[HN Gopher] Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)
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Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)
Author : zdw
Score : 280 points
Date : 2025-01-10 15:53 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (oecdecoscope.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (oecdecoscope.blog)
| Carrok wrote:
| > In the United Kingdom, for instance, people who had been living
| on the streets or in shelters were housed in individual
| accommodations in a matter of days.
|
| So it was always possible. We just didn't care to do so.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| it was striking to see Hong Kong in the British-law phase..
| there used to be social layers including homeless and "boat
| people" but the British changed that .. under the British law,
| every single person and every single place to sleep was
| counted, numbered, licensed and taxed.
| mmooss wrote:
| Didn't the British control Hong Kong from the mid-19th
| century until the 1990s?
| ipaddr wrote:
| When they refuse to go inside do you jail them? Some cities
| with big hearts have been through this before.
| Carrok wrote:
| Everything won't be perfect immediately, so let's do nothing
| instead! /s
| lostlogin wrote:
| It's an interesting phenomenon that seems universal. People
| point to any failure anywhere in a system and then right it
| off in its entirety.
|
| Is there every a system of any sort that someone doesn't
| try to exploit?
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Depends on circumstances. IE, if someone's camping in the
| woods, who cares. But, if someone is camping in a public
| park, or on someone's doorstep, or in a tunnel, than that's a
| different story.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| And then we told ourselves it wasn't possible so we could sleep
| at night.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I get the impression "individual accommodations" were hotel
| rooms; and the goal was _also_ to subsidize hotels that had no
| business due to the pandemic.
|
| Housing homeless people in hotels is not sustainable. (It's
| also overkill, as adequate shelter doesn't need to be a motel
| with a queen bed. It can be a much smaller room and still be
| humane.)
| philip1209 wrote:
| Worth pointing out that Finland is one of the most ethnically
| homogeneous societies in Europe - only ~10% of the population is
| of foreign origin and background [1]. So, like Japan, it's easier
| to have a high-trust society if you eschew immigration.
|
| Edit: Just to be clear, I'm very pro-immigration. I just think
| that studying rich homogeneous societies doesn't result in many
| useful takeaways for countries like the USA.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Finland#:~:tex....
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Controversial, but worth considering. I believe societies have
| different capacities for assimilation (changing immigrants) and
| appropriation (changing themselves), with the hallmark of any
| era's great societies being their ability to maximise both.
|
| That said, the evidence is mixed [1], with fairness and
| economic inequality [2][3] seeming to matter more than racial
| homogeneity. (Lots of tiny, racially-homogenous societies-high
| trust or not-bordering each other also have a one-way
| historical track record.)
|
| [1]
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000169931772161...
|
| [2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/23324182
|
| [3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7454994/
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| A very often ignored fact is the _cultural_ homogeneity. I do
| not thing racial homogeneity is of any benefit whatsoever,
| but I do believe that cultural is.
|
| When someone raised in a culture where cheating to win by any
| means is acceptable (most of India) or where bartering,
| persuading and microfrauding in trade (most of Middle east
| and sup-sahara Africa) is not frowned upon, it is not a
| stretch to imagine that the introduction of such cultural
| elements will lead to dilution of the overall interpersonal
| trust in let's say, Swedish society.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Putnam found a linear correlation between diversity and
| social trust.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| Putnam indeed reported a correlation between the _mean
| herfindahl index of ethnic homogeneity_ and trust in
| societies (both own-race trust, other race trust &
| neighbour trust).
|
| If you had actually read the paper (which I have), you
| would realise that the relationship between ethnic
| diversity and social trust is inverse.
| smegsicle wrote:
| i think you've got it backwards- the xenophobia of so called
| 'high trust' bigots are holding back the global society of our
| future, and their low homelessness is in reality an unfair
| burden on other more troubled countries
| magixx wrote:
| Romania has very similar ethnically homogenous population at
| 89.3% [1] and I can definitely say that this factor does not
| directly lead to a high trust society. I suspect there are
| quite a few other countries with similar makeups that don't
| result in outcomes similar to Finland/Japan.
|
| While homogeneity may play a factor I think it's dwarved by
| other things. [1]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Romania
| philip1209 wrote:
| Finland has almost 3x the GDP per capita as Romania [1]. I
| think being rich (i.e., good social programs) accounts for
| the trust gap.
|
| https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/finland/romania
| jltsiren wrote:
| Finland was traditionally a very homogeneous society, and
| immigration before ~1990 was negligible. But then there was a
| burst of immigration from the former USSR and Somalia, followed
| by a gradual increase over the decades. And in 2023 (and likely
| in 2024), net immigration was >1% of the population and
| exceeded births.
| morbicer wrote:
| No idea how it's relevant. For example in USA, I bet the
| overwhelming majority of homeless are citizens born in USA, not
| immigrants.
|
| In my central European country with high ethnic homogenity the
| unhoused are also stemming from majority population. There is a
| Roma minority who are often struggling with poverty but are
| rarely unhoused.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _in USA, I bet the overwhelming majority of homeless are
| citizens born in USA, not immigrants_
|
| Correct.
|
| "There was no significant difference in rates of lifetime
| adult homelessness between foreign-born adults and native-
| born adults (1.0% vs 1.7%). Foreign-born participants were
| less likely to have various mental and substance-use
| disorders, less likely to receive welfare, and less likely to
| have any lifetime incarceration." ("The foreign-born
| population was 46.2 million (13.9% of the total population)"
| in 2022 [2].)
|
| [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30739834/
|
| [2] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-
| releases/2024/foreign-...
| barbazoo wrote:
| > it's easier to have a high-trust society if you eschew
| immigration.
|
| citation needed
| ipaddr wrote:
| You need a citation for you to understand people with similar
| customs/religious believes, similar dna have a higher trust
| society than a cities of unknown elements?
| itishappy wrote:
| Yes. It sounds right, but many subtly wrong things often
| do. At the very least, a measurement of the effect strength
| would be nice. For instance, is a homogenous society a
| stronger or weaker signal than GDP?
