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Helsinki's solution to homelessness
- com2kid 7y agoOne problem of applying this to the American cities that have a homeless problem is that housing in those cities is prohibitively expensive. Go to a city like Seattle and a 1 bed 1 bath is going to cost 300k+ to construct at density. (The city doesn't have enough land to build enough tiny houses at 30k or so a pop, so fixing the entire housing problem that way isn't doable.)
- Qwertystop 7y agoIncreased investment in public transportation would make it easier to use land that's not in already-densely-packed urban areas. It's not as though the US has less land than Finland, after all.
- kazinator 7y agoThe other problem of applying this to American cities is that these homes will be used for criminal activity and trashed.
- rhacker 7y agoShould we just install cameras and watch them? It's not like they had privacy before. Privacy would be earned over time with trust.
- kurthr 7y agoWhile I agree with you, in most cases that's only because they won't be policed... which also makes it a terrible place for all the other folks who need housing, when bullies move in. There are real on going labor/maintenance costs with providing housing to many homeless... even beyond the standard social services that are required.
- AstralStorm 7y agoI suspect these homes would be more policed even than any general "rough area". In fact, this might cut on crime in general, much like honeypot stings.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- eveningcoffee 7y agoThe Finnish solution is to have a support team inside these facilities. There is also a trial period and substance usage is restricted (though per article there are places where it is more relaxed).
- snegu 7y agoI recently served on a jury in Seattle. The trial involved a man who was living in a facility similar to the ones described in this article. Many of the people living there continued to use drugs heavily in their apartments, and in this case that led to a murder. It was pretty depressing to see that even with significant intervention, people's personal choices led to disaster.
- AstralStorm 7y agoCalling it personal choice is disingenuous and not compassionate. Hard drugs are a real hard trap...
- refurb 7y agoUsing drugs may not be a 100% voluntary choice, but I would argue murder is.
- knolax 7y agoWhy wouldn't that be the case for Helsinki?
- linuxftw 7y agoIt will be, give it time. They seem to be working overtime in Europe to create a welfare class, and that's going to inherit all the problems the US has. It's simply the law of economics.
- alistairSH 7y agoCitation? Salt Lake City used to have a similar program as Helsinki that was widely lauded. Of course, as funding has dried up and real estate prices have gone up, the program has faltered and homelessness is once again on the rise in SLC.
- TaylorAlexander 7y agoIt’s my understanding that lots of US cities have more vacant homes than homeless people, so perhaps our solution is not building homes but simply placing people in existing homes.
- eveningcoffee 7y agoFinnish solution is not to put homeless people into random houses. They have created special facilities for this that are supervised by a support team ("At Rukkila, seven staff support 21 tenants.").
- WillPostForFood 7y agoa 1 bed 1 bath is going to cost 300k+ to construct at density This is a problem that can be worked on that will benefit everyone across the income spectrum. No way we should be stuck with $~7500 per square foot construction costs (assuming a small 1 bed 1 bath would be 400sqft).
- pkaye 7y ago> No way we should be stuck with $~7500 per square foot construction costs... I think that should be $750 per square foot...
- sampo 7y agoOf that $750/sq.ft. ($8100/sq.m.) maybe 25% is construction cost. The rest 75% is the value of the land in that location.
- WillPostForFood 7y agoGovernment already owns plenty of land, even in most large cities. If you can get a bunch 30+ story housing cheaply and quickly, you can make a dent in the housing problem. Look at what China is doing.
- com2kid 7y agoNot in Seattle. The city is having huge issues finding places to build low income housing. Whenever they do identify a location, a bunch of lawsuits show up from nearby residents. Sometimes those lawsuits go somewhere, and the city has to start planning all over again.
- redisman 7y agoRight because Helsinki is famous for it's cheap real estate. Oh wait.. Condos are pretty comparable to Seattle and single family homes in the city are very rare and expensive. Seattle has probably built more housing in the last 5 years than Helsinki proper in the last 50.
- WhompingWindows 7y agoIt says in the article: "A leafy green suburb of Helsinki"
- bostik 7y agoThey named it too: Malminkartano. Technically just at the edge of the Helsinki border, touching Vantaa. Funnily enough, I grew up nearby, in Konala.
- TaylorAlexander 7y agoDoes anyone here think markets alone could solve this problem? Or do you see that coordinated group action is necessary to practically solve problems markets can’t fix?
- Qwertystop 7y agoMarkets clearly haven't solved the problem. They've certainly had the time.
- DuskStar 7y agoMarkets partially solved this problem a more than a century ago - the solution was "really shitty, cheap, shared housing". As a society we decided that such housing was unacceptable and banned it without providing a replacement. "This enormously regulated industry doesn't yield outcomes we like for the poor! Obviously markets cannot solve this problem!" is a disturbingly common argument.
