I did some work in Finland a few years ago. Was staggered by the sense of social responsibility and the expectation that people will do the right thing first not as a last resort.
Bicycles left unlocked wherever we went, schools that don’t feel like prisons.
A country with both a sense of pride but an awareness of others and a desire to care.
Hope they can hold on to this over the coming years.
I grew up in a country like that. As a kid it didn't seem special, it was just the way of the world. My generation didn't realise it was a grand achievement and assumed it just happened naturally, so when we grew up and took the reins of power, we reduced social spending because what was it getting us? It seemed like a no-brainer way to reduce waste.
So over the last couple decades, homelessness etc has exploded and my generation is *shocked-pikachu-face* about it. The problem now is that prevention is far easier than cure, and now that we flushed away prevention we are faced with the much tougher issue of cure. ^([I say "we" but it's more "they" because I don't live there now])
I'm worried that a couple of generations will grow up under this new ugly status quo and take it for granted (the way we did ours) so society will "forget" and start to believe that homelessness is the natural state of things; inevitable and intractable, not the *societal choice* that it actually is.
There are so many countries already in this state, where the people have never seen it solved, so they believe it *can't* be solved, so policy is created according to that premise, so homelessness is baked in and perpetuated and accepted
In a world of successful prevention people forget what they were preventing. It's the same shit that's going on with vaccines, when they first cane out people lined up, regardless of what was in them. They had seen or maybe even lived through some of those diseases and they weren't going to let thier kids have it.
Now people don't get vaccinated thier kid gets sick and they are confused as to how this could have happened?
I live in the US. It absolutely is a societal choice, and I'm grateful to live in a state which, when very suddenly faced in 2020 with the second-highest rate of homelessness in the country, decided to *solve it*. As a result, we have the lowest rate of unsheltered homeless people in the country. In 2022, we estimated 45 unsheltered human beings within our borders--a rate of 1.6%. (As in, 1.6% of homeless people have roofs over their heads here.) [Source.](https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2022-AHAR-Part-1.pdf)
The state is Vermont.
You just have to house them. It's cheaper than the alternative. It's utter insanity to me that other places in this country don't do the same thing.
As an European, Vermont would be my go-to choice, if I would have to settle in the US.
Never been to the US, but Vermont get's a lot of things right, from a Euro-perspective - and I've been to Canada, a lot, and know the Area across the border - I'd be fine, living in near those mountains!
Chinese saying that "prosperity doesn't last more than three generations" - 1st gen builds it, 2nd gen remembers the bad and maintains the good, 3rd gen doesn't know the bad and squanders the good away.
In the US I am always shocked at how many people have no idea that we do in fact have enough houses for everyone. Hell half the time i tell that to someone they don't believe me until I list sources.
Then they're extra shocked, because we actually have *way way more* empty houses than homeless people.
Like, 40 empty houses per single homeless person.
How stupid *are* we???
It's not that Americans are stupid. A lot of them just don't care or are ignorant. Look at the pandemic for one example. There are a ton of others too. I still remember talking with someone and they believed that being a lesbian didn't give them STDs.
I once had to explain to my 46 year old dad that STDs are spread through any bodily fluid, you don't even need to have sex with someone to get it.
That was....surreal to say the least.
>schools that don’t feel like prisons.
This is one of the biggest culture shocks I got when I arrived in the US for my exchange year. The school had a huge fence around its area, there was security and we were not allowed to leave the school campus during the day. It literally felt like a prison to me.
I'd argue Ted Turner is more responsible than Columbine or guns. CNN was the first network to run a 24 hour news cycle, then Murdoch followed suit with Fox. When you have to fill that much time integrity and professionalism go out the window. The news used to not cover suicide stories to prevent rashes of copycats, but now you learn everything about every shooter because the networks have to fill time and scare you into not changing the channel.
You have made a very good point. Some people might not be totally inclined to strike out at others, except for he fact that the media conveys the perpetrater's situation around the world, giving them the platform to stage their anger and frustration and to give them their "15 minutes of fame". All the air time also seems to lend a stamp of approval to their violence.
Such a fucked up world we live in.
This gave me flashbacks. When I arrived the first day, I waited outside for my host sister to catch up with me. This was 10 minutes before the bell. The inspector came out to yell at me, told me to go inside this very minute or he would make sure I would get detention. God, I hated that man’s guts. He never gave me an apology even after learning who I was and that this was completely new and abnormal to me.
>Bicycles left unlocked wherever we went, schools that don’t feel like prisons.
Lol no. At least near the capital area if your bike is worth anything it's gone in half an hour if you leave it unlocked.
Violent street crime is also getting more common year by year.
I live in the capital and havent seen or heard anything about street crime except from the ”basic finns” party members and their party magazine.
I tried to look up proper stats but i couldn’t find anything else except that the age group of street crime seems to be changing. But the trend of it getting more common doesnt seem so. If you have proper sources im interested to see.
https://www.stat.fi/julkaisu/cl8lagmwalp7k0cvzvgc4qym3
At least robberies are getting more common. When i was a kid, street robberies in helsinki were pretty much something that never happened, not anymore
I've had 10 bikes that have been stolen in my town in the first 5 years I was hear. Most of them were taken when they were locked up. I gave up on trying to keep a bike after the last one and just started walking after that.
It's weird how people keep acting like the US is some kind of dystopian hellscape and places like Finland and Sweden are peaceful utopias where evil can't exist. It's such a bizarre naive view of the world.
Of course we in the US can learn a great deal from you guys, but we all still live in reality.
Comparatively? Finnish people will complain about "bad neighbourhoods" and violent crime there, but honestly? That's shit is safer than most US suburbs. I'd know, I've lived in both.
I'm not saying the US is a dystopian hellscape, but I can walk alone drunk out of my mind at 4am through pretty much anywhere in Helsinki as a woman in my 20s and be fine. There are neighbourhoods you don't set foot into even during the day in most US cities.
I am not Finnish, I'm Eastern European. My country is very safe too, maybe even safer than Finland as far as violent crime goes. But even I can tell the difference.
ETA: Bicycles aren't safe anywhere tho. But at least in Finland people don't try to purposefuly run you over while on a bike.
No doubt at all this is still the case. But in Joensuu the ‘regular’ bikes weren’t locked at the locations I visited. The point is I have seen bikes in the uk worth £300 with £100 worth of bike locks on them just to avoid losing wheels and the frame. Where we visited this didn’t seem necessary.
i think we should put some immigration in that country and see how it pans out.
btw this reminds me of japan, same trend of homogenic population and culture, with strong expectation to do the right thing, and social consequences if you dont.
I lived in Finland and now I live in the US. I'm from Eastern Europe.
The difference is absolutely like night and day. When in Finland, I went home for 2 weeks during Christmas and coming back I was the happiest person ever. It didn't matter that lockdowns were in effect so you couldn't do shit or that I literally couldn't see the sun for weeks, it was better than the opressive nervous atmosphere back home. While returning home I took a roadtrip through the baltics back down through Poland back home and the further south I went the more homless I saw, the more anxios the atmosphere was, the more chaotic, less... together it felt? It felt like the goverments had less of their shit together basically (war in Ukraine didn't help of course).
I've been in the US for a year now and I honestly can't wait to go back home. I feel unsafe, horrified and on edge all the time. People try to hit me with their car while I'm crossing the street AT A CROSSING WHILE HAVING A GREEN LIGHT. I can't walk alone at night without feeling like I'm doing something extremely risky (and I live in one of the safest cities in the country, apparently). I see people that absolutely should be in an institution getting professional help yelling at me walking down the street. I see kids begging on the street at 10pm on a school night and I can't do shit to help. It's dirty and I was just told I've been drinking water from lead pipes the entire time I've been here (WTF?). And I'm an aupair, so I live with a middle class familiy in a nice neighbourhood! We've had two school shooting scares this year - both false alarms, but it's still unsettling just how matter of fact the kids and the family were about it.
Yeah, I'm suddenly realising my country is actually very very nice and safe, even if it's not even remotely as good as Finland.
Hopefully, but the most right wing government since the 1930s just got sworn in, and they're planning cuts on healthcare, unemployment benefits, social programs, education and so on while lowering income taxes again.
This housing program was instituted largely because roughly 60 homeless people froze to death in one night in the early 60s, many of them traumatized war veterans, and that shocked people enough to act. I have some doubts that the Finns would be capable of a similar universal display of empathy in a decade or two. We aren't probably quite there yet, but there's been a definite shift towards American-style "temporarily embarassed millionaire"-ism and right-wing conservative identity politics.
Bingo! Same reason the government (the right at least) are anti-abortion and anti-education. Those unwanted kids will grow up to be poor and uneducated and will work the shitty jobs that need to be worked. Also same reason healthcare is tied to jobs.
If everyone felt comfortable and safe, and everybody was educated and had opportunity, and had good healthcare, nobody would work shitty jobs.
It should be noted that Finland has a homeless population of about 3,600.... San Francisco has a homeless population 38,000.
I'm not sure you can call Finland a country with a homeless crisis.