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| So you mean GDP per capita?
| itishappy wrote:
| I do indeed, thanks.
| mmooss wrote:
| Yes!
| jas39 wrote:
| This is extremely relevant. Finland is basically Sweden without
| mass migration. The cracks in our society that the multi-culti
| ideology has opened up is difficult for an American to
| comprehend, because you never experienced the benefits of a
| true monoculture.
| goodpoint wrote:
| citation needed
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| So are there other techniques for fixing homelessness that work
| in these so-called "low-trust" societies?
| justin66 wrote:
| > Worth pointing out that Finland is one of the most ethnically
| homogeneous societies in Europe - only ~10% of the population
| is of foreign origin and background
|
| Meh. They've got two different official languages. It's not as
| ethnically uniform as a lot of other European countries.
| tuukkah wrote:
| We also have an indigenous people, the Sami (who are not
| always treated that well).
| ttkari wrote:
| FWIW, the share of Swedish (the other official language)
| speakers in Finland is about 5%.
| justin66 wrote:
| And the language is nevertheless recognized as one of the
| country's two official languages.
|
| I just don't think Finland is a great example of what the
| post was talking about (a mythic country where everything
| works because it is an "ethnically homogenous high trust
| society" - although on reflection I'm not even sure what
| that all means). It's a way of lazily discounting what
| their government might or might not be achieving regarding
| homelessness, and it's not even true.
|
| I'm not any sort of expert on Finland, but they have had
| some real political and social divides over the years and
| (I think?) nevertheless manage to care about the
| effectiveness of their welfare state. They'd appear to be a
| counterexample to the notion that everybody in a country
| needs to be the same in order for this stuff to work.
| rs999gti wrote:
| In the article, I did not see anything about mental illness or
| addicts. How did FI solve for those people?
|
| Both groups have people who want to be homeless, so they can be
| left alone.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Probably close to zero people want to be homeless per se.
|
| What happens is that people are unwilling or unable to accept
| the terms of housing offered, like for example strict sobriety,
| or not allowing pets. Family housing is also rare, and I don't
| think it's fair to say someone choosing to be homeless with
| their spouse over housed separately miles away from each other
| "wants to be homeless."
|
| If people are consistently declining the aid we're offering,
| that's a problem we can address. It is our fault, not theirs.
| samspot wrote:
| "unwilling or unable" is extremely key. I recall a US Senator
| talking about his son who has schizophrenia. The father would
| pay for an apartment for his son, no strings attached, and
| still find him sleeping in the street.
|
| It may be possible to "solve" homelessness for some majority
| of people. But I doubt 100% is ever humanly achievable. At
| least, not without some massive breakthrough in understanding
| and intervention for mental illnesses.
| metalman wrote:
| So we build semi-automomous free zones, where the
| infrastructure is essentialy indistructable,anyone can get a
| lockable secure space, and the violent sociopaths, are picked
| off. Facets from other proven models could include, a work for
| drunks program, like in some german areas, they get to clean
| the streets they hang out on, and are a sort of invisible
| "watch". Free "heroine" , for any and all who check into a
| controlled access facility. The real ferrals are just a fact,
| but are very easy to spot so the threat level is lower, but as
| they dont have adequate shelter, see point #1, they congregate
| in more southerly areas, and or, get into trouble trying to
| survive in northern areas. I have lived on the edge, for most
| of my life, seen a lot of wild things, in a lot of different
| places, and the story is that people just want to be seen and
| accepted, there, in the moment. Those moments are impossible to
| predict or create with any kind of predictability or
| repeatability. All ww can do is build the places, where that
| can happen, or not, and its "even", everybody can walk away, If
| nothing works, then there is the road, and that needs to be ok,
| and no one is a "vagrant" as they got a place to go. nobody is
| stuck.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Both groups have people who want to be homeless, so they can
| be left alone_
|
| Why can't they be left alone in a home?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| disruptive behavior
|
| A working mom with a 2 year old doesnt want to live next door
| to violent actors and drug dealers.
|
| More specifically, I think the US is unwilling to distinguish
| between lawful and unlawfully behaving poor, and segregate
| them accordingly when providing shelter.
| kansface wrote:
| They destroy it.
| mmooss wrote:
| > I did not see anything about mental illness or addicts
|
| Maybe it's not actually a problem. Maybe it's another way to
| promote fear, hate, division, and cynicism about social
| spending.
| octopusRex wrote:
| The US chooses not to end homelessness. We have the highest GDP
| in the world. We could end it if we wanted to.
|
| I was in Japan recently. A choice was made there as well.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The US could end homelessness but would need to stop
| immigration and change the constitution which could force
| people in shelter. Not sure it's the outcome we all want.
| barbazoo wrote:
| That's your assumption. Instead, mine is that it would
| require some kind of wealth transfer to pay for the social
| services.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Paying for the social services is possible. The difficult
| issue is some people don't want to go to a homeless shelter
| because they want to maintain a level of freedom while
| others fear they will be robbed/raped at the shelter.
|
| Do you force them inside?
| barbazoo wrote:
| > The difficult issue is some people don't want to go to
| a homeless shelter because they want to maintain a level
| of freedom while others fear they will be robbed/raped at
| the shelter.
|
| A bit of a strawman, social service doesn't have to mean
| homeless shelter, so no, no one is forcing anyone to do
| anything. Problem is in many places at least where I
| live, there just isn't enough money to serve all the
| people that need the various levels of help.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Homeless people go to homeless shelters from that point
| they could go into secondary housing or other programs.
|
| In my city they wanted to end homelessness 25 years ago.
| They had enough money to do so and went ahead. They found
| a 1/3 refused to come in even on the coldest days for
| various reasons. The fight became do you let them stay
| and sleep on the street or do you force them into
| shelters/jails.
|
| What is more humane? The let's leave them on the street
| but send people to feed them approach won over the
| forcible removals.
|
| So homelessness remained.
|
| When people say they want to end homelessness I don't
| think they realize they need to jail some of them.
| marssaxman wrote:
| Simpler than that: just roll back the restrictive zoning
| codes which have been making sufficient development
| infeasible for many years, thus creating a steadily growing
| housing deficit. When laws have turned the housing market
| into a game of musical chairs, _someone_ is guaranteed to be
| left outside.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I'm often skeptical of simple solutions like this. They
| tend to assume that the regulation causes the problem, but
| when looked at more critically, it's clear that the
| regulation is a formalization of a combination of consumer
| & business preference.
|
| For example, Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE)
| regulations. If you get into the gritty details, you'll
| find that they have a whole bunch ofloopholes that seem to
| favor larger trucks & SUVs. Many people will point to these
| regulation as _causing_ people to buy light trucks & SUVs,
| but the data seems to suggest consumers prefer to buy these
| vehicles and auto manufacture prefer to sell them (they are
| extremely profitable). I postulate that, if CAFE
| requirements were eliminated, the best selling vehicle in
| the USA would continue to be the F-series and other trucks
| and SUVs would continue to dominate the top 10, because the
| regulations are influenced by consumer preference, not the
| other way around.
|
| I think the same logic applies to zoning. People largely
| want to own single family homes (SFH) in the suburbs;
| builders largely want to build SFHs in the suburbs. There's
| no reason to believe that changes in zoning will cause a
| meaningful shift in consumer and business preference. In
| the handful of ultra expensive metro areas, sure it might
| move the needle because economics trump preference, but in
| most of the USA, there's plenty of space to build housing.
| It's hard to imagine a developer in Pittsburgh choosing to
| build housing in an industrial area in the city over some
| empty land on the outskirts.
| marssaxman wrote:
| I appreciate your skepticism! The proposition that rates
| of homelessness are primarily driven by housing costs has
| actually been well supported in research - this Pew
| article contains many useful references:
|
| https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-
| analysis/articles/...
|
| As per econ 101, high prices are a function of scarcity
| relative to demand: we can reasonably claim that
| regulations which restrict housing development, which by
| their nature _must_ increase scarcity and therefore
| housing costs, therefore also lead to increased rates of
| homelessness.