- ars 7y agoThey were called "Rooming Houses" and we should bring them back.
- devereaux 7y agoThe beautiful thing with democracy is that these housing solutions that provided an actual solution to homelessness where banned, are still illegal, and thus won't be "brought back" even if they make perfect sense, were preferred by the people who used them, are a free market solution, and much cheaper than the alternatives. See San Francisco as an example of what happens when more money is poured in the "modern" solutions - very little reduction of the problem, if any.
- redisman 7y agoI usually don't like libertarian solutions but this is not a bad idea given the United States' inability to solve the issue with their current tools. Right now we're very inefficiently running a couple of slightly better but very constrained in throughput homeless shelters instead.
- petrikapu 7y agoCold and harsh winter is actually what makes homelessness not an option around here
- TaylorAlexander 7y agoHomeless people die every winter in San Jose CA, so I guess this program could have wide appeal.
- virgilp 7y agoYeah, but the weather is mild enough that I bet many don't fully realize the risk. In Helsinki, spending the winter sleeping outside is obviously not an option.
- AstralStorm 7y agoYou'd be surprised what homeless in Poland pull to just sleep inside during harsher winter. Forging keys, breaking and entering into garbage disposal or basements and of course trespassing and squatting are some of the things I've personally witnessed and that's not the end. Yes, there are some facilities but apparently not enough and with conditions not acceptable to some of them.
- DuskStar 7y agoWide appeal to the homeless or wide appeal to policymakers?
- 0898 7y agoThe article's "solution to homelessness" is giving homeless people homes. The article says they have to pay rent or they get kicked out, but doesn't explain how these homeless people can suddenly afford rent.
- AnssiH 7y agoProbably housing allowance (https://www.kela.fi/web/en/housing-benefits https://www.kela.fi/web/en/housing-benefits) and/or basic social assistance (https://www.kela.fi/web/en/social-assistance https://www.kela.fi/web/en/social-assistance), the latter of which covers essential daily expenses if you cannot afford them. Kela is the Social Insurance Institution of Finland (https://www.kela.fi/web/en https://www.kela.fi/web/en).
- TaylorAlexander 7y agoMaybe they can’t afford market rate rent by they can afford a subsidized rent? I’m just speculating.
- Qwertystop 7y agoMore homes means higher supply means rents fall? And the three-month trial period, additional support services, and near-guaranteed contract in perpetuity would help get people into homes who might previously have had difficulty holding down a job, or might previously have been evicted for reasons other than rent.
- TallGuyShort 7y agoIt's a classic problem of mistaking the symptom of homelessness for the problem. If a person simply has a life event that wipes out their finances and they get evicted, okay sure - providing cheap housing just for people in their situation is great. But as much as we don't like stereotypes, a lot of homeless people do actually end up in that situation because of behavioral cycles that still need to be broken. What makes it worse is that homelessness changes a person - and sometimes they are unable to be a part of society right away for more reasons than money (and sometimes they don't even want to). My family operates a hotel that will sell off excess hotel rooms to various homeless groups in the winter - and many times the homeless don't want to be complete inside, so they open windows, etc. and only be as "inside" as they absolutely need to be to survive. That does cause problems if you share infrastructure with other people.
- gnode 7y agoOn the surface this kind of solution is easy to dismiss as an expensive socialist extreme; a cost to the taxpayer that there is no political appetite for in other countries. Yet counter-intuitively this is likely a saving for the taxpayer, as hospitals and prisons often end up filling this role, at a much larger cost than simply housing people.
- luckydata 7y agoSaid bluntly, who gives a shit about the taxpayers. Some things are to be done because they are right, not because they save money, even if they end up saving money. The ROI-first perspective when talking about social policies has created the monstrous society the US is now.
- gnode 7y agoFor better or worse, taxpayers give a shit about taxpayers, so it's important to recognise when arguments made in their name, and against people who are suffering, are actually a false economy.
- Konnstann 7y agoThe savings are there, the article even talks about it. I think the socialist extreme is the government owning 70% of the housing in the city. Not that it's a bad extreme, it sounds like it works fine, but out of the ordinary.
- gnode 7y ago> the government owning 70% of the housing in the city. I'd argue that this is actually state capitalism, rather than socialism.
- jeffreyrogers 7y agoI live in Salt Lake City and we were doing a pretty good job with this approach. Unfortunately, a change in the police chain of command and in the local government led to scaling back of the housing program and a switch to a more traditional model (arrest, choice between jail or rehab, various support programs, housing at the end if you make it through all that). This new system (which is really the old system come full circle) is much less effective as is clear to anyone who walks around the city. We have a beautiful public library downtown, which is completely unpleasant to visit because it has turned into the place where the homeless stay during the day. About half the times I go I see someone either being arrested or in active withdrawal. Like most social problems, the solutions are simple, but politically hard to sell, and even harder to maintain once they've been put in place.