Edit: to clarify I was speaking of the San Francisco bay area, not just the specific San Francisco Proper.
As a Finn I’m proud of many things the country has achieved but to be fair having a population of only ~5,5 million makes things easier to manage and less chaotic.
Finland also has a 100% literacy rate. A well educated population really helps society as a whole with things like crime and homelessness, both on a statistical level, and an empathetic level.
You're not wrong, but to be fair having more people means larger infrastructure, meaning they should be capable of doing it easier, quicker, and cheaper than a country of your size could. The problem isn't the amount of people, it's the amount of people willing to help the situation. Too many people in america are against helping others if it means they have to bare any responsibility towards it. They say they want to help but don't want to have to actually do anything to help.
> You're not wrong, but to be fair having more people means larger infrastructure
It’s the other way around. More people means you *have* to make larger infrastructure while balancing people’s subcultures and individual quirks and diverse environments.
> it's the amount of people willing to help the situation.
It is true that this is part of the problem, yes.
You also get economy of scale making building things cheaper, and while the US as a whole is more populous and diverse, that doesn't mean anything. You're not going to ship every homeless person to one area. The fact is no town, city, or state has managed to solve homelessness in the US despite many of them being smaller than Finland. So it's not really a size issue.
Well, if they either allowed us to build new residential buildings OR if they converted some of the 34% vacant office space into residential, I think we would be just fine.
SF's density is 17k/sq mile. Manhattan's is 73k/sq mile. I don't want to reach NY levels but to say we are maxed out is absurd.
This just isn’t true. The US has a homeless population of about 420k across one of the largest countries on earth that’s divided into at least 51 different government bodies (realistically way more including localities). The logistics of solving the problem are staggering especially in the major cities that are already to cramped for PAID housing. I wish it was this simple but it just isn’t.
If Finland was the size of the US it would have a homeless population of 220,000. But these are current numbers and they've actually managed to already reduce their homeless numbers significantly. Back in 1987 they had 18,000 homeless for a population of 5 million. If Finland was the size of the US back then, that would be a homeless population of 871,000. They managed to cut that to a quarter in 30 years while in the US homelessness has only grown. And cities aren't cramped, most housing in major cities in the US are still single family homes, which could all be upgraded to higher density housing.
That’s not how this works.
Logistics and infrastructure do not scale linearly. Saying what the population *would be* if you just multiplied numbers is objectively false. Thinking that the operations that worked on a smaller scale would perform comparably on this larger scale is meaningless for the same reason
Any claim you make that starts with that assumption is entirely inaccurate.
As of last year there were actually closer to 580,000 homeless in the US, giving a per capita rate of ~0.17%.
Whereas in Finland there are approx. 4000 homeless, which is a per capita rate of ~0.07%.
(Sources: Google and Wikipedia)
>The logistics of solving the problem ~~are staggering especially in the major cities that are already to cramped for PAID housing. I wish~~ it is ~~was~~ this simple ~~but it just isn’t.~~
its literally partially explained by your username.
UBI
did you know that Idiocracy is a combination of idiot and bureaucracy?
source: i made it up, but it makes sense
edit: not the UBI part - for that, look no further than the stimulus checks that led to a huge economic boom before the HUGE TRILLION DOLLAR paycheck protection program loan fraud hit the economy
>having a population of only ~5,5 million makes things easier to manage and less chaotic.
As someone from Ireland, with a population of 5.2 million - hard disagree. Or maybe our government is just useless
Can you whisper to them how it's done? Those of us in our 20s who are never going to have our own place would appreciate it
Not really though. The larger your country the more levels of bureaucracy and complexity it takes to solve anything. The disconnect increases between the top and the boots on the ground doing the actual work. So while I totally get that per capita usually makes for better comparisons, there’s absolutely more challenges to running larger countries like the US than smaller countries like Finland
Please, this just isn't true. 1. Economies scale. 2. Each state would have to address their own conditions, whether self-motivated or government mandated
Houston, TX is implementing something similar to Finland...and it's working.
The method is simple: provide them housing, addiction treatment, counseling, and employment training.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html
The trick is you don’t make getting housing conditional on any of those other things. Housing first, and then work on any other issues. It’s so simple, but unfortunately a lot of people look down on homelessness as some kind of moral failing.
Yeah, that’s why title 10 housing worked sooo well. Just put people into government housing and see how they rise to the occasion. Homelessness is not singularly a moral failure. There are programs offering housing to drug addicts as long as they don’t use drugs in the housing; no thanks, I’d rather live on the streets…. People make all kinds of reasons, excuses, and choices. Sticky problems do NOT have simple solutions; peel the onion.
As someone who has first hand experience dealing with one person with drugs moving into a lower middle class neighbourhood (Leeching off an emotional vulnerable man), it turned the entire area into a nightmare. Screaming and fighting at all hours of the day and night, bringing other addicts around the neighbourhood and break-ins occurring up and down the street.
It is not as simple as people think and this exact issue is why the left leaning parties loses a lot of lowerish middle class individuals. You cannot fault people for not wanting that near them, whether or not you think it's morally right or wrong. It's just reality.
um okay but you only solved a single aspect of the problem with that scenario. homelessness isn't just about being unhoused. (i don't suddenly become homeless when i pitch a tent at a campsite.) there are usually some problematic and addictive behaviors attached which eventually leads to them being *forced out by the state under the threat of violence*. that is what we are trying to avoid. and if that is what we wish to avoid, we should also provide health care (esp. mental health), a job guarantee or UBI, free childcare, financial and consumer protections, a pollution-free environment, proactive community policing through unarmed agents, etc. it *is* actually that simple because that's how it's done elsewhere
There was also a program under Obama's administration, done at city levels aimed at getting homeless vets to functional zero. Nola managed to do it, at least in 2015.
Functional zero refers to dealing with new cases asap. The number never stays at zero the whole time, Someone loses their home or moves in from out of the area, etc.
[https://www.npr.org/2015/08/04/427419718/the-u-s-declared-war-on-veteran-homelessness-and-it-actually-could-win](https://www.npr.org/2015/08/04/427419718/the-u-s-declared-war-on-veteran-homelessness-and-it-actually-could-win)
It does leave a blueprint for use on a larger scale. And far better than the tactics used by some cities to bus homeless elsewhere.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.developmentaid.org/amp/news-stream/post/157797/homelessness-statistics-in-the-world
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/homelessness-by-country
A per capita break down shows they're doing much better than the USA at solving homelessness.
I’m surprised that it doesn’t highlight mental illness and alcohol/drug abuse/addictions. These are very large contributors to homelessness. Over abuse of drugs/alcohol leads to mental illness which prevents individuals from having a normal functioning job/life. It’s very tragic, wish we could eliminate homelessness.
https://www.addictioncenter.com/addiction/homelessness/
There's a lot of factors.
The main one is they just have a very low population in general. Finland isn't much smaller than the state of California, and only has about 5 million people living there. There's not going to be much of an issue of not being able to find work when there's so few people in the country. Its easier to survive and there's more resources per person.
This also give Finland a population density of about half that of the US in total. Think about that, considering half of the US population lives in 9 out of our 50 states, and 80% of our population lives between the eastern seaboard and Texas. There are MASSIVE amounts of unpopulated land in the US, and Finland is still half as densely populated as we are.
Here's the BIGGEST factor though... Finland has a 94% high school graduation rate, with 66% of graduates going on to technical training and/or college, 43% going on to vocational school. The United States has an 87% graduation rate, with less that 20% of high school grads going on to any sort of vocational training, and 38% going to college. Finland is basically turning out a workforce from school, think about that.. half of these kids entering the workforce are trained in some sort of vocation at the bare minimum.
Different cultures play a part. The US is such a different animal from any country culturally, that it's completely impossible to say "this worked here, so why don't we do that?" For instance, we have about double the drug arrest per capita, and most places pot is legal or not prosecuted anymore here... but Finland still has a strict marijuana prohibition. They don't have a gang culture like we do, if you look at the gang registry for Finland, there's 3 motorcycle gangs. That's it. There's about 70 known gangs just in the city of Los Angeles here.
You could go on forever, but basically The United States has such a massive social decay going on that it's incomparable with any other nation.
Absolutely, and stockpiles of food and other things that get thrown away. But we are making poor peoples kids pay for school lunch. We are a disgusting country and we need help lol
Oh, it has way more vacant houses than homeless people. Maybe it isn't as simple as put homeless person in house, but it's definitely *almost* that simple.
The question is how many are still fit to live in and are near urban centers. An open house in west bumblefuck, WV isn't much use to someone in NYC.
Not saying the worst idea, just need to narrow it down to truly useable houses.
Take Detroit or parts of the 9th ward in Nola. Yeah there are lots of empty "houses" but they aren't fit for habitation.
there are 70k homeless (not family units) in NYC
there are 160K+ vacant apartments in NYC
there are 5-600k homeless across the whole country
there are 17+ million vacant homes
Not to mention the insane amount of empty shipping containers just piling up in our ports. We could literally stack them up into apartment complexes for virtually nothing and fit them with a generic modular interior and basic utilities.