|
| > In the handful of ultra expensive metro areas, sure it
| might move the needle
|
| That's a good point, but those are exactly the places
| which have significant homelessness problems.
|
| In general, this is not a housing preference issue,
| because opposition to upzoning does not come from people
| who aspire to live in single-family homes, but from
| people who already own them. This is a typical example:
|
| https://www.change.org/p/whittier-neighbors-against-
| seattle-...
|
| As usual with these things, the complaints include a
| cloud of nitpicky nonsense surrounding a central concern
| over "neighborhood character", which is a polite way of
| saying "we don't want apartment-dwelling poor people
| coming to live near us".
| toss1 wrote:
| >>which is a polite way of saying "we don't want
| apartment-dwelling poor people coming to live near us".
|
| NO, it is most definitely NOT that.
|
| It is overwhelmingly exactly what people say it is --
| maintaining the character of a neighborhood that everyone
| there has paid higher cost of entry, cost of taxes, and
| cost and time of maintenance and upgrades to maintain.
| Don't make claims in areas where you have zero knowledge
| just because you think it helps your point.
|
| I'm in a small sub-/ex-urban town with a rural character
| which has zoning, and have been involved in local issues.
| I've never met a single person who feels the way you
| claim (although there are surely a few examples
| somewhere). No one looks down on the low income ppl who
| are here because their families were here before housing
| started to get tight and expensive. Most everyone either
| grew up here or came specifically because they _WANT_ to
| live in a quieter area, have some wildlife, maintain
| gardens, etc. No one is avoiding poor people, they are
| SEEKING quiet and green spaces where you can do outdoor
| activities.
|
| Moreover, saying that zoning in locales like this should
| be changed to accommodate low-income high-density housing
| is just stupid. Yes, the current homeowners could get
| rich subdividing their properties, razing the trees and
| putting up condos. Great, maybe you get a lower-income
| population. But getting ANYWHERE useful from here, even
| groceries or convenience stores, is a 5-10 mile car ride,
| and the rail station to the big city is 25min away by
| car. Any low income person is now condemned to replace
| housing expenses with car expenses, purchase/lease,
| maintenance, insurance, fuel, etc.. And, they now have a
| big commute reducing their time available.
|
| It is really simple to just blame other people and yell
| "they're just greedy!", and it surely makes you feel
| better and more righteous.
|
| It is much harder to actually figure out complex problems
| and create solutions that work.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The groceries and convenience stores and so on will
| naturally appear once density increases if they are
| allowed to. It's a non issue.
|
| I'm sympathetic to your plight seeing the character of
| your neighborhood change if public housing is built, but
| society has to balance it against the plight of people
| who are forced to change their neighborhood due to
| poverty, and on the balance their plight is simply worse
| than yours.
|
| Unlike them, in such a scenario, you get to sell your
| land whose value now increased and go somewhere else with
| similar attribute.
|
| Any society that cannot make this obvious decision to
| inconvenience some to save others is doomed to failure.
| fragmede wrote:
| > groceries and convenience stores and so on will
| naturally appear
|
| I'm sorry, but that's not how that works. not if you
| really want it to happen. There's conversations between
| high level government officials and corporate execs to
| make things happen. negotiations are had, and contracts
| are signed. theres a city planning agency that has a CPC.
|
| All of that is to say, there's entire industry just in
| the planning of cities. while we're building housing for
| the homeless, let's _also_ engage them and build a viable
| town and start with that, and not just build the center
| square with hope and wishes. (Hope is not a strategy.)
| sudosysgen wrote:
| There is an entire industry for planning cities, yes. And
| public housing bypasses most of that industry.
|
| It's just a simple fact that if you have a large
| population center, and market demand for it, basic things
| like grocery stores and convenience stores will pop up.
| Not every grocery store and convenience store is run by a
| large chain that negotiates with the government for a
| location, if you believe that's the case you are missing
| knowledge of that industry.
|
| This isn't a hypothetical, things like this have been
| done. Just because we are overcomplicating it doesn't
| mean it has to be.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yes, and even if they do magically popup, the grocery
| stores will STILL be a drive for everyone. And stores for
| every other supply, and the _JOBS_ , will be a
| significant drive away.
|
| So, you will have just condemned every poor person you
| transplanted to now buying, maintaining, and insuring an
| automobile or several for each family. A constantly
| depreciating asset. Which may well cost more than they
| saved in rent.
|
| "Oh, just put in public transit", you'll say. Have you
| ever looked at any suburban/rural bus service? They only
| run infrequently, and often unreliably on time, and are
| so now the poor people must squander massive hours of
| their day just waiting on the busses, or configuring
| their schedule around the busses.
|
| No one else is overcomplicating it. You are massively
| oversimplifying it, waving your hands about, and being
| very loud about proclaiming your virtuous non-solution.
| Stop it, and think more.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| > Yes, and even if they do magically popup, the grocery
| stores will STILL be a drive for everyone. And stores for
| every other supply, and the JOBS, will be a significant
| drive away.
|
| There is basically nowhere a family can pay less for rent
| that the price of upkeeping a beater car - the residents
| were going to have a car either way. There's just not
| enough public transit in the US to avoid this reality
| outside of cities with high rent, especially for
| apartments large enough for a family.
| toss1 wrote:
| Where we are talking about areas that are already almost
| entirely paved with sidewalks and minimal trees or yards,
| etc., then we agree -- there's no environment to preserve
| -- it is just the character of the human-only habitat.
| converting this from single-family postage stamp lots to
| high-rise apartments is in most cases a reasonable
| tradeoff.
|
| But NO, you obviously do not understand, let alone have
| any sympathy for, preserving environment and habitat. It
| is not merely inconvenient, what you propose is death for
| everything from the insects, birds, flora, fauna, and
| 50-year-old endangered turtle living in the wetland
| behind my neighborhood. Paving paradise and putting up a
| parking lot is not a solution.
|
| Beyond that, you are proposing to literally steal
| uncounted millions of dollars of built-up value. Everyone
| in this area has willingly paid large amounts of extra
| costs and far higher taxes to maintain its character,
| purchase lands for greenspace preservation, trails, etc.
| It is not mere inconvenience you are talking about, it is
| literally stealing all of that extra value, and handing
| it to the developers who will strip the land and put up
| (almost universally shitty quality) buildings and
| pavement. You need to compensate the residents who will
| be displaced, not merely hand their value over to the
| developers, destroy the habitat and "inconvenience" the
| current residents.
|
| Moreover, even if grocery and convenience stores "popup"
| with demand, they will still require cars to get to for
| almost everyone. It also fails solve the problem of where
| will be the JOBS or any other supplies. Most things will
| still be a significant drive away, and you've just solved
| one problem (lower housing cost) to add another -- the
| requirement to spend money on multiple automobiles per
| family. And the added pollution and resource usage.
|
| Your problem is you think there is a single simple
| solution that applies everywhere. You are wrong.
|
| In some cases, it is a great solution. In others, you are
| literally destroying everything to gain nothing, because
| you can't be bothered to think about it more deeply. Any
| society doing that is doomed to failure.
