https://www.economist.com/europe/2019/12/18/finland-has-slashed-homelessness-the-rest-of-europe-is-failing

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[                    ]
[20191221_EUP001_0]

Oh give me a home
Finland has slashed homelessness; the rest of Europe is failing

Giving the homeless shelter is cheaper than dealing with the
consequences of rough sleeping

EuropeDec 21st 2019 edition
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Dec 21st 2019

HELSINKI AND PARIS

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TUYA'S COLLECTION of bongs occupies an entire bookshelf in her
immaculate little flat, though she does not smoke marijuana--she just
likes the way they look. Her weaknesses, alcohol and pills, landed
her in a homeless shelter in Helsinki for three years. But since 2018
she has had an apartment of her own, thanks to a strategy called
"housing first" with which Finland has all but eliminated
homelessness.

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Akbar has no such luck. Last month the Afghan migrant stood in the
mud of a camp outside Paris, brushing his teeth at a hose that served
as a communal shower. For two months Akbar had been living in a tent
city of 3,500 Asian and African migrants, hoping to apply for refugee
status.

Tuya and Akbar are at opposite ends of Europe's growing homelessness
problem. Finland is the only European country where the numbers are
not rising. In other rich welfare states, escalating housing costs
are pushing more people into homeless shelters. In countries with
weak social services, many end up on the street. And everywhere,
migrants with the wrong papers fall through the cracks.

Statistics on homelessness are patchy, but dispiriting. In 2010-18
the French government doubled the spaces in emergency accommodation
to 146,000, yet cannot meet demand. In Spain the number in shelters
rose by 20.5% between 2014 and 2016. In the Netherlands homelessness
has doubled in the past decade. In Ireland, the number in shelters
has tripled. The German government estimates homelessness rose by 4%
in 2018 to a record 678,000, most of them migrants. All this has
thrown a spanner into governments' plans. For years, they have been
trying to shift from providing beds for the night to housing-first
strategies like Finland's. Instead they are struggling to keep people
off the streets.

The housing-first approach got its start in North America in the
1990s. Previously social-service agencies used a "staircase" model:
to qualify for a subsidised flat, homeless people first had to
control their behavioural problems (such as addiction, petty crime or
mental illness). In the meantime they had to sleep in shelters.

But being homeless makes it hard to quit drugs or crime. Shelters are
often dangerous, because they are full of desperate people. Some
homeless folk prefer to sleep rough, though that is risky. Street
sleepers are often robbed and often get ill. When American and
Canadian cities tried first giving homeless people a place to live
and then working on behavioural problems, the approach saved more
money on police, jails, shelters and health care than it cost.

In 2008 Finland became the first European country to embrace housing
first. The number of long-term homeless has since fallen by 21% to
about 5,500. (This includes those in shelters; the number sleeping
rough in Finland is negligible, as they would die of cold.)
Chronically homeless people were shifted from hostels to flats with
contracts under their own names. They pay rent with the help of
government benefits. The government saves EUR15,000 ($16,500) per year
in overall spending on each homeless person it houses. Hostels can be
counterproductive, says Juha Kaakinen of Y-Foundation, the country's
biggest social-housing group: they "create a kind of culture of
homelessness".

The complex where Tuya lives, run by the Salvation Army, is
classified as "supported housing". There are 20 staff for the 87
residents. Each flat has a kitchen, and there is a jolly communal
cafe. Social workers keep track of each resident's problems and run
work activities. Every year a few graduate to less dependent housing,
but expectations are modest, says Antti Martikainen, the complex's
director. Persuading a troublesome resident to stop dropping rubbish
out of the window is a win.

All this takes resources. Finland has hired hundreds of new social
workers. In 2017 it built more subsidised public housing for
low-income renters (over 7,000 units) than England, with a population
one-tenth the size. Still, in a small, wealthy country to which few
poor people move, it appears that homelessness is solvable.

Can big countries do the same? In France, the national emergency
shelter hotline (number 115) gets 20,000 calls per day. Paris's
annual "solidarity night", when volunteers systematically scour the
city to count everyone sleeping rough, found 3,622 people in February
this year.

The poor face rising rents and precarious employment, says Bruno
Morel of Emmaus Solidarite, a housing organisation. Each year from
November 1st to March 31st France bars landlords from evicting
tenants, and this year the Paris region created an extra 7,000
temporary winter shelter places. But Mr Morel says it needs 10,000.

Another problem is the split between native homeless, for whom
municipalities are responsible, and migrants, who fall under the
national government. Dominique Versini, Paris's deputy mayor for
solidarity, blames the state for the migrant camps: when the city
tried to set up a reception centre to house them, she says, the
government blocked it. (In November it closed the camps and moved the
migrants to temporary shelters farther out.)

Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor, converted the reception hall of
Paris's Hotel de Ville into a shelter for 39 homeless women. Visiting
dignitaries brush shoulders with women recovering from addiction and
abuse. Ms Hidalgo has also strengthened Paris's rent controls. The
move keeps current homes cheaper but may discourage private firms
from building new ones. The city is building 7,500 new social-housing
units a year, but Mr Morel says too few are for the very poor.

Germany is more proactive at sheltering migrants than France. But its
public housing stock has shrunk dramatically: houses built with
government aid can be freely sold or rented out after 30 years.
Berlin, which had 360,000 social-housing units in the 1990s, now has
just 100,000. Rents have doubled in the past decade. As in Paris, the
city government has capped rent increases.

Europe's homelessness problem combines two issues. Public-housing
construction has slowed, and rents are rising fast, because red tape
makes it so hard to build in many cities. Meanwhile, illegal
immigration creates a homeless population many countries are
unwilling to house. That is sabotaging the shift to housing first.
France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and others have all committed
to the policy. But their programmes remain a patchwork of local
initiatives and pilots. "Why pilot it when you know that it works?"
asks Mr Martikainen, the director of Tuya's building in Helsinki. In
most of Europe, things are not so simple. #

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition
under the headline "Oh give me a home"

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