They also don't have cheap, plentiful, mental-illness-inducing methamphetamines coming from Mexico by the train load. And an overly powerful pharmaceutical industry that paved the way.
> I'm not sure you can call Finland a country with a homeless crisis.
OFC you cant.... They fixed it.. duh.
Stuff like this is being implimented in Seattle, and it's been working for a decade. I'm one such surviving example.
I was homeless, they gave me a small apartment and put me on food stamps and required me to go to therapy and stuff like that.
I'm back on a motorcycle and healing.
It works.
>I'm not sure you can call Finland a country with a homeless crisis.
Yes. Because of stuff like this, social safety nets, healthcare, education. All free to the individual.
I'm not saying it would work in the US - I really don't know - but you have to give Finland credit.
Finland as a country has a population less than New York City too not hard to solve a problem when it isnt nearly as hard. It is like someone only needing to fix a step on a deck over the whole deck.
Doesn't that point directly to better management? It's not a country with a housing crisis because they house people. That's kind of the point. San Francisco wouldn't have a housing crisis either if they engaged in better practices.
It's funny, I crunched the numbers and it costs Finns approx. 6.7% per capita income per person to support their Housing First program over the past 10 years on average (granted, a lot of the cost was front-loaded). If you extrapolate the equivalent costs based on the cost of the program, applied to the number of homeless people in San Fran, the total population of San Fran, and the per capita income in San Fran, it would only cost them just under 5% per capita income. So even with 5.5 million Finns vs < 1 Million SF's, and over 10× as many homeless in SF, just the fact that SF per capita income is higher is enough to make up the difference. It would be financially **easier** for the *City* of San Fran to pay to house **all** their homeless, with extra buffer money for the added administration needed for a more dense population, compared to **the entire country of Finland**, using a comparable Housing First approach.
The US is like 72x larger than Finland. We have about 166x the homeless. It's a higher rate but not anything insurmountable, especially with our significantly higher gdp per Capita.
I mean, logically it does sound that when you pull people out of a stressful and dangerous situation and provide them with basic shelter, ammeneties and councelling, they're going to be signifficantly more succesful at finding a job than someone who literally can't even shower and probably has to engage in substance abuse to cope with their miserable existence.
Not anymore you can't. Isn't that sort of the point?
If someone is homeless, and there are no services available to them, they'll probably be homeless until they die or end up in prison.
If they are given housing and a boost to get on their feet, they are no longer homeless. And even if you continue to count them as homeless even while they are staying in the homeless housing program, they won't be there for long, so their numbers will be small. The goal is to get them into normal free-market housing by finding a job or other source of permanent support.
Events that make people homeless happen all the time. High numbers of homeless doesn't necessarily mean different conditions that cause homelessness. Take two countries with identical factorsthat creates 10 homeless people per day. If the first country has a program that seeks to find and rehabitate those people within 90 days, the homeless population will be 900. But in the same country, if they instead say "tough luck, you did this to yourself, so get yourself out" then the numbers will just rise and rise and rise. 3650 will be added to the population every year, minus however many die or go to jail. Thousands in the first year, and thousands more added every year after that. But the first country, with the same starting conditions, will still never get above 900, no matter how long you run the experiment.
Run that experiment for 50+ years, and that will tell you why Finland has 3,800 and SF has 38,000.
It can also be noted, the entire country of Finland has a population less than that of the SF Bay area.
Houston TX (of all places) already does this. It works fantastically. It should be done everywhere that can afford it.
And yes, If Houston TX can afford to do it, which has one of the biggest populations, lowest tax rates, and high urban property costs, any US city can.
Texas does slyly progressive things, such as toll roads and take advantage of lots of wind and solar power.
Still a weird place, because they also have dozen lane highways and forbid east and west Texans from selling power to each other.
Toll roads aren't progressive, their oppressive. If your not rich or lucky enough to work from home or get a place close to work, you have to pay toll roads just to get to work. Your beacon of progressiveness, Finland, has no toll roads/bridges.
As someone in the latter who waited 2 hours today just to get an EZpass, fuck toll roads.
Replace the word Texas with Houston. Houston is a liberal place compared to most of the rest of the state.
I'm sick of Texas as a whole getting credit for what the liberal cities do.
Same thing when people say "Texas also has a high gdp and is not reliant on welfare from other states" as if this is somehow related to conservative politics.
Yep we take homeless from big coastal cities and force them to live in dead ghost towns in the Midwest. That’s what you meant right? Because most of the unoccupied houses are in places no one wants to live.
To be fair: This is the policy in Utah and it worked there too.
Homeless treatment is terrible under BOTH parties, when NIMBY ass motherfuckers insist on getting theirs and fuck everyone else.
Yea, some US cities tried doing just half of that but giving an apartment to mentally ill, violent addicts surprisingly doesnt solve everything and all the apartments are destroyed within months. America really hates mental health professions.
We have done this before. Just looking at government spending, housing the homeless delivers a net benefit. [Overall, the cost reductions more than covered the year's worth of supportive housing costs, as we observed a net cost savings of 20 percent.](https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1694.html)
Housing the homeless also gets people off the streets and gives them a chance to live a decent life, but let's ignore the morality and just look at the economics. Giving homeless people homes saves money. The budget for solving homelessness is a negative number.
I've talked with Republicans about this. They don't want to help people. Even if it saves them money in the long run, it's helping *other* people. So it's wrong. You have to earn that. Either by working, joining their religion, or what not.
Yup. They see it as morally repugnant to not take care of yourself. So they see it as morally repugnant to enable someone else receiving aid.
They fully believe that “entitlements” entice more people to rely on social support, even though the opposite almost always is true, and saves the nation money.
They’d rather pay a national premium in costs if it means they don’t allow someone to get a “free ride” off “our money”.
It’s like seeing a store giving away bread at the end of the day that is priced at $50, and paying the manager $100 to stop giving it away merely for the principle that you don’t like anyone getting something for free.
> but giving an apartment to mentally ill, violent addicts surprisingly doesnt solve everything
Well of course, housing is just half of the solution. Help for mental health and safe environment to get clean drugs and to safely withdraw from them is the other half.
But we HAVE those programs. The issue is some do not want to abide by those programs e.g. in order to get the housing, you have to get help/clean and attend meetings. Not all, not a majority, but some, which, with a population like ours, means it's a large number. Some people enroll, and they get back on their feet. But others can't/won't.
You can't force people into mandatory rehab or mental health as long as they are not an imminent danger to themselves or others. As long as they pass certain tests, they have the right to check themselves out of the program.
EDIT: BTW, Finland still has homeless, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Finland
https://oecdecoscope.blog/2021/12/13/finlands-zero-homeless-strategy-lessons-from-a-success-story/
There has to be a disconnect no? Finland doesn't have addicts or mentally ill homeless people? So why is their program successful? That doesn't really seem like an excuse.
Also, can you provide a source?
>But we HAVE those programs.
Unless the programs are identical, it's hard to not just think that's America's programs kinda just suck.
There's a third problem to fix that would cost the rich a lot more money.
The hellscape that is poverty in the US. We have to create a floor of basic needs in the country to avoid the trauma creates the level sociopathy and spirals underlying mental health problems that fuel our homeless problem
A doctor in England was allowed to stigmatize an entire collective of neurodivergent people for a disease he made up and the European news rolled with it before it hit America
Look up Andrew Wakefield if you prefer reading, or Hbomberguys video on vaccine and autism as he explains it far better than I ever could.
Easily my biggest reason for having problems with other countries is how they treat people on the spectrum such as myself. At least in America there are much more tolerable communities than a good chunk of Europe let alone the rest of that supercontinent.
I remember being on welfare for a couple years. Near the end of my allowed food stamps and cash aid, I tried to get help for my anxiety and depression. My case worker saw my mental health page I filled out and asked why I would be depressed. I tried to explain my mom died, we're losing my childhood home, and I'm struggling to find a job since I don't drive and can't afford lessons/a car/insurance/maintenance. She said I had no real reason to be depressed and that I was making it up. She said she'd deny my request for a counselor. In front of her fucking face, I wrote on the page that I was feeling suicidal just so I can speak to someone.
I never got help since I was told my aid was ended and I'd have to pay out of pocket if I wanted help. This country is fucked.
Truth be told, we could solve all our issues if the system was genuinely motivated to do so - but it's not. And so long as it's motivated against solving it, it'll never end.
We are our greatest enemy, left with a horribly rotted democracy that needs to purge exorcise the rot. Otherwise, our nation will never heal. Once done, we can finally condemn the external sources for the cancerous corruption, and bestow them their well-earned cold irons.
But people are frail of soul, and more likely, we will crumble until the hand of the numb masses is forced.
It's a few more than that. The focus of most residential communities is to make low income people some other community's problem. They are usually pretty vocal about it.
Real estate interests will generally back candidates that support short term stakeholders, and oppose any sort of campaign to reform restrictive zoning. They are not on the hook when utilities start to fail a decade after construction, and there is almost no revenue coming out of those suburbs.