| marssaxman wrote:
| > Moreover, saying that zoning in locales like this
| should be changed to accommodate low-income high-density
| housing is just stupid.
|
| It's a good thing I am not talking about locales like
| yours, then; unless your small town has a
| demographically-improbable homelessness problem, akin to
| the ones you see in big cities whose history of
| inadequate development due to strict zoning regulation
| has created a persistent housing crunch, nothing I said
| pertains to you.
|
| > It is overwhelmingly exactly what people say it is --
| maintaining the character of a neighborhood that everyone
| there has paid higher cost of entry, cost of taxes, and
| cost and time of maintenance and upgrades to maintain.
|
| You're not making this point of view sound any more
| appealing by defining "the character of a neighborhood"
| entirely in terms of money.
| JamesLeonis wrote:
| There are 10 million empty homes [0] and ~700,000 homeless.
| No matter how you slice those numbers you still have more
| empty housing stock than homeless right now.
|
| [0]:
| https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf
| (page 4)
| EA-3167 wrote:
| You're assuming that the major challenge is the lack of a
| home, because the term we choose to use as an umbrella
| implies that. For some people it's even true, but they tend
| not to be CHRONICALLY homeless, and that's the population
| of major concern. Chronically homeless people have
| extremely high rates of mental illness and substance abuse;
| depending on how you slice it, a third or more are
| schizophrenic or something similar.
|
| Those are not people you can just stick into a house and
| wish them well, they need serious help for many years. In
| most cases that help isn't there, or comes with strings (no
| drugs, no alcohol) that they refuse to accept. Homelessness
| in the US is in many respect a mental health and substance
| abuse issue, exacerbated in the post-Reagan era when our
| mental health system was gutted and weakened.
|
| If you want to reach those people and keep them off the
| streets, you need more than just empty houses.
| itishappy wrote:
| Chronically homeless make up about a quarter to a third
| of the US homeless population.
|
| https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/20
| 23-...
| EA-3167 wrote:
| That's true, but they make up a disproportionate number
| of the "visible homeless" that people encounter in camps,
| taking drugs on the street, etc. A lot of homeless people
| are at a low point in their lives, but use the systems
| offered to them and dig themselves back out. That's why
| they aren't CHRONICALLY homeless.
|
| They don't represent the same kind of societal problem
| that poor students, broke divorcees, and people moving
| through rough patches do. They also don't represent a
| single population that needs help they aren't provided
| with already, unlike the chronically homeless.
| erehweb wrote:
| If you're saying that "homeless" means something other
| than not having a home, that seems unnecessarily
| confusing. Re strings - I believe there has been some
| success in providing no-strings housing and then working
| on the other problems.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| It's a broad term, just like "Sick" can mean anything
| from having a seasonal cold, to terminal cancer. The
| causes vary, the prognoses vary, the treatments vary.
| Talking about "Sickness" without specifics is profoundly
| unhelpful.
|
| Same with homelessness.
| stevenicr wrote:
| My first read of this document leads me to believe that
| there are only about 341,000 housing units available for
| rent, there are some for sale at an average price of
| $373,000.. but many or most of the empty housing units are
| like second homes and such and not 'available'.
|
| So we have 350k open units and 700k people without homes,
| average rent is around $1500..
|
| just looking at the data my guess is that we have about
| 700k people who don't have an extra 2 grand every month to
| put into housing. (and I think it's way higher personally,
| maybe not counting the couch surfing relatives who can't
| afford their own place, and others who are living in over
| crowded situations of basements )-
|
| I'm sure there is much more to it than the averages, like a
| lot of the homeless are in areas where the average rent is
| much higher and 1500 - and the few places where rent is
| $800 likely has less homeless, (and also has less other
| things like jobs and public transit) -
|
| and really if it is 10 million or a quarter a million empty
| places, I don't see how that matters if no one can afford
| any of them.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Those houses sitting empty with no-one in them is exactly
| why the price of rent is so high. The supply is there but
| it's being hoarded by 1% of the population. Write laws
| that would force people to rent out their secondary
| houses, condos and apartments (with the threat of having
| it seized if they don't) and watch the prices immediately
| start to fall.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| It's not 1% of the population hoarding the empty houses.
| It's your elderly relatives.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| What does that mean for the next steps?
|
| Does the government eminent domain the houses, arrest the
| homeless, and then ship them out to Detroit or wherever the
| surplus houses are?
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| The "surplus houses" are not just in Detroit but also
| around Central Park, NY, where people buy them as
| investment.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| so what is the operational theory then?
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| one can describe the situation and its causes without
| prescribing solutions
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Don't seem so suggest a cause unless they can be
| connected
| JamesLeonis wrote:
| Housing as infrastructure, like roads and electricity.
|
| We will exit an era where housing prices always rise,
| because both taxes and insurance will become
| unaffordable. I see a combination of publicly managed
| apartments (like Germany or Austria) with a much smaller
| private market for houses. The end-game is housing
| managed like infrastructure, with most of it publicly
| managed but a few privately managed/owned houses for
| unique or highly desirable spaces.
|
| There is also a crisis in affordability of apartments,
| with a report [0] showing a collapse in lower-cost
| apartments that is partially driving homelessness. It is
| especially hard for fixed-income folks.
|
| > arrest the homeless
|
| Most homeless are working homeless. They crash with
| friends and family, or they live in their cars/trailers.
| Others are pushed to the periphery or out of their job
| market entirely; San Fransisco's struggle for service
| workers is a reflection of this trend, but it's hardly
| unique to the Bay Area. We need workers for just about
| everything, and those workers need a place to stay.
|
| While this won't solve street-level homelessness, right
| now most homeless programs cannot move recovering people
| into permanent housing due to affordability and
| shortages. There are long waitlists right now for
| _Housing and Urban Development_ subsidized housing
| because of the shortages. There are camp grounds or
| shelters, but those are only temporary. Having more stock
| available also means these homeless programs can provide
| much needed stability for recovering people and get them
| away from places /people that might cause them to
| relapse.
|
| > Does the government eminent domain the houses
|
| I see a collapse in house prices, and that might cause
| private equity to dump a bunch of housing stock into the
| market. To prevent a total collapse government would step
| in and be a buyer-of-last-resort, which will kickstart
| the publicly managed housing initiative. Another is
| insurance, where private insurers step away leaving
| governments to either rebuild after disaster or face a
| new homeless crisis. There's also banks holding a lot of
| mortgage paper that can go underwater forcing another
| intervention.
|
| I see plenty of cases of market dysfunction that requires
| government to step in without explicitly eminent domain,
| which is why I see housing-as-infrastructure becoming the
| 21st century solution.
|
| [0]: https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/press-releases/new-
| report-shows...
| Qwertious wrote:
| There could be a ghost town with 50 million homes in the
| middle of the desert, but if there are no grocery stores or
| jobs there then homeless people can't move there.
