thinks it is.
A Housing-first policy has only been trialled by ~15 councils in the UK, and it has been shown to work in all of them. It's much more expensive that the UK's traditional shelter approach, which is partly why it's not national policy.
Your choice of words makes me wonder whether you would agree that an addict who sleeps in an apartment is better off than an addict who freezes their ass off in an alley at night.
Maybe solving for housing first is a way to eliminate some of the suffering in the world. By demanding that their life “is in order” before providing housing, I think we are demanding the impossible from someone who clearly is not capable of making perfect choices.
That being the case, the value-added of free housing appears marginal compared to the cost. It would best target those who are a) chronically homeless, but b) neither addicted or mentally unfit to be employed, which sounds like a vanishingly small demographic. Mind you I take "effective" and desired outcome here to mean that they won't continue to roam out in the streets, either to be close to dealers or from being mentally unwell.
States with lower housing costs do appear to have lower homelessness rates.
Zoning and regulatory reform spurs more building including smaller, dense units, which lowers prices. There's a fantasy among leftists that developers are snubbing mixed-density and dense mid-rises because condos pay more. No one leaves money on the table. Everything is built on credit, and banks deem these builds riskier in large part owing to the impact of zoning and regs. Condos have a lot of overhead, which checks a lot of boxes, while this would be unaffordable for other units. They also ignore that there are small developers in cities that try to compete, but can't get loans, because of these regulations.
That's probably true, but the ability to do it strongly depends (I'm thinking US centric here) on keeping the borders closed to illegal immigration. The last thing you want is a flood of people coming for the free/cheap housing. BTW I believe the US currently has a housing shortage, particularly at the lower end of the market.
Because those people need a place to live and they don't bring a home with them. It's added stress on the market. I will also be costly for any program that subsidizes housing in any way.
I feel like the cognitive dissonance between the above line of thought and the social expectation to demonstrate "kindness", "generosity", "compassion" is at the root of many people's rejection of an universal social safety net. Can't let themselves realize that a homeless beggar on crack might not only be just as human, but in some ways even a more genuine human being than your garden-variety obedient nine-to-fiver with a bullshit job and toxic family in 4 kinds of debt to cokehead bankerbros.
Unfortunately, not getting one's fundamental assumptions challenged is very often a much more powerful motivator than any desire to actually reduce the actual suffering of actual beings.
Many people can accept that someone is so incapable of making the right decisions that left on their own they might die. That since they're a danger to themselves and others, the state has to step in and take care of them.
The issue is that many of these people then turn around and argue that these people are capable of making their own decisions. Housing first in the U.S. gives these people apartment with no conditions attached. In a lot of cases, the people, since they are "clearly not capable of making Right Choices," make life hell for the other residents of the building, and usually aren't able to escape their problems.
There's a similar disconnect when people say "the shelters are extremely dangerous places, of course homeless people won't stay there" and then turn around and say "how could anyone think that putting a homeless person near them could increase their danger." Apparently, the homeless are the only ones who are allowed to consider the danger of being around homeless people.
Empathy is great. It would be nice if homeless advocates occasionally had empathy for other citizens as well.
Do you believe that what I noncoincidentally capitalize as "Right Choices" are actual right choices in some absolute, or at least universally shared, or at least non-self-contradictory frame of reference? I see them more like unilaterally mandated moves in some arbitrary social game that we all have, voluntarily or not, been recruited into (and which persists not in spite of, but because it is fundamentally nonsensical).
Of course, my viewpoint is incorrigibly biased by having witnessed manifestations of empathy significantly more often among the "dregs of society" than in what one would call "polite company".
Anyway, empathy is only the first step. Effecting systemic change takes significantly more right thought and right action than is generally permitted. And those aren't really things one can delegate. (I've found the lack of those things among the "down and out" vs. the "better off" to be about equal, the comparison I was making was along another axis.)
In other words, if the social safety net that you have experienced leads to the outcomes you describe, that means it's a bad implementation of a social safety net - not that we shouldn't have an actual one. Outside of Kafka, people don't just randomly wake up one day to find out they've somehow transformed into helpless monsters. It's a gradual process, and there are people at every step of the way, who are making the choice to allow others to slide into poverty and insanity, for the sake of not disrupting some comfort zone which may not even be particularly comfortable.
The Golden Rule is an ages-old part of this conversation because it helps people confront this common bias. Imagine your situations are reversed, how would you want things done? Do that.
* Good at a first approximation for directing your own agency (conscientious effort definitely improves chances of success, there are few reasons not to engage it other than "your ladder is on the wrong wall" situations).
* Much poorer as a general model of the world, especially one that should be socialized.
It does not mean that your assessment of others' situations is wrong, it may mean your assessment of your situation is wrong (and your assessment that others made bad choices is right).