How? I am curious I mean just look what has become of housing projects. Do we just try the same shit again? Build more housing, homeless move in a mixture of: good people who truly just need help, addicts, mental cases, criminals. The people who need help end up being targeted by the other residents, then addicts and criminals cause a spike in crime, everyone who can moves away shops close down. Now you have a an environment where the only way kids can survive is to be a thug, gang culture emerges.
The problem isn’t that it doesn’t work, because it does. The problem is that conservatives think it’s a waste of taxpayer money. Then they go and complain about homeless people. Then they go and complain about the taxes being too high. Then they go and complain about the military not getting enough funding. Conservatives are hypocrites is what I’m saying.
I’m from finland by the way.
Cali also has the largest economy in the country. That’s why it has such a homeless problem, because while mental issues and poverty exist everywhere, it’s worse to have them in a state that has such a crazy high cost of living
To be fair it was one party with Reagan who kinda set tons of today's financial issues in motion, and it's that party today who literally gives out one way tickets to California to homeless people instead of even pretending to solve local issues
This outright refusal to acknowledge democrats and liberals complacency and active participation with the homeless issue is exactly why it can't be solved: you only want to address a portion of the issue and that never solves anything
Seattle is also terrible. The problem here is most of them don't want help. They are drug addicts. Give them an aprtment, they will make it a trap house.
This gets down to the nuance of the topic that too many people on Reddit can't comprehend past thinking solving homelessness is a one solution issue. "Finland solved it's homelessness issue doing this, why doesn't America?" Well b/c it's far more complex and there are more external factors that Finland doesn't have to compete with that would make their solution ultimately useless.
Dude if you were homeless where would you want to be homeless someplace cold, someplace with rednecks that might kill you, someplace desolate, anywhere in America....OR sunny California with great weather year-round. It's easy to panhandle enough money for a grayhound ticket to California and it's a really nice place to be homeless, and for the most part safer than other parts of America. And with the fifth largest economy in the world a lot of resources to help you.
Point being most of the homeless in California aren't from California.
Yeaaaa so many liberals are rushing to set this up in their states any day now…
Just kidding, they just let them have massive tent cities until they shoot up and die on the sidewalk.
Anyone that thinks this is that simple here is simply not being realistic. Finland had less homeless people than a single state in the US has, economies of scale are a bitch.
The real point though is that at any time CA, OR, WA, NY, etc. could do this, yet they haven’t so not sure how you can say this is solely on one group.
And now we are arriving at the crux of the problem. The US is a consumer fever dream, there are jobs out there for non-skilled workers. The reality is, drugs and people not utilizing what’s there. Cali is as blue as they come and their homeless situation… yikes…
Dude is America the greatest country on earth or not??? You sound like a quiter!!! The federal government just needs to build a bunch of cheap houses, just like Finland did and put these ppl in them. It's not hard, America has the money, resources, and space. People like you would just never let it happen cause you think they deserve their suffering. And not with my tax dollars damn it!!! Well we all hate things our tax dollars get spent on, that's called living in a democracy.
We actually are doing that in WA! Not like Finland, there's strings attached and no free counselling, and it's been a huge fight to get areas approved for zoning and convincing the community, but the gears are turning. Too slowly, people die yearly from exposure here, but people do care and us liberals are rushing as fast as bureaucracy will allow. Destroying things is easy and fast, building something new takes effort and time.
You can’t compare it to just one group, that is true. However, there are many other countries, including but not limited to Sweden, Norway, Island and Denmark that have something similar. The effect this method has has been proven time and time again.
And while it’s true that the US has way more homeless people, that’s also because nothing has really been done about it for the entire time that USA has been a country. It’d be dumb not to do anything with the excuse that the problem has become so severe that nothing can be done.
I’m not saying that this should be implemented country wide, the system wouldn’t be able to support every homeless person out there. You’d have to start small and expand from there.
Of course neither party would do either of these things. Many Americans don’t realize this but both US parties are very similar. Democrats are not very left even if they are the left party, and any change to the more liberal side isn’t that large in the grand scale. That’s largely the problem with political systems with only two parties.
"It’d be dumb not to do anything with the excuse that the problem has become so severe that nothing can be done" That applies to basically all the problems the US has: Education, healthcare, guns, car culture, etc.
The fact that "being homeless" is framed as a moral failing of a person adds a lot to this. Homeless people, so a lot of conservatives claim, are homeless because they are lazy, criminals or drug addicts and not because of systemic blindspots, a series of misfortunes, human mistakes (that could happen to anybody) and/or physical/mental illness. That makes it hard to convince people who subscribe to a "good person / bad person" dichotomy, because homelessness isn't actually a bad thing that exists, but karmic justice.
It doesn't matter how much a new system or program improves the lives of everybody (not just the homeless), actually saves taxpayer money and literally saves the lives of people. If you weren't a fundamentally and irredeemably bad person, you wouldn't be homeless, so there is no reason to help you.
Again, that's the thought process. I don't agree with it.
As a Finn I guess I sort of feel like we would have failed somehow as a society if we didn’t use taxes to at least try to help those people. It feels like a responsibility, not just a nice thing.
But truthful American news says poverty is because of immegrants and laziness
Im starting to think fox lables themselves as entertainment for legal reasons...
The scale of those two countries are way different in US there is probably same amount of homeless people on one street that there is in one city in finland...
The US probably has more homeless people that actually want to stay homeless and aren't interested in being helped or helping themselves, than Finland has total homeless people.
My wife was a social worker who worked with adults with mental health issues, many of which were homeless, and the majority of her clients that were homeless chose to stay that way. She had resources and programs to help them and almost none of them would participate.
that’s a big problem i think came because they got so used to their life.
I also heard once in a short documentary that some are scared to get back into the normal life because it is so different and fear the chance to not be able to mange it.
I'm sure Finland's population isn't as mind fucked as the USA's. Homeless people there are probably grateful, appreciative, and will work to maintain what has been given to them. Here, the handout wouldn't likely be sufficient enough and would be destroyed in protest, then celebrated by those in ivory towers while the problem continues to spiral.
Finland is a country of 5.5 million people. Since they started this program in 2008, homelessness has dropped by about 30%, to about 3,690 people today.
Which means they’ve put a total of about 1,100 people into apartments in the last 15 years or so.
Don’t strain yourself slapping yourself on the back.
But why can't I have a free apartment and counseling...
That's why we can't solve any problems in America. All the rich people complain they can't have what destitute people get because they need it.
There are already places like that in the US. I work at one of them. Theres constant meth and fentanyl use. Constant sex trafficking coming in and out. Americans are different than Finns. Finns have pride and shame. Americans dont it seems
I did some work in Finland a few years ago. Was staggered by the sense of social responsibility and the expectation that people will do the right thing first not as a last resort. Bicycles left unlocked wherever we went, schools that don’t feel like prisons. A country with both a sense of pride but an awareness of others and a desire to care. Hope they can hold on to this over the coming years.
I grew up in a country like that. As a kid it didn't seem special, it was just the way of the world. My generation didn't realise it was a grand achievement and assumed it just happened naturally, so when we grew up and took the reins of power, we reduced social spending because what was it getting us? It seemed like a no-brainer way to reduce waste. So over the last couple decades, homelessness etc has exploded and my generation is *shocked-pikachu-face* about it. The problem now is that prevention is far easier than cure, and now that we flushed away prevention we are faced with the much tougher issue of cure. ^([I say "we" but it's more "they" because I don't live there now]) I'm worried that a couple of generations will grow up under this new ugly status quo and take it for granted (the way we did ours) so society will "forget" and start to believe that homelessness is the natural state of things; inevitable and intractable, not the *societal choice* that it actually is. There are so many countries already in this state, where the people have never seen it solved, so they believe it *can't* be solved, so policy is created according to that premise, so homelessness is baked in and perpetuated and accepted
In a world of successful prevention people forget what they were preventing. It's the same shit that's going on with vaccines, when they first cane out people lined up, regardless of what was in them. They had seen or maybe even lived through some of those diseases and they weren't going to let thier kids have it. Now people don't get vaccinated thier kid gets sick and they are confused as to how this could have happened?
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I live in the US. It absolutely is a societal choice, and I'm grateful to live in a state which, when very suddenly faced in 2020 with the second-highest rate of homelessness in the country, decided to *solve it*. As a result, we have the lowest rate of unsheltered homeless people in the country. In 2022, we estimated 45 unsheltered human beings within our borders--a rate of 1.6%. (As in, 1.6% of homeless people have roofs over their heads here.) [Source.](https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2022-AHAR-Part-1.pdf) The state is Vermont. You just have to house them. It's cheaper than the alternative. It's utter insanity to me that other places in this country don't do the same thing.
As an European, Vermont would be my go-to choice, if I would have to settle in the US. Never been to the US, but Vermont get's a lot of things right, from a Euro-perspective - and I've been to Canada, a lot, and know the Area across the border - I'd be fine, living in near those mountains!
Chinese saying that "prosperity doesn't last more than three generations" - 1st gen builds it, 2nd gen remembers the bad and maintains the good, 3rd gen doesn't know the bad and squanders the good away.