|
| The raw number of empty houses is irrelevant. Especially
| when some of those houses are temporarily uninhabitable,
| e.g. houses being renovated, or houses in LA right now near
| the wildfires.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _US could end homelessness but would need to stop
| immigration and change the constitution which could force
| people in shelter_
|
| Immigrants are a tiny fraction of the homeless [1]. And we've
| tried criminalising homelessness; incarceration is forced
| shelter and incredibly expensive.
|
| [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30739834/
| stevenicr wrote:
| according to that 'adults participating in the National
| Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions' ..
| It also says foreign born is 1% vs native at 1.7% - so they
| are both 'a tiny fraction'
|
| Whether or not a large percentage, or a large number or
| small number of immigrants are homeless or not,
|
| one must assume that if 11 million people left the US next
| month, the price of rent in many places may go down a bit,
| and some currently unhoused people might be able to afford
| a cheaper place.
|
| Of course another side is that wages in some industries
| will rise, and that may put more people into a position
| where they can afford an apartment.
|
| What I'd like to see is how inexpensive optional housing
| can be made.
| ipaddr wrote:
| In Canada the majority of shelter beds go to refugee
| claimants. I believe it is highly like many illegals in the
| US are homeless and make up the majority of homeless
| people. They are not part of the numbers you provided.
| mmooss wrote:
| > In Canada the majority of shelter beds go to refugee
| claimants.
|
| Is there data someplace that shows it?
|
| > I believe it is highly like
|
| I believe that angry gods cause rain. What does it
| matter?
| lostlogin wrote:
| In 2022, the majority (90.3%) of shelter users were
| Canadian citizens, which has been the case for all years
| of analysis since 2015. The proportion of refugees and
| refugee claimants in the shelter system was 2.0% in 2022,
| up from 2021 (0.9%) but down compared to pre-pandemic
| (2019, 4.1%). Pandemic travel restrictions in 2020 and
| 2021 may have contributed to a decrease in the number of
| asylum claims, with a partial recovery in 2022.
|
| https://housing-infrastructure.canada.ca/homelessness-
| sans-a...
| ipaddr wrote:
| As of March 2023, refugees and asylum seekers made up 30%
| of the total population in Toronto's municipal shelter
| system. At that point they were upto 2,900 but that
| number has risen to over 4,200.
|
| There was a 400+% increase in 2023.
|
| https://www.toronto.ca/news/city-of-toronto-update-on-
| shelte...
|
| https://www.google.com/amp/s/globalnews.ca/news/10933673/
| tor...
| 15155 wrote:
| What impact do you suppose this population has on housing
| costs?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| How could the United States end homelessness? It is a mix of
| federal government, state governments, and
| local/county/municipal governments. The level of government
| best suited to do the actual work is hamstrung... if any one
| city fixes homelessness (somehow), more homeless will show up.
| If they do that again for the new arrivals, more homeless show
| up.
|
| The first to solve it is punished with tens of thousands of
| newly arriving homeless who, as you might imagine, will find a
| way to get there if it means not being homeless anymore. But
| budgets are finite and the cost per homeless must he higher
| than zero, but in a practical sense the number of homeless
| aren't entirely finite.
|
| If you start from the other end, with the feds, then you might
| as well hold your breath. Homelessness is so far down the list
| of priorities, that even if it somehow did bubble to the top,
| the polarization in Congress will sabotage any effort, and
| we'll end up with boondoggles that both sides can criticize and
| that won't really help any homeless at all.
|
| This isn't a choice being made, it's just the complexity of the
| real world that some are still blind to even after graduating
| college and (theoretically) turning into grownups.
|
| There's actually a technical solution too, but since it's dry
| and boring, most leftists (and quite a few of the rightists)
| find it too boring to ever want to try. Obviously the solution
| is either love and compassion (from the left) or maybe "pulling
| themselves up by their bootstraps" (from the right).
| wormlord wrote:
| This argument is so lame. "Actually the overall structure of
| the USA is designed so that its basicalyl impossible to solve
| the crisis".
|
| You're not wrong in the fact that America is a shit country
| designed to intentionally to use homelessness as an implicit
| threat against the working class. You are wrong in the sense
| that all the things you listed aren't reasons, just excuses
| to cover up the intentionality of homelessness, and that
| homelessness could be solved if there was the political will
| to do so. Which there will never be in the USA because again,
| the homelessness crisis is intentional.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha.
| ..
| enaaem wrote:
| Yeah if you really want to end homelessness you will find a
| way, if not, you will find excuses.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Create a federal jobs program to build apartments in large
| quantities, not just in cities but in rural, suburban and
| exurban areas as well. Anybody who's an American citizen and
| able bodied (including ex-convicts and felons) can apply and
| get a good paying job with health insurance. Use the federal
| government's power of eminent domain to override zoning laws
| and seize land that's being sat on, and finally pay for it by
| heavily taxing the tech giants, cutting military spending and
| legalizing (and taxing) cannabis.
|
| Will politicians ever do it? No, they're in the pocket of the
| military and the 1%. Will voters ever vote for it? No,
| they're fed a steady stream of propaganda that tells them
| that this would be "socialism". But that's how the problem
| would be solved.
| Avicebron wrote:
| I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought of this, pour
| government money into taking anyone unemployed and give
| them solid jobs building/improving/managing infrastructure
| like housing, any public good, parks, roads, train tracks,
| whatever it is as long as it's a net positive.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| 70-80% of homeless people are local. Fixing homelessness in
| your community does not attract large numbers of additional
| people.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| Not in California. The fact that 80% + of the local
| homeless come from other states is the one thing that makes
| the problem unsolvable.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| 90% of the homeless people in California lived in
| Californa for over a year before becoming homeless.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_California
| mmooss wrote:
| > The first to solve it is punished with tens of thousands of
| newly arriving homeless
|
| I've seen nothing to support this claim. It does fit the
| right-wing disinformation pattern of demonizing people,
| encouraging division and hate between people, undermine
| social programs, and making baseless claims to put others in
| the defensive position of having to disprove them.
|
| Can you support that claim?
|
| Here's some evidence to the contrary, from another comment:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30739834/
| sugarplant wrote:
| you should carefully reread what he wrote and reread what
| you linked
| nostromo wrote:
| It's funny how every westerner visits Japan and comes home
| thinking we can "solve crime" or "solve homelessness" or "have
| clean subway stations."
|
| Japan's culture is why those things are the way they are. It's
| not due to funding. It's because people raise their children
| differently than we do in the west. The family's obligations
| are also greater.
|
| And, yes, there are homeless people in Japan. But they
| typically are invisible by choice because of their cultural
| norms around discretion.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| It's definitely cultural. I've been to every major city in
| the US and I don't think I've ever seen a homeless Indian.
| Some groups have broken familial cultures that does not churn
| out good citizens. Did the US in the past play a major role
| in breaking down those groups and surrounding them with
| abject poverty that makes it hard to escape from? Absolutely.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Mental illness is a major factor that makes it hard to help
| people. A majority of homeless people don't have mental
| illness, but a large fraction do, but those are the hardest
| to help.