Otherwise, the Golden Rule is great, except for FAE being a good example of how it isn't particularly applicable in practice.
I don't care whether the guy who smells like piss and lies beside the supermarket door has earned a room. I would, however, like him to use the shower and laundry attached to the building. If he isn't doing those things even though he has a home now, then we're down to altruism rather than altruism + self-interest.
Nice closing joke, though, got a laugh out of me!
There is a lot of money to be made putting on raggedly clothing and standing on a street corner with a sign. Some of the people doing that really are in a bad place unable to support themselves any other way, but many of them are normal people with normal houses who have decided to make begging their job. (I was going to write full time job, but in a good location they are working part time and pulling in a full time income).
I support someone busking on the street. I'm paying for the entertainment value there, if they provide me a smile or other enjoyment that is worth some money.
For those who are in trouble I donate to local shelters which take care of people who need help and also have people who can determine if help other than shelter is needed. I'm not against someone in need begging on the streets, but if you could support yourself with a "normal job" then you are scamming me by begging. Local shelters are an easy work around for that. While there are also scams in the shelters, they get audited once in a while.
"Provide shelter" here does not mean a shelter in the UK sense. In Finland, the "Housing First" approach means giving them a private flat.
The silver bullet for what? Stop letting people die of cold in the street while there are plenty of empty building out there?
I live in France and here we happily let kids which are attending school go sleep in a tent for the whole winter, more than 2000 according to the (probably minoring) official stats. Meanwhile we have MILLIONS of empty shelters.
Kudo Finland and all countries that won’t let whatever fear and bullshit metrics make look elsewhere when political decisions lead to unbearable human conditions.
https://www.publicsenat.fr/actualites/societe/2043-enfants-a...
https://www.federationsolidarite.org/wp-content/uploads/2024...
https://www.ecoreseau.fr/expressions/tribune-libre/la-traged...
https://www.statistiques.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/editi...
When it gets cold, the homeless congregate in the warm interiors of malls. The guards on duty won’t let them sleep there, but they prefer it over being out in the cold.
I think it can help a lot under the right circumstances, but if the system is already overwhelmed then funding less permanent solutions for a while may actually be more effective and kind
1. We'd need to pay 5k get a price estimate for all of the permits we would need, and
2. That we would need to either pave a road along the property (which would immediately fall apart from erosion since it would be the only paved road for multiple blocks), or pay $400k for the right to not pave the road
At that point, we stopped even trying. There's no way to build affordable housing in a timeline manner in that city.
I remember reading an article in Portland that the city was expecting N new people to move there in the next 10 years. So they approved construction of housing for N-200k people.
They intentionally set things up to push the poorest and most vulnerable 200k people into homelessness.
There are no preconditions, but there are conditions to maintain. In this case, rent being required apparently. This is the recipe for success that I've seen. And if they don't maintain the conditions they get kicked out with the opportunity to come back and try again.
It does lack the climate which might appeal to border-crossers, however, unlike, say, Southern California which has a long-standing homeless situation.
Other countries do not have this policy
2 positives https://www.urlvoid.com/scan/thebetter.news/
3 positives https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/755f26bd9ebff3179dab3ed68...
https://trafficlight.bitdefender.com/info/?url=http://thebet...
> Of the large cities, Helsinki is the only one where homelessness has systematically decreased in the past five years. In other large cities, the pattern has been more irregular (Figures 4 and 5). The reduction in homelessness in Helsinki covers more than half of the reduction in homelessness in the whole country.
Also worth noting from that report is that it has data going back to 1986 in an appendix (page 25) and the downward trend in homelessness dates back at least that far. The homeless rate had already cut in more than half by 2008 when this program started.
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.
That's one part of the solution; whether it works is left as an exercise to the reader ..
Wow, now that is something I have not heard at all despite how frequently I've heard about the Finland housing first approach to drug addiction/homelessness. Thank you for the reading topic!
EDIT: Where did you get these numbers and what kind of detention do they refer to? I am not finding this 214/100k number anywhere. The prisoner population in Finland seems to be about 50/100k and the pre-trial detention rate is similar (unlike where I live where pre-trial accounts for 80% of detainees due to slow courts)
EDIT 2: Nevermind, I did find psychiatric holds, which I see to be reported as 150/100k which is certainly much much higher than other countries.
If you're concerned about abuses of this kind of arrangement, look for example to the Soviet Union, where a person who was against the government was of course mentally ill and put away – because how can you be against the wonderful government?
Okay, but this thread is about homeless housing.
I have known a few paranoid schizophrenic people in my life. They needed help, but refused all attempts to get it to them. One eventually did get help - but only because he committed a felony and his condition was obvious enough that the court forced an insanity plea on him.
While the above sounds awful, it could be worse. The US used to have a lot of institutions and force people into them all the time. Abuse was common - it is debatable if freezing to death on the streets is worse than the institutions of old - most homeless don't freeze to death (though it happens). The right answer is reform the institutions, but I don't know how you do that.