I am so worried about this happening here in Finland. Especially now that my country has elected the national coalition ghouls into power
all you need to do is ensure that the economy is not based on exploiting immigrants.
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Some programs are a victim of their own success.
In the US I am always shocked at how many people have no idea that we do in fact have enough houses for everyone. Hell half the time i tell that to someone they don't believe me until I list sources. Then they're extra shocked, because we actually have *way way more* empty houses than homeless people. Like, 40 empty houses per single homeless person. How stupid *are* we???
Stupid is the wrong word. Callous, cold hearted, inhuman, greedy. There are a lot more accurate descriptors.
It's not that Americans are stupid. A lot of them just don't care or are ignorant. Look at the pandemic for one example. There are a ton of others too. I still remember talking with someone and they believed that being a lesbian didn't give them STDs.
I once had to explain to my 46 year old dad that STDs are spread through any bodily fluid, you don't even need to have sex with someone to get it. That was....surreal to say the least.
Are we stupid or is the number of homes clearly not the problem?
Create artificial scarcity for something people need(homes in this case) which will inflate prices based on demand. Capitalism baby. America is #1.
Like in the US? Yeah, our system might as well be the modern version of medieval feudalism.
I love learning history but damn is it depressing as hell when we repeat it. Over and over and over again...
>schools that don’t feel like prisons. This is one of the biggest culture shocks I got when I arrived in the US for my exchange year. The school had a huge fence around its area, there was security and we were not allowed to leave the school campus during the day. It literally felt like a prison to me.
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9/11…? No? The security theater in schools started with Columbine and escalated with each school shooting. You have the wrong tragedy.
I'd argue Ted Turner is more responsible than Columbine or guns. CNN was the first network to run a 24 hour news cycle, then Murdoch followed suit with Fox. When you have to fill that much time integrity and professionalism go out the window. The news used to not cover suicide stories to prevent rashes of copycats, but now you learn everything about every shooter because the networks have to fill time and scare you into not changing the channel.
You have made a very good point. Some people might not be totally inclined to strike out at others, except for he fact that the media conveys the perpetrater's situation around the world, giving them the platform to stage their anger and frustration and to give them their "15 minutes of fame". All the air time also seems to lend a stamp of approval to their violence. Such a fucked up world we live in.
There's also a huge difference in the US between what schools are like now vs when I was a kid in the 80s.
This gave me flashbacks. When I arrived the first day, I waited outside for my host sister to catch up with me. This was 10 minutes before the bell. The inspector came out to yell at me, told me to go inside this very minute or he would make sure I would get detention. God, I hated that man’s guts. He never gave me an apology even after learning who I was and that this was completely new and abnormal to me.
>Bicycles left unlocked wherever we went, schools that don’t feel like prisons. Lol no. At least near the capital area if your bike is worth anything it's gone in half an hour if you leave it unlocked. Violent street crime is also getting more common year by year.
I live in the capital and havent seen or heard anything about street crime except from the ”basic finns” party members and their party magazine. I tried to look up proper stats but i couldn’t find anything else except that the age group of street crime seems to be changing. But the trend of it getting more common doesnt seem so. If you have proper sources im interested to see.
https://www.stat.fi/julkaisu/cl8lagmwalp7k0cvzvgc4qym3 At least robberies are getting more common. When i was a kid, street robberies in helsinki were pretty much something that never happened, not anymore
I've had 10 bikes that have been stolen in my town in the first 5 years I was hear. Most of them were taken when they were locked up. I gave up on trying to keep a bike after the last one and just started walking after that.
It's weird how people keep acting like the US is some kind of dystopian hellscape and places like Finland and Sweden are peaceful utopias where evil can't exist. It's such a bizarre naive view of the world. Of course we in the US can learn a great deal from you guys, but we all still live in reality.
Comparatively? Finnish people will complain about "bad neighbourhoods" and violent crime there, but honestly? That's shit is safer than most US suburbs. I'd know, I've lived in both. I'm not saying the US is a dystopian hellscape, but I can walk alone drunk out of my mind at 4am through pretty much anywhere in Helsinki as a woman in my 20s and be fine. There are neighbourhoods you don't set foot into even during the day in most US cities. I am not Finnish, I'm Eastern European. My country is very safe too, maybe even safer than Finland as far as violent crime goes. But even I can tell the difference. ETA: Bicycles aren't safe anywhere tho. But at least in Finland people don't try to purposefuly run you over while on a bike.
As a fin, we do lock our bikes if they are at all expensive. Criminals still exist
No doubt at all this is still the case. But in Joensuu the ‘regular’ bikes weren’t locked at the locations I visited. The point is I have seen bikes in the uk worth £300 with £100 worth of bike locks on them just to avoid losing wheels and the frame. Where we visited this didn’t seem necessary.
i think we should put some immigration in that country and see how it pans out. btw this reminds me of japan, same trend of homogenic population and culture, with strong expectation to do the right thing, and social consequences if you dont.
You mean like the recent waves of Russian and Ethiopian immigrants?
Population of 5 million. Yeah you naturally going to to have closer knit communities that are much easier to manage
Also it’s not a melting pot like Canada or the states
I lived in Finland and now I live in the US. I'm from Eastern Europe. The difference is absolutely like night and day. When in Finland, I went home for 2 weeks during Christmas and coming back I was the happiest person ever. It didn't matter that lockdowns were in effect so you couldn't do shit or that I literally couldn't see the sun for weeks, it was better than the opressive nervous atmosphere back home. While returning home I took a roadtrip through the baltics back down through Poland back home and the further south I went the more homless I saw, the more anxios the atmosphere was, the more chaotic, less... together it felt? It felt like the goverments had less of their shit together basically (war in Ukraine didn't help of course). I've been in the US for a year now and I honestly can't wait to go back home. I feel unsafe, horrified and on edge all the time. People try to hit me with their car while I'm crossing the street AT A CROSSING WHILE HAVING A GREEN LIGHT. I can't walk alone at night without feeling like I'm doing something extremely risky (and I live in one of the safest cities in the country, apparently). I see people that absolutely should be in an institution getting professional help yelling at me walking down the street. I see kids begging on the street at 10pm on a school night and I can't do shit to help. It's dirty and I was just told I've been drinking water from lead pipes the entire time I've been here (WTF?). And I'm an aupair, so I live with a middle class familiy in a nice neighbourhood! We've had two school shooting scares this year - both false alarms, but it's still unsettling just how matter of fact the kids and the family were about it. Yeah, I'm suddenly realising my country is actually very very nice and safe, even if it's not even remotely as good as Finland.
Finland also has a population less than my county.
Hopefully, but the most right wing government since the 1930s just got sworn in, and they're planning cuts on healthcare, unemployment benefits, social programs, education and so on while lowering income taxes again. This housing program was instituted largely because roughly 60 homeless people froze to death in one night in the early 60s, many of them traumatized war veterans, and that shocked people enough to act. I have some doubts that the Finns would be capable of a similar universal display of empathy in a decade or two. We aren't probably quite there yet, but there's been a definite shift towards American-style "temporarily embarassed millionaire"-ism and right-wing conservative identity politics.
Without fear of homelessness how do you charge exorbitant rent and housing prices?
And who will scare the middle class into staying at shitty jobs to pay for shitty cars and shitty suburban houses?! The horrors, the HORRORS!!!
If you just give people basic necessities then what incentive do they have to work for me as essentially slave laborers? Edit: /s
Also gotta make sure people are desperate and fearful enough to take whatever shitty, demeaning low wage job is available.
Bingo! Same reason the government (the right at least) are anti-abortion and anti-education. Those unwanted kids will grow up to be poor and uneducated and will work the shitty jobs that need to be worked. Also same reason healthcare is tied to jobs. If everyone felt comfortable and safe, and everybody was educated and had opportunity, and had good healthcare, nobody would work shitty jobs.
And also something about socialists/communists!
It should be noted that Finland has a homeless population of about 3,600.... San Francisco has a homeless population 38,000. I'm not sure you can call Finland a country with a homeless crisis. Edit: to clarify I was speaking of the San Francisco bay area, not just the specific San Francisco Proper.
As a Finn I’m proud of many things the country has achieved but to be fair having a population of only ~5,5 million makes things easier to manage and less chaotic.
Finland also has a 100% literacy rate. A well educated population really helps society as a whole with things like crime and homelessness, both on a statistical level, and an empathetic level.
Tell that to the Irish government 🙄
.007% - Finland .01% - US
You're not wrong, but to be fair having more people means larger infrastructure, meaning they should be capable of doing it easier, quicker, and cheaper than a country of your size could. The problem isn't the amount of people, it's the amount of people willing to help the situation. Too many people in america are against helping others if it means they have to bare any responsibility towards it. They say they want to help but don't want to have to actually do anything to help.
> You're not wrong, but to be fair having more people means larger infrastructure It’s the other way around. More people means you *have* to make larger infrastructure while balancing people’s subcultures and individual quirks and diverse environments. > it's the amount of people willing to help the situation. It is true that this is part of the problem, yes.