|
| I have a friend right now who is in a precarious housing
| situation who has schizophrenia but does not have a DX and
| has no insight into her condition. If my wife tries to set
| a time to pick her up and take her out to our farm, odds
| are 1/10 that she will really be there, will really get in
| the car, will not get out of the car for some hare-brained
| reason or otherwise not make it out. You've got to have the
| patience of a saint to do anything for her.
|
| If she had some insight into her condition she could go to
| DSS and get TANF and then get on disability and have stable
| housing but she doesn't. No matter how I try to bring up
| the issue that she does have a condition she just "unhears"
| it.
|
| Indians and other people from traditional cultures have
| stronger "family values" and won't wash their hands of
| intractable relatives the way people who grew up in the US
| monoculture will. (Or if they do it, they'll do it in a
| final way)
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| > I've been to every major city in the US and I don't think
| I've ever seen a homeless Indian.
|
| 1) I have.
|
| 2) There are plenty of homeless or impoverished people in
| India, they just don't come to the US. Immigrants need a
| visa or permanent residency, and that usually comes with a
| requirement to maintain a job or have some level of
| financial security. Later generation Indian-Americans are,
| hopefully, kept out of poverty by the work their parents
| and families put in to establish a foothold in the US. But
| none of this is guaranteed; homelessness can happen to just
| about anyone if they have the right run of bad luck, and
| one's culture is only a small part of that equation.
| m2024 wrote:
| That's because it's very affluent Indians who have been
| granted citizenship historically.
|
| Homelessness goes down in places where housing is cheap and
| also in places where the government intervenes sensibly.
| mmooss wrote:
| India is overwhelmed with poverty far beyond anything I've
| seen in the US.
|
| The people of India started from even worse poverty and
| have generally made progress (especially since recently-
| deceased PM Singh). I'm not criticizing. But holding forth
| India's culture [1] as a model of preventing homelessness
| is pretty incredible.
|
| [1] India may have the largest, most diverse collection of
| 'cultures' within one national border in the world, so
| which one are we talking about?
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| OP is referring to a homeless Indian in the US, not in
| India.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| Do they have a vastly different culture?
| dyauspitr wrote:
| I'm talking about Indian homeless people in the US.
| mmooss wrote:
| You said the claimed lack of Indian homeless in the US
| was a consequence of culture. Indians in India presumably
| have the same culture, and lots of homeless.
| anon291 wrote:
| No... homeless people in India behave nothing like
| homeless in America. Their situation is easily fixed with
| money.
| nineplay wrote:
| Have you ever seen a homeless Indian in India? I would
| assume not, since evidently Indians have intact familial
| cultures that churn out good citizens.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Yes I have seen _plenty_ of homeless people in India.
| mrkstu wrote:
| Yep, I'm sure there are plenty of 2nd/3rd generation
| homeless ethnic Indians in the US. Someone with the will
| and drive to cross 1/2 the globe and get through the visa
| gauntlet is highly unlikely to end up homeless due to
| addiction or mental health, since those have likely been
| weeded out in the process, but the same mentalities that
| entrap many American's will likely fall on their
| descendants.
| anon291 wrote:
| The 'homeless' in India live in slums. They have
| relatively stable housing, even if it's a hovel. They do
| not behave like American homeless. America's homeless
| problem has little to do with money or accessibility of
| housing.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It's definitely cultural. I've been to every major city
| in the US and I don't think I've ever seen a homeless
| Indian.
|
| Why might it be rare to see a homeless member of a group
| whose members make up less than 2% of the population in the
| US to start with and are largely recent immigrants (15%
| immigrating within the last 5 years!), often under work-
| based visa programs targeting highly-skilled workers that
| are well paid?
|
| Could it be cultural superiority of the cultures from which
| they are drawn? Could it be some other thing that makes
| them rare among the US homeless?
|
| Hard to tell, I'm sure.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| You say its cultural ... ok ... then you say you have never
| seen "a homeless Indian" ... ok ... Does Indian culture
| exist in India and is there virtually no homelessness in
| India?
| anon291 wrote:
| I mean... even within India, the poor act _nothing_ like
| they do here. I 've been to India several times and
| witnessed abject poverty (getting better now supposedly).
| But the poor people in india still go home to their
| families (they had families!), have dinner together, and
| are deeply invested in educating their children to set
| themselves up for success.
|
| I'm shocked when politicians in America blame our
| homelessness problem on poverty. Poor people do not behave
| this way. This is a breakdown in culture.
|
| It's weird growing up in the 90s as an American and
| visiting India and thinking that America was better than
| that because we are so rich and no one is that poor, but 30
| years later, it no longer seems that way. While India is
| still very poor, I think even the homeless there might have
| a more stable life than what I physically see on the
| streets of west coast America. I mean.. it may be a slum,
| but at least they have a permanent house, their kids are in
| school, etc.
|
| Meanwhile, in Portland, I see human feces on many streets,
| and the homeless are drugged out zombies (Portland has
| enough beds for all homeless but no ability to force usage
| of shelter beds, and few homeless person accepts the
| offer).
|
| I hate to say it, but maybe just allowing a 'proper' slum
| would be a better option.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Homelessness in Japan and the invisibility thereof is a theme
| in this game
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/1235140/
|
| I can't help but think that homelessness in downtown San
| Francisco is a spectacle.
|
| For one thing, there has been a decision to concentrate
| people there, which is why people think homelessness is worse
| in SF than LA, whereas I understand there are more homeless
| per capita in LA. If you tried to "live outside" in a
| residential area I think the authorities would deal with you
| as harshly they would deal with anyone who tried to build
| more housing.
|
| The messages are: (1) you'd better not stand up to your
| jackass boss because this could be you, (2) you'd better not
| ask politicians for a more generous welfare state (especially
| in the bluest state in America) because we'll never give it
| to you.
| peab wrote:
| Even if it's cultural, it can be fixed. Culture can change
| and can be changed by choice
| thfuran wrote:
| Culture changes, but it's very hard to deliberately effect
| specific changes.
| mmooss wrote:
| Not really. People deliberately persuade the public of
| things all the time. Some persuade them of absolutely
| false, awful things with regularity.
| thfuran wrote:
| When you say "things", I assume you don't mean "to change
| deeply held values and cultural traditions".
| fragmede wrote:
| Like eating meat? We've been doing that for millenia, yet
| somehow there's grass roots vegetarian and vegan
| movements all over the place.
| mmooss wrote:
| Sure, like women getting educated, working, and having
| equal rights? Universal literacy and education? Instant
| global telecommunications? Democracy? ... I think it can
| be done!
| thfuran wrote:
| >Sure, like women getting educated, working, and having
| equal rights?
|
| That only took a few thousand years and still isn't
| really there yet.
| mmooss wrote:
| It took a couple decades really. I don't think what
| happened in 9th century Japan was really relevant to the
| modern women's rights movement.
|
| They delivered the results, and there's nothing you can
| say that changes the facts. You seem to really want to
| believe, and everyone to believe, how hopeless you are.
| yencabulator wrote:
| You know how everyone talks about the Finnish education
| system? That system was completely planned, designed, and
| transitioned into in the semi-recent past.