- luckydata 7y agoIt's unfortunate that the culture in the US is so deprived of compassion and so focused on the "punish first" reaction to anything outside of the ordinary that it will be difficult if not impossible to get anything like this solution adopted. It's plan to see, even in the comments in this forum so many are really quick to jump to "but mental illness..." "but drugs..." etc... It makes me sad to realize this is unlikely to change during my lifetime.
- adammichaelc 7y agoThe data disagrees. It can happen in the US. It _did_ happen in the US. “Utah reduced chronic homelessness by 91%. Here’s how” https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chronic-homelessness-by-91-percent-heres-how https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni...
- luckydata 7y agoI'm glad to learn that. It's also not a surprise it's been tried in Utah of all places.
- 8bitsrule 7y agoBeautiful. Homes for the home-less, who'da thought that'd work better than spending $25K/capita pushing them around all year long? "... housing comes first, services later. Clients do have to pay some rent — either 30 percent of income or up to $50 a month, whichever is greater." And those homes don't have to be big, sprawling, 1000-footers either. An address, bathing, electric, a share in the cost ... is a leg up and a way to escape the terrors. Has to be a hell of a relief.
- linuxftw 7y agoUS public housing projects are some of the most dangerous places on the planet. We need to give the common person a path out of poverty that doesn't involve higher education. Once those people are able to move up the ladder, those at the very bottom (homeless) will be able to move up as well.
- dgzl 7y agoComparing other countries'policies to our own is like saying "but it works on mycomputer". There are too many differences in culture, rights and laws to just pretend that if something works over there, then it should work here too.
- OldSchoolJohnny 7y agoThis annoys me to no end; so is this intended to make sure no one does anything about a serious problem with this Whataboutism? Or is it intended to make us care less? What exactly is the purpose of this kind of comment? Why on earth wouldn't it work?
- dgzl 7y agoThe literal foundations and functions of government are different between the countries, as are the rights that the residents have. It's like trying to copy a Windows program into OSX. You can't just use the .exe, the best you can do is rewrite the entire thing and hope the new OS will even support needs of the software. Personally, I'm really against the idea of just giving folks free stuff as a benefit. I grew up poor and my parents are on all the social programs you can think of, and none of them help in the way they're intended to. The government turns everything into an expensive cluster-f and doesn't ever fix the root problem. No, simple band-aids are not the answer.
- 1290cc 7y agoI don't agree that every solution Finland or Iceland comes up with can be replicated to the rest of the world. These are ethnically homogenous countries with a small population and the majority of which is centered in a small area. Swedens perfect approach to education in the 2000's has now been debunked and even the swedes are telling everyone not to do what they did! I think the same would be true of Finlands "solution". The US by contrast is a continent in its own right with a vastly diverse set of people and cultures. My own experience of the bay area is people are extremely giving and donate a lot of money and time towards homeless efforts. However I feel the latest backlash is born from fatigue towards no solution in sight. If homeless refuse to accept help or seek alternative options to sleeping on the street why would you want to keep helping? I am still stunned that the tiny city of San Francisco had a $300m annual budget to help less than 5000 people. Thats $60k/homeless person, this is greater than the per capita GDP of every single country on earth except the US. Anecdotally I have a guy living in his car on my street that is filled to the ceiling with trash, he refuses to move or get into a shelter despite us trying to help him. Sadly the neighbors on the street are starting to sour towards him after 6 months of having social workers reach out to help and various charities try to assist.
- kjeetgill 7y agoI'm no pro on the subject but it's always worth remembering that statements of this form are almost always wrong: "300m annual budget to help less than 5000 people. That's $60k/homeless person" Maybe you have a killer source and I'm out of line, but the usual issues is that these numbers almost never come from one comprehensive study or source. You can't just grab two numbers without context and divide them to say anything meaningful. What exactly is that 300m/yr spent on? How many people did it successfully get off the streets or prevent from ending up there? How many new homeless people arrived over that same time span? I don't have a meaningful answer to these questions and I'm sure you're right that there are better ways that the money can be spent. It's just that those numbers can be absolutely accurate and still fail to be a meaningful way to understand the problem.
- sroussey 7y agoYou should look into the efforts of people trying to get a public audit of where that money goes. At that budget (now doubling), lots of companies and non-profits live on that. And some homeless.
- Bodhisattya 7y agoThe solution to homelessness is {drum rolls} giving people homes. Who knew? I am not partial to 'handout' economy, but one wonders where did capitalism go wrong.