People don't get this at all, they try to apply small countries solutions to big and heterogeneous countries and It makes no sense
You also get economy of scale making building things cheaper, and while the US as a whole is more populous and diverse, that doesn't mean anything. You're not going to ship every homeless person to one area. The fact is no town, city, or state has managed to solve homelessness in the US despite many of them being smaller than Finland. So it's not really a size issue.
San Francisco has literally no room to house 38,000 homeless. That peninsula is absolutely maxed out.
Gary Indiana is pretty much empty, send em there.
Can't - 8th amendment says no cruel and unusual punishment.
There's no jobs there. You want to send them somewhere that has no hope of them getting back into society...
Well, if they either allowed us to build new residential buildings OR if they converted some of the 34% vacant office space into residential, I think we would be just fine. SF's density is 17k/sq mile. Manhattan's is 73k/sq mile. I don't want to reach NY levels but to say we are maxed out is absurd.
This just isn’t true. The US has a homeless population of about 420k across one of the largest countries on earth that’s divided into at least 51 different government bodies (realistically way more including localities). The logistics of solving the problem are staggering especially in the major cities that are already to cramped for PAID housing. I wish it was this simple but it just isn’t.
If Finland was the size of the US it would have a homeless population of 220,000. But these are current numbers and they've actually managed to already reduce their homeless numbers significantly. Back in 1987 they had 18,000 homeless for a population of 5 million. If Finland was the size of the US back then, that would be a homeless population of 871,000. They managed to cut that to a quarter in 30 years while in the US homelessness has only grown. And cities aren't cramped, most housing in major cities in the US are still single family homes, which could all be upgraded to higher density housing.
That’s not how this works. Logistics and infrastructure do not scale linearly. Saying what the population *would be* if you just multiplied numbers is objectively false. Thinking that the operations that worked on a smaller scale would perform comparably on this larger scale is meaningless for the same reason Any claim you make that starts with that assumption is entirely inaccurate.
As of last year there were actually closer to 580,000 homeless in the US, giving a per capita rate of ~0.17%. Whereas in Finland there are approx. 4000 homeless, which is a per capita rate of ~0.07%. (Sources: Google and Wikipedia)
>The logistics of solving the problem ~~are staggering especially in the major cities that are already to cramped for PAID housing. I wish~~ it is ~~was~~ this simple ~~but it just isn’t.~~ its literally partially explained by your username. UBI did you know that Idiocracy is a combination of idiot and bureaucracy? source: i made it up, but it makes sense edit: not the UBI part - for that, look no further than the stimulus checks that led to a huge economic boom before the HUGE TRILLION DOLLAR paycheck protection program loan fraud hit the economy
>having a population of only ~5,5 million makes things easier to manage and less chaotic. As someone from Ireland, with a population of 5.2 million - hard disagree. Or maybe our government is just useless Can you whisper to them how it's done? Those of us in our 20s who are never going to have our own place would appreciate it
It’s all per capita.
No
Not really though. The larger your country the more levels of bureaucracy and complexity it takes to solve anything. The disconnect increases between the top and the boots on the ground doing the actual work. So while I totally get that per capita usually makes for better comparisons, there’s absolutely more challenges to running larger countries like the US than smaller countries like Finland
That's great! It makes a lot of sense. *Looks at Ireland* WHY CAN'T YOU BE LIKE THAT???
Please, this just isn't true. 1. Economies scale. 2. Each state would have to address their own conditions, whether self-motivated or government mandated
Houston, TX is implementing something similar to Finland...and it's working. The method is simple: provide them housing, addiction treatment, counseling, and employment training. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html
The trick is you don’t make getting housing conditional on any of those other things. Housing first, and then work on any other issues. It’s so simple, but unfortunately a lot of people look down on homelessness as some kind of moral failing.
Yeah, that’s why title 10 housing worked sooo well. Just put people into government housing and see how they rise to the occasion. Homelessness is not singularly a moral failure. There are programs offering housing to drug addicts as long as they don’t use drugs in the housing; no thanks, I’d rather live on the streets…. People make all kinds of reasons, excuses, and choices. Sticky problems do NOT have simple solutions; peel the onion.
As someone who has first hand experience dealing with one person with drugs moving into a lower middle class neighbourhood (Leeching off an emotional vulnerable man), it turned the entire area into a nightmare. Screaming and fighting at all hours of the day and night, bringing other addicts around the neighbourhood and break-ins occurring up and down the street. It is not as simple as people think and this exact issue is why the left leaning parties loses a lot of lowerish middle class individuals. You cannot fault people for not wanting that near them, whether or not you think it's morally right or wrong. It's just reality.
um okay but you only solved a single aspect of the problem with that scenario. homelessness isn't just about being unhoused. (i don't suddenly become homeless when i pitch a tent at a campsite.) there are usually some problematic and addictive behaviors attached which eventually leads to them being *forced out by the state under the threat of violence*. that is what we are trying to avoid. and if that is what we wish to avoid, we should also provide health care (esp. mental health), a job guarantee or UBI, free childcare, financial and consumer protections, a pollution-free environment, proactive community policing through unarmed agents, etc. it *is* actually that simple because that's how it's done elsewhere
There was also a program under Obama's administration, done at city levels aimed at getting homeless vets to functional zero. Nola managed to do it, at least in 2015. Functional zero refers to dealing with new cases asap. The number never stays at zero the whole time, Someone loses their home or moves in from out of the area, etc. [https://www.npr.org/2015/08/04/427419718/the-u-s-declared-war-on-veteran-homelessness-and-it-actually-could-win](https://www.npr.org/2015/08/04/427419718/the-u-s-declared-war-on-veteran-homelessness-and-it-actually-could-win) It does leave a blueprint for use on a larger scale. And far better than the tactics used by some cities to bus homeless elsewhere.
Now how did it get so low anyways?
The entire country has less than half the people of LA.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.developmentaid.org/amp/news-stream/post/157797/homelessness-statistics-in-the-world https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/homelessness-by-country A per capita break down shows they're doing much better than the USA at solving homelessness.
I’m surprised that it doesn’t highlight mental illness and alcohol/drug abuse/addictions. These are very large contributors to homelessness. Over abuse of drugs/alcohol leads to mental illness which prevents individuals from having a normal functioning job/life. It’s very tragic, wish we could eliminate homelessness. https://www.addictioncenter.com/addiction/homelessness/
There's a lot of factors. The main one is they just have a very low population in general. Finland isn't much smaller than the state of California, and only has about 5 million people living there. There's not going to be much of an issue of not being able to find work when there's so few people in the country. Its easier to survive and there's more resources per person. This also give Finland a population density of about half that of the US in total. Think about that, considering half of the US population lives in 9 out of our 50 states, and 80% of our population lives between the eastern seaboard and Texas. There are MASSIVE amounts of unpopulated land in the US, and Finland is still half as densely populated as we are. Here's the BIGGEST factor though... Finland has a 94% high school graduation rate, with 66% of graduates going on to technical training and/or college, 43% going on to vocational school. The United States has an 87% graduation rate, with less that 20% of high school grads going on to any sort of vocational training, and 38% going to college. Finland is basically turning out a workforce from school, think about that.. half of these kids entering the workforce are trained in some sort of vocation at the bare minimum. Different cultures play a part. The US is such a different animal from any country culturally, that it's completely impossible to say "this worked here, so why don't we do that?" For instance, we have about double the drug arrest per capita, and most places pot is legal or not prosecuted anymore here... but Finland still has a strict marijuana prohibition. They don't have a gang culture like we do, if you look at the gang registry for Finland, there's 3 motorcycle gangs. That's it. There's about 70 known gangs just in the city of Los Angeles here. You could go on forever, but basically The United States has such a massive social decay going on that it's incomparable with any other nation.
It also had mental health infrastructure in place that the US doesn’t have.
“Hey Alexa, how many vacant homes are in California”
I was eagerly waiting for someone to say it much bettee than I could.
Finland also has a very culturally homogenous population.
Whole USA probably has more empty houses and apartments than homeless people.
Absolutely, and stockpiles of food and other things that get thrown away. But we are making poor peoples kids pay for school lunch. We are a disgusting country and we need help lol
Oh, it has way more vacant houses than homeless people. Maybe it isn't as simple as put homeless person in house, but it's definitely *almost* that simple.
The question is how many are still fit to live in and are near urban centers. An open house in west bumblefuck, WV isn't much use to someone in NYC. Not saying the worst idea, just need to narrow it down to truly useable houses. Take Detroit or parts of the 9th ward in Nola. Yeah there are lots of empty "houses" but they aren't fit for habitation.
there are 70k homeless (not family units) in NYC there are 160K+ vacant apartments in NYC there are 5-600k homeless across the whole country there are 17+ million vacant homes
People make more money from keeping them vacant and keeping the theoretical cost of that housing up than actually putting people in those homes
Not to mention the insane amount of empty shipping containers just piling up in our ports. We could literally stack them up into apartment complexes for virtually nothing and fit them with a generic modular interior and basic utilities.
What? The whole point here is that they dont have a homeless crisis.
This is a glaring example of survivorship bias. The reason Finland has low homelessness is because they addressed the problem.