| nostromo wrote:
| I hope you're right.
|
| It's very difficult to address culture in the US without
| being accused of victim blaming or bias.
|
| But the uncomfortable truth is that some cultural practices
| simply do produce better neighbors and coworkers and
| compatriots than do others.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| What if culture springs from genetic inheritance? How do
| you change that?
| Aachen wrote:
| Are you wondering whether some humans are better than
| others?! Eh, I don't have the research to know that's not
| the case, but this seems like an extraordinary hypothesis
| goodpoint wrote:
| Huh?!
| TypingOutBugs wrote:
| Cultural evolution in genetics is a current topic of
| research
|
| For example:
|
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-
| brain...
| wesselbindt wrote:
| The US just spent 8 billion on continuing a certain genocide
| in the middle east. Spend such expenditures on housing, and
| homelessness is solved. It costs about 200k to build a house.
| The US has 600000 homeless people. If you do the math, the US
| could've solved 5% of homelessness instead of bombing more
| children. But they chose not to.
| Aunche wrote:
| Geopolitical commentary aside, the city of San Francisco
| has spent billions of dollars on homelessness and it has
| only gotten worse. I'm not opposed to paying higher taxes
| to house people less fortunate than me, but I expect the
| government to get their money's worth. If I wouldn't want
| to spend a million on a shoebox, then the city shouldn't
| either.
| mmooss wrote:
| What is the point? Not everything has worked, so do
| nothing? If we read the OP, we can find out about some
| things that have worked.
| mrkstu wrote:
| The point is that it isn't a money problem, so the
| proposed solution of diverting money is off point to
| begin with.
| nostromo wrote:
| The US does spend tens of billions fighting homelessness
| though. The US is very generous in this regard.
|
| The problem is it's not solvable by building homes. It's
| about addiction and mental illness. And because of the US
| constitution, it's very difficult to help Americans that do
| not want to be helped.
| andriamanitra wrote:
| The US approach to fighting homelessness is the
| equivalent of hiring more and more cleaners to mop the
| floor instead of spending a little bit more upfront to
| fix the leaky pipes. It's both expensive and ineffective
| (much like the healthcare system).
|
| > it's very difficult to help Americans that do not want
| to be helped
|
| This is true but if you were to offer free housing to 100
| homeless people how many of them do you reckon would
| decline the offer? Many if not most of them could be
| helped back on their feet if there was political will to
| do so.
| dinkumthinkum wrote:
| What genocide? I'm not aware of genocide that is currently
| occurring that the US is funding. The US is not bombing
| children.
|
| How would just giving people houses solve homelessness? Do
| you know what happens to places that house homeless people?
| How long would this solve the problem for these people?
| This just seems like anti-Americanism with no quantitative
| grounding.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| They are likely talking about aid to Israel, which then
| uses it to buy American weapons.
|
| Probably a bigger horror was 20 years ago when the US
| invaded Iraq, leading to something like half a million
| dead.
| anon291 wrote:
| Portland (population 622k) spent $531 million
| (https://www.koin.com/news/portland/shocking-amount-spent-
| on-...) which is 1/16 of the $8 billion that will fix
| homelessness according to you.
|
| By your reckoning, Portland, which is 0.15% of the American
| population should have been able to fix homelessness for
| its entire population for $12 million. Portland spent 45
| times that so we ought to be able to house the homeless in
| the Ritz Carlton, if your calculations are correct.
|
| But they're obviously not. And your argument is childish.
| nojvek wrote:
| We can change our culture as well. American culture is
| dynamic.
|
| The major issue with US even in blue cities is how apathetic
| they are to build new infrastructure (homes, roads,
| hospitals, schools) e.t.c
|
| At the end of the day demand-supply dynamics dictate the
| price.
|
| Finland (pop 5.5M) Norway (pop 5.5M) Sweden (pop 10M)
|
| I look at WA state with a similar population 7M , and higher
| GDP from tech boom at ~$700B
|
| Seattle & Bellevue should have solved homelessness, but that
| is not the case. Millions are spent on homeless but little
| towards long term solving of the solution.
|
| There is a lot of money to be made by many problems not being
| solved.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| How do you end homelessness, when some percent of homeless
| people will, if you give them a place to stay, smoke meth all
| day and make their apartment and nearby apartments health
| hazards?
|
| Many drug addicts don't want to be addicted, and would try to
| go through treatment if provided. But some are inveterate, and
| don't want to quit. What do you do with them?
| yard2010 wrote:
| Not all homeless people are dangerous drug addicts.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Notice how I never said they were.
| Groxx wrote:
| You do however seem to be implying "this won't work
| because some won't go along with it, _therefore we should
| not do it_ ".
|
| In which case you're essentially saying "meth users
| decide everyone's housing status".
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| No, that is not what I'm saying. Notice, I never said we
| shouldn't do anything.
|
| I'm saying reaching the state of "no homelessness" is
| dependent upon finding something to do with the worst of
| the homeless.
|
| For a tech analogy, imagine you've architected a system
| that has 99.5% uptime. You might be able to imagine a way
| to get to 99.9% up time.
|
| With enough resources, you might even be able to get to
| 99.99% uptime. With laser focus and a giant dedicated
| team and an immense budget, maybe you can get it to
| 99.995%.
|
| But what would you do if some exec came in and said we
| need 100% uptime, and we are a failure as a company
| unless we reach that?
| Qwertious wrote:
| Is anyone here saying we need to reach literally 0%
| homelessness? Reducing current numbers by 99% would be
| amazing.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Well, people have used the phrase "end homelessness",
| which I take to mean no homeless.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| People have used the phrase "end poverty" for decades,
| and we still spend money on it even if we didn't get to
| 0%.
| anon291 wrote:
| The data are pretty clear that those who are not drug
| addicts end up coming out of homelessness fairly fast by
| making use of America's numerous social programs. The story
| of American poverty alleviation is a resounding success.
|
| Drug addiction and mental illness is another story.
| cwillu wrote:
| "[...] if you give them a place to stay, smoke meth all day
| and make their apartment and nearby apartments health
| hazards"
|
| You skipped a step or two in there, but I will note that if
| you had real health care, the homeless adhd and such would be
| on their vyvanse prescriptions rather than self-medicating
| with meth.
| sugarplant wrote:
| i like how condescending this post is while just casually
| asserting multiple ridiculous things. ie: nobody ever acts
| decadently, all meth addicts actually have adhd, staying up
| for 4 days smoking meth is actually "self medicating", that
| the healthcare in usa (one of the most lenient places to be
| prescribed stims in the world) is somehow the reason why
| they cant get a stimulant prescription. just ridiculous.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Jail: At this point 2nd and 3rd chances have been burned up.
|
| And, to be quite blunt: If someone wants to be a meth-head,
| there's plenty of ways to consume it that don't create
| hazards for other people.
|
| Edit: I think it's perfectly acceptable, in guaranteed
| housing situations, to say "If you create a hazard you will
| go to jail."