Homeless who are mentally ill -> Forcefully put into institutions
Homeless who are drug addicts -> Forcefully put into institutions
Homeless who are criminals -> Forcefully put into jail or prison
How many homeless do you have left after that? The majority of homeless people in any place in the world has one or more of the above problems. Why would anybody be homeless if they didn't? Except for a short time during a crisis.
Like in the US, "homelessness" as in "poor or unlucky people who find themselves without a residence" is practically a nonexistent problem. The real problem is the mentally ill or drug addicted people frankly being a public nuisance.
Finland has tried to sell their strategy as one of providing housing, but that masks the actual reality. Finland is engaging in large-scale involuntary confinement of mentally ill individuals, and that is responsible for the entirety of their solution.
The current Finnish mental health regime was enabled by a law passed in 1990. Since that point, given the 5.6M population times the 214/100,000 rate [3], we get a total of ~12,000 people committed. The graph in the linked article [4] shows a reduction in homelessness from about 17,000 to about 4,000, a reduction of approximately 13,000 people.
So all but a tiny fraction of the homeless population was not miraculously housed; they were put involuntarily into mental hospitals. While I hope that Finnish mental health facilities are humane and the inmates are well cared for, historically this has almost never been the case -- other agencies claim credit for reducing homelessness and eventually funding dries up and the conditions worsen in the facilities because the problem doesn't seem urgent.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42656711
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42683898
[3] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychiatric-bulletin...
[4] https://oecdecoscope.blog/2021/12/13/finlands-zero-homeless-...
All the while the simple reality remains that at no point has there ever actually been enough homes for everyone who needs one, and in fact, despite whatever homes have been built in the last decade, the city experienced a net loss of affordable housing in total, and the net amount of people experiencing homelessness has only increased.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here watching this because I don't understand how anyone expects anyone to get any traction whatsoever on resolving more difficult personal problems like drug use disorders or mental health when they don't actually have anywhere to live.
Whether it's "housing first" or "housing last" the insane thing that I see in Vancouver is that it seems to be neither!
Solving a big complex problem you gotta start with a good foundation here and the basics. Ok step one: ensure you actually have housing for literally everyone in your society. Ok if you've done that now work on the more challenging complex stuff.
A) number of homeless today vs 10 years ago
B) waiting time for one of these apartments
c) acceptance and integration of these people in the local community
1. Finish high school.
2. Get (and keep) a full-time job once you finish school.
3. Get married before you have children (if you have children).
Their analysis concluded that 97% of millennials in the US who follow this three step sequence are not poor by the time they reach 31 or so.
There isn't anything specific in that sequence about drugs, but I imagine the subgroups for whom drug use would be problematic would also find it hard to follow that sequence while using them.
[1]: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IFS-Millennia...
It's like saying "we finally found the success sequence for breaking into upper middle class in three easy steps: 1) get a high paying job, 2) get raises every year matching or exceeding inflation , 3) avoid layoffs". Or the good old-fashioned advice for becoming rich: "buy low, sell high".
These are all 100% true, but also 100% useless.
If you're looking for a policy angle, I'd suggest one more conducive to providing more housing and stable incomes.
Even if there was a correlation, why do you assume there is a causation?
But it sounds to me like, for you, the unfettered freedom to use recreational drugs is an inherent good, and that you don't think it should be discouraged even if can be shown to lead to increased homelessness.
The straw person you've now added fills a similar function. You're clearly in search of rhetorical positions that lets you keep repeating yourself without taking the risk of participating in rational discourse.
How common is it that wealthy people become homeless because they recreationally consume wine? Is the prevalence the same as for other groups?
80% of people get out of homelessness on their own, seems like basically the same rate. How are they certain the initiative had any bearing on the long-term outcome? That's the part I'm not understanding. It doesn't seem to suggest it leads to a difference in rates.
That photo doesn't look like it would beat a small apartment to me.
>The policy applied in Finland is called “HousingFirst”. It reverses conventional homeless aid. More commonly, those affected are expected to look for a job and free themselves from their psychological problems or addictions.
That quote seems to me to say that people are given housing without a sobriety requirement.
The combination of these two factors leads some to self-assess that they're better off on the street.
(Billionaires have a MILLION dollars per MONTH of income, PER MONTH FOR LIFE)
yet people around here sleeping in the woods and cemeteries
exponentially more sleeping in their cars thinking it will only be for a few weeks (turns into years real quick)
But apart from that it is "competitive"...
Flip side is that the US are much richer so could afford to have much more then they have now.
I haven't seen this at all. Europe is generally seen as our closest ally.
Must still be asleep on the West coast… Rise and grind, my dude!
In other news, giving thirsty people drinks reduces the amount of thirsty people.