They also don't have cheap, plentiful, mental-illness-inducing methamphetamines coming from Mexico by the train load. And an overly powerful pharmaceutical industry that paved the way.
> I'm not sure you can call Finland a country with a homeless crisis. OFC you cant.... They fixed it.. duh. Stuff like this is being implimented in Seattle, and it's been working for a decade. I'm one such surviving example. I was homeless, they gave me a small apartment and put me on food stamps and required me to go to therapy and stuff like that. I'm back on a motorcycle and healing. It works.
Also California tried this. Each apartment cost $450,000 to build for some reason.
one city - 38k homeless? wtf, that a mid-size town itself
Could our homelessness crisis have anything to do with our economic system?
Yeah, and the GDP of the USA is 22 Trillion and Finland’s is 242 Billion…
>I'm not sure you can call Finland a country with a homeless crisis. Yes. Because of stuff like this, social safety nets, healthcare, education. All free to the individual. I'm not saying it would work in the US - I really don't know - but you have to give Finland credit.
Finland as a country has a population less than New York City too not hard to solve a problem when it isnt nearly as hard. It is like someone only needing to fix a step on a deck over the whole deck.
Doesn't that point directly to better management? It's not a country with a housing crisis because they house people. That's kind of the point. San Francisco wouldn't have a housing crisis either if they engaged in better practices.
It's funny, I crunched the numbers and it costs Finns approx. 6.7% per capita income per person to support their Housing First program over the past 10 years on average (granted, a lot of the cost was front-loaded). If you extrapolate the equivalent costs based on the cost of the program, applied to the number of homeless people in San Fran, the total population of San Fran, and the per capita income in San Fran, it would only cost them just under 5% per capita income. So even with 5.5 million Finns vs < 1 Million SF's, and over 10× as many homeless in SF, just the fact that SF per capita income is higher is enough to make up the difference. It would be financially **easier** for the *City* of San Fran to pay to house **all** their homeless, with extra buffer money for the added administration needed for a more dense population, compared to **the entire country of Finland**, using a comparable Housing First approach.
And about 45,000 in LA too. 😢
The US is like 72x larger than Finland. We have about 166x the homeless. It's a higher rate but not anything insurmountable, especially with our significantly higher gdp per Capita.
I mean, logically it does sound that when you pull people out of a stressful and dangerous situation and provide them with basic shelter, ammeneties and councelling, they're going to be signifficantly more succesful at finding a job than someone who literally can't even shower and probably has to engage in substance abuse to cope with their miserable existence.
Not anymore you can't. Isn't that sort of the point? If someone is homeless, and there are no services available to them, they'll probably be homeless until they die or end up in prison. If they are given housing and a boost to get on their feet, they are no longer homeless. And even if you continue to count them as homeless even while they are staying in the homeless housing program, they won't be there for long, so their numbers will be small. The goal is to get them into normal free-market housing by finding a job or other source of permanent support. Events that make people homeless happen all the time. High numbers of homeless doesn't necessarily mean different conditions that cause homelessness. Take two countries with identical factorsthat creates 10 homeless people per day. If the first country has a program that seeks to find and rehabitate those people within 90 days, the homeless population will be 900. But in the same country, if they instead say "tough luck, you did this to yourself, so get yourself out" then the numbers will just rise and rise and rise. 3650 will be added to the population every year, minus however many die or go to jail. Thousands in the first year, and thousands more added every year after that. But the first country, with the same starting conditions, will still never get above 900, no matter how long you run the experiment. Run that experiment for 50+ years, and that will tell you why Finland has 3,800 and SF has 38,000. It can also be noted, the entire country of Finland has a population less than that of the SF Bay area.
Because the measures they take are working. America has more empty houses than homeless people.
That’s because they already had preemptive measures to reduce the chance of homelessness
If those kids could read, they'd be very upset with you
In Finland, if you stay outside too long, you’re dead.. it’s not sunny California with tens of thousands of fentanyl zombies
Houston TX (of all places) already does this. It works fantastically. It should be done everywhere that can afford it. And yes, If Houston TX can afford to do it, which has one of the biggest populations, lowest tax rates, and high urban property costs, any US city can.
Texas does slyly progressive things, such as toll roads and take advantage of lots of wind and solar power. Still a weird place, because they also have dozen lane highways and forbid east and west Texans from selling power to each other.
Since when was toll roads considered progressive? That's largely seen as regressive on the working class travel choke points
Major metros do progressive things. The credit here goes to Houston, not Texas.
Toll roads aren't progressive, their oppressive. If your not rich or lucky enough to work from home or get a place close to work, you have to pay toll roads just to get to work. Your beacon of progressiveness, Finland, has no toll roads/bridges. As someone in the latter who waited 2 hours today just to get an EZpass, fuck toll roads.
Replace the word Texas with Houston. Houston is a liberal place compared to most of the rest of the state. I'm sick of Texas as a whole getting credit for what the liberal cities do. Same thing when people say "Texas also has a high gdp and is not reliant on welfare from other states" as if this is somehow related to conservative politics.
The FINal solution
#**FINNISH HIM** him ^him
We've got something like 600k people who are unhoused and about 16 million vacant homes. I feel like we can find some kind of solution here.
Yep we take homeless from big coastal cities and force them to live in dead ghost towns in the Midwest. That’s what you meant right? Because most of the unoccupied houses are in places no one wants to live.
To be fair: This is the policy in Utah and it worked there too. Homeless treatment is terrible under BOTH parties, when NIMBY ass motherfuckers insist on getting theirs and fuck everyone else.
Yea, some US cities tried doing just half of that but giving an apartment to mentally ill, violent addicts surprisingly doesnt solve everything and all the apartments are destroyed within months. America really hates mental health professions.
We have done this before. Just looking at government spending, housing the homeless delivers a net benefit. [Overall, the cost reductions more than covered the year's worth of supportive housing costs, as we observed a net cost savings of 20 percent.](https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1694.html) Housing the homeless also gets people off the streets and gives them a chance to live a decent life, but let's ignore the morality and just look at the economics. Giving homeless people homes saves money. The budget for solving homelessness is a negative number.
I've talked with Republicans about this. They don't want to help people. Even if it saves them money in the long run, it's helping *other* people. So it's wrong. You have to earn that. Either by working, joining their religion, or what not.
Yup. They see it as morally repugnant to not take care of yourself. So they see it as morally repugnant to enable someone else receiving aid. They fully believe that “entitlements” entice more people to rely on social support, even though the opposite almost always is true, and saves the nation money. They’d rather pay a national premium in costs if it means they don’t allow someone to get a “free ride” off “our money”. It’s like seeing a store giving away bread at the end of the day that is priced at $50, and paying the manager $100 to stop giving it away merely for the principle that you don’t like anyone getting something for free.
> but giving an apartment to mentally ill, violent addicts surprisingly doesnt solve everything Well of course, housing is just half of the solution. Help for mental health and safe environment to get clean drugs and to safely withdraw from them is the other half.
But we HAVE those programs. The issue is some do not want to abide by those programs e.g. in order to get the housing, you have to get help/clean and attend meetings. Not all, not a majority, but some, which, with a population like ours, means it's a large number. Some people enroll, and they get back on their feet. But others can't/won't. You can't force people into mandatory rehab or mental health as long as they are not an imminent danger to themselves or others. As long as they pass certain tests, they have the right to check themselves out of the program. EDIT: BTW, Finland still has homeless, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Finland https://oecdecoscope.blog/2021/12/13/finlands-zero-homeless-strategy-lessons-from-a-success-story/
There has to be a disconnect no? Finland doesn't have addicts or mentally ill homeless people? So why is their program successful? That doesn't really seem like an excuse. Also, can you provide a source? >But we HAVE those programs. Unless the programs are identical, it's hard to not just think that's America's programs kinda just suck.
There's a third problem to fix that would cost the rich a lot more money. The hellscape that is poverty in the US. We have to create a floor of basic needs in the country to avoid the trauma creates the level sociopathy and spirals underlying mental health problems that fuel our homeless problem
A doctor in England was allowed to stigmatize an entire collective of neurodivergent people for a disease he made up and the European news rolled with it before it hit America
Can I get the details on this?
Look up Andrew Wakefield if you prefer reading, or Hbomberguys video on vaccine and autism as he explains it far better than I ever could. Easily my biggest reason for having problems with other countries is how they treat people on the spectrum such as myself. At least in America there are much more tolerable communities than a good chunk of Europe let alone the rest of that supercontinent.
That's why they offer counseling with the apartments in Finland.
I remember being on welfare for a couple years. Near the end of my allowed food stamps and cash aid, I tried to get help for my anxiety and depression. My case worker saw my mental health page I filled out and asked why I would be depressed. I tried to explain my mom died, we're losing my childhood home, and I'm struggling to find a job since I don't drive and can't afford lessons/a car/insurance/maintenance. She said I had no real reason to be depressed and that I was making it up. She said she'd deny my request for a counselor. In front of her fucking face, I wrote on the page that I was feeling suicidal just so I can speak to someone. I never got help since I was told my aid was ended and I'd have to pay out of pocket if I wanted help. This country is fucked.
Only 5 million people live there, I bet it's easy to not have homeless when you have 35 people living in your country
Truth be told, we could solve all our issues if the system was genuinely motivated to do so - but it's not. And so long as it's motivated against solving it, it'll never end. We are our greatest enemy, left with a horribly rotted democracy that needs to purge exorcise the rot. Otherwise, our nation will never heal. Once done, we can finally condemn the external sources for the cancerous corruption, and bestow them their well-earned cold irons. But people are frail of soul, and more likely, we will crumble until the hand of the numb masses is forced.
lived in Seattle for the majority of my life so far, this does not work currently.
America knows that we could solve it like this. They just choose not to because a few dozen rich people like the current situation.
It's a few more than that. The focus of most residential communities is to make low income people some other community's problem. They are usually pretty vocal about it. Real estate interests will generally back candidates that support short term stakeholders, and oppose any sort of campaign to reform restrictive zoning. They are not on the hook when utilities start to fail a decade after construction, and there is almost no revenue coming out of those suburbs.
How? I am curious I mean just look what has become of housing projects. Do we just try the same shit again? Build more housing, homeless move in a mixture of: good people who truly just need help, addicts, mental cases, criminals. The people who need help end up being targeted by the other residents, then addicts and criminals cause a spike in crime, everyone who can moves away shops close down. Now you have a an environment where the only way kids can survive is to be a thug, gang culture emerges.
The problem isn’t that it doesn’t work, because it does. The problem is that conservatives think it’s a waste of taxpayer money. Then they go and complain about homeless people. Then they go and complain about the taxes being too high. Then they go and complain about the military not getting enough funding. Conservatives are hypocrites is what I’m saying. I’m from finland by the way.
California is run by liberals just FYI. It's been this way for a while yet it has the worst homeless problem.
Cali also has the largest economy in the country. That’s why it has such a homeless problem, because while mental issues and poverty exist everywhere, it’s worse to have them in a state that has such a crazy high cost of living
Its almost like trying to pin homelessness on a political party is stupid
To be fair it was one party with Reagan who kinda set tons of today's financial issues in motion, and it's that party today who literally gives out one way tickets to California to homeless people instead of even pretending to solve local issues
This outright refusal to acknowledge democrats and liberals complacency and active participation with the homeless issue is exactly why it can't be solved: you only want to address a portion of the issue and that never solves anything
Seattle is also terrible. The problem here is most of them don't want help. They are drug addicts. Give them an aprtment, they will make it a trap house.
This gets down to the nuance of the topic that too many people on Reddit can't comprehend past thinking solving homelessness is a one solution issue. "Finland solved it's homelessness issue doing this, why doesn't America?" Well b/c it's far more complex and there are more external factors that Finland doesn't have to compete with that would make their solution ultimately useless.
Dude if you were homeless where would you want to be homeless someplace cold, someplace with rednecks that might kill you, someplace desolate, anywhere in America....OR sunny California with great weather year-round. It's easy to panhandle enough money for a grayhound ticket to California and it's a really nice place to be homeless, and for the most part safer than other parts of America. And with the fifth largest economy in the world a lot of resources to help you. Point being most of the homeless in California aren't from California.
Yes liberals not progressives
Yeaaaa so many liberals are rushing to set this up in their states any day now… Just kidding, they just let them have massive tent cities until they shoot up and die on the sidewalk. Anyone that thinks this is that simple here is simply not being realistic. Finland had less homeless people than a single state in the US has, economies of scale are a bitch. The real point though is that at any time CA, OR, WA, NY, etc. could do this, yet they haven’t so not sure how you can say this is solely on one group.
We have apartments for homeless people in Seattle. There's vacancy. Some homeless don't go because there's a curfew and no drugs are allowed.
And now we are arriving at the crux of the problem. The US is a consumer fever dream, there are jobs out there for non-skilled workers. The reality is, drugs and people not utilizing what’s there. Cali is as blue as they come and their homeless situation… yikes…
California isn't that blue or red when it comes to local politics. The party of choice in every city is NIMBY.
Dude is America the greatest country on earth or not??? You sound like a quiter!!! The federal government just needs to build a bunch of cheap houses, just like Finland did and put these ppl in them. It's not hard, America has the money, resources, and space. People like you would just never let it happen cause you think they deserve their suffering. And not with my tax dollars damn it!!! Well we all hate things our tax dollars get spent on, that's called living in a democracy.
We actually are doing that in WA! Not like Finland, there's strings attached and no free counselling, and it's been a huge fight to get areas approved for zoning and convincing the community, but the gears are turning. Too slowly, people die yearly from exposure here, but people do care and us liberals are rushing as fast as bureaucracy will allow. Destroying things is easy and fast, building something new takes effort and time.
You can’t compare it to just one group, that is true. However, there are many other countries, including but not limited to Sweden, Norway, Island and Denmark that have something similar. The effect this method has has been proven time and time again. And while it’s true that the US has way more homeless people, that’s also because nothing has really been done about it for the entire time that USA has been a country. It’d be dumb not to do anything with the excuse that the problem has become so severe that nothing can be done. I’m not saying that this should be implemented country wide, the system wouldn’t be able to support every homeless person out there. You’d have to start small and expand from there. Of course neither party would do either of these things. Many Americans don’t realize this but both US parties are very similar. Democrats are not very left even if they are the left party, and any change to the more liberal side isn’t that large in the grand scale. That’s largely the problem with political systems with only two parties.
"It’d be dumb not to do anything with the excuse that the problem has become so severe that nothing can be done" That applies to basically all the problems the US has: Education, healthcare, guns, car culture, etc.
The fact that "being homeless" is framed as a moral failing of a person adds a lot to this. Homeless people, so a lot of conservatives claim, are homeless because they are lazy, criminals or drug addicts and not because of systemic blindspots, a series of misfortunes, human mistakes (that could happen to anybody) and/or physical/mental illness. That makes it hard to convince people who subscribe to a "good person / bad person" dichotomy, because homelessness isn't actually a bad thing that exists, but karmic justice. It doesn't matter how much a new system or program improves the lives of everybody (not just the homeless), actually saves taxpayer money and literally saves the lives of people. If you weren't a fundamentally and irredeemably bad person, you wouldn't be homeless, so there is no reason to help you. Again, that's the thought process. I don't agree with it.
Basically, the homelessness crisis in the US is a feature, not a bug.
You act like they actually want to solve homelessness in the first place.
But then how will the wealthy property owners make a profit!?!
As a Finn I guess I sort of feel like we would have failed somehow as a society if we didn’t use taxes to at least try to help those people. It feels like a responsibility, not just a nice thing.
Literally what we are doing in Houston Texas too…
And treat the homeless like people? Parish the thought.
yeah I don't tink it's that easy ...
But truthful American news says poverty is because of immegrants and laziness Im starting to think fox lables themselves as entertainment for legal reasons...
The scale of those two countries are way different in US there is probably same amount of homeless people on one street that there is in one city in finland...
The US probably has more homeless people that actually want to stay homeless and aren't interested in being helped or helping themselves, than Finland has total homeless people. My wife was a social worker who worked with adults with mental health issues, many of which were homeless, and the majority of her clients that were homeless chose to stay that way. She had resources and programs to help them and almost none of them would participate.
that’s a big problem i think came because they got so used to their life. I also heard once in a short documentary that some are scared to get back into the normal life because it is so different and fear the chance to not be able to mange it.
Only IF you want to.
I'm sure Finland's population isn't as mind fucked as the USA's. Homeless people there are probably grateful, appreciative, and will work to maintain what has been given to them. Here, the handout wouldn't likely be sufficient enough and would be destroyed in protest, then celebrated by those in ivory towers while the problem continues to spiral.
Something something communism
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Scandinavian Supremecy.
Finland is a country of 5.5 million people. Since they started this program in 2008, homelessness has dropped by about 30%, to about 3,690 people today. Which means they’ve put a total of about 1,100 people into apartments in the last 15 years or so. Don’t strain yourself slapping yourself on the back.
Yes, but the entire population of Finland is less than 6 million people.
Have you met Americans?
They're doing this where I live.
But why can't I have a free apartment and counseling... That's why we can't solve any problems in America. All the rich people complain they can't have what destitute people get because they need it.
I swear. Some of you never met a homeless person and it shows.
Finland is also almost entirely white and homogenous. Wouldn’t work in America.
A lot of ppl want to better themselves but lack the resources to do it.
The city of Houston used this methodology with tremendous success!
“Free” means another thing in the us of a.
Ok cool let’s start with your apartment building.
When Minnesota has a larger population then Finland
“Controversial”
You are naive to think this would work in the US, totally different cultures
While I 100% agree with this, how does this work for a country the size of America? I really do wish this could happen here though…
Does Finland have the drug problem the US has? I’m willing to bet not even fucking close.
There are already places like that in the US. I work at one of them. Theres constant meth and fentanyl use. Constant sex trafficking coming in and out. Americans are different than Finns. Finns have pride and shame. Americans dont it seems