| skirge wrote:
| US and Europe have different reasone for homelessnes. Give free
| houses in US and next day you will have +400mln people from
| South America. In EU (I can speak for Poland) most homeless
| have alcohol _and_ violence problems - people removed from
| homes for domestic violence by court (divorce). You must be
| quite bad person if no one takes care of you, in a country with
| a) strong family tights and b) many people owning a home.
| mmooss wrote:
| > Give free houses in US and next day you will have +400mln
| people from South America.
|
| I don't know that at all. People in public housing that I
| know and see are not especially from South America.
| skirge wrote:
| yet
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| Now consider that most homeless in Poland are male. There
| _exist_ people who never had family, or ruthless real estate
| grabbers who'd rather have real estate for themselves and a
| homeless family member.
|
| > people removed from homes for domestic violence by court
| (divorce)
|
| This is classic why the husband moves out, have you ever
| dealt with family courts as a male in Poland, nothing rings
| the bell for you? So a male homeless must be violent
| alcoholic, right? I'm happy that your life and family are
| doing okay. Once your life will turn more difficult, Polish
| society will dismiss you as a violent alcoholic and no help
| or support will be awaiting. Will reveal you one more secret,
| Polish male homeless are in Germany and Netherlands.
| Occasionally you hear about them in media when someone beats
| them to death or sets them on fire.
| skirge wrote:
| there are many organisations and individuals who will help
| you, if you are sober and non-violent, actually everyone
| will like cheap workforce - I know few cases like that,
| someone taken from street to farm or similar.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| Neither what you mention is working in reality, sorry.
| Cheap workforce? Yeah you will be exploited physically,
| and paid something or rather nothing. Social benefits?
| These are usurped by various professional groups and
| institutions are plagued with nepotism. Poland delegated
| its homelessness to Germany and Netherlands while it's
| pretending to be a state with 5% unemployment and without
| housing crisis. Your attitude is a pristine example of
| selfish well off part of the society. How many apartments
| do you own?
| skirge wrote:
| 1 house built by grandfather, surrounded by 4 empty
| houses. No housing crisis, only people looking for
| something better they already have, preferably free
| money.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| > surrounded by 4 empty houses
|
| They'd happily sell but for 1mln PLN.
|
| > people looking for something better they already have,
| preferably free money
|
| They'd rent but they are also aggressively sly,
| dismissing every perfect tenant. In the end they indeed
| end up renting to another non-paying sly who will tell
| them exactly what they want to hear.
|
| At this point of the real estate the market, it's the
| owners who want free money.
| skirge wrote:
| for sure, because sellers in this area demand 300k - 600k
| PLN
| patatero wrote:
| Japan has plenty of homeless people but you don't see them
| because they're staying in cybercafes.
| skirge wrote:
| Is cybercafe free?
| weberer wrote:
| I've seen a bunch just camping out under an overpass just
| outside of Akihabara station.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| > I was in Japan recently.
|
| It's funny, I was as well and saw homeless everywhere, for the
| first time ever.
|
| I was recently in Scandinavia and while i've seen homeless
| there as well, there was a noticeable increase.
| tencentshill wrote:
| Note this is a country where you cannot survive without shelter
| for most of the year. It's much "easier" to remain unhoused
| somewhere like California.
| jltsiren wrote:
| There used to be homeless alcoholics living in shacks and WW1
| bunkers in the forests around Helsinki. Many (most?) of them
| were WW2 veterans. Older kids still told stories about them in
| the 80s, but most of them had actually died or found shelter by
| then.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| The winter climate is comparable to, even milder than, large
| parts of the US including large cities like Boston, Chicago,
| Minneapolis that have significant homeless populations.
|
| Homeless people are not necessarily completely shelterless, in
| a survival sense. They're associated with tents for a reason.
| ge96 wrote:
| It's funny I've considered going there when my life imploded.
| Just get dropped off and live there Venice beach but yeah I get
| how annoying that would be to a non-homeless.
|
| I have family who are poor (3rd world) and I think about how
| it's fair for me to b here and they are over there but yeah etc
| etc idk. Why does it feel bad to be. I do help (virtue signal)
| donate but I'm also in a shit ton of debt but I'm not
| technically poor/homeless. I have a car/apt/toys. Still
| thinking about it.
|
| Oh yeah giving money isn't a fix it turns out because people
| fight over it/demand more. Next thing you know everyone is your
| relative hunting you down online. My personal gmail chat pops
| up "hey man..."
|
| It does piss me off when I pull up to a light and there's a guy
| right there with a sign. How do I know he's homeless? I'm
| coming out of a grocery store at night somebody's like "sir,
| sir, sir..." trying to get my attention. I guess it shouldn't
| be a problem to just hand em a dollar. But then they say
| "that's it?".
|
| Again I donate to a local food shelter, NHA, etc... just funny
| is altruism real idk why do I feel annoyed (greed?). I can't
| even ask people for money without feeling shame but other
| people don't care. Alright rant over I am privileged I know.
|
| I'm gonna live a life though, mid sports car, land, not give
| up. I'll continue to donate too whether in cash or open source
| work but first I have to get out of debt, been in debt for 15
| years now crazy. That's why I have my tech job, drive for UE,
| donate plasma and freelance to speed run my debt off.
| Thankfully I'm single so it's only my own life I gotta worry
| about.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > a "Housing First" approach, which provides people experiencing
| homelessness with immediate, independent, permanent housing
|
| Could timing have something to do with it? Maybe if the cycle is
| broken right at the start, when one becomes homeless, it prevents
| some of the mental health issues and addiction issues that come
| from living without support for too long. People here in NA often
| have lived on the streets for years or decades. That's so much
| trauma, many say it's impossible to heal at that point.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Maybe if the cycle is broken right at the start, when one
| becomes homeless, it prevents some of the mental health issues
| and addiction issues that come from living without support for
| too long_
|
| What fraction of the homeless addicts or mentally ill started
| out that way?
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Suffering from mental trauma does not mean that one cannot
| suffer from additional mental trauma.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Comparing the homlessness chart in the article to Finland's net
| immigration chart
| (https://stat.fi/en/publication/cl8n2ksks2yau0dukaxe3it75) the
| country's net negative immigration created much of the housing
| availability to house people immediately. Next door in Sweden,
| the situation is different.
|
| Their approach of building flats and committing to getting
| homeless people into them absolutely worked and should be an
| example, but not without a relatively fixed homeless rate. This
| is the general issue with the nordic social model. it was the
| model of functioning social programs, but in a vacuum of relative
| isolation and homegeneity.
| thePhytochemist wrote:
| This issue is very relevant for me since I have been homeless
| since May. It's been a bad run of being a target of criminal
| activity, unemployment and just running out of money during my
| job search. I cope with a mix of volunteering, overpriced housing
| (think $1200/month for a room in a rural area before I ran out of
| money for that), catsitting, house-sitting, staying with family
| and sleeping in my ancient car. Although I'm a citizen I don't
| qualify for any government support or programs, even though we
| have employment insurance here which I paid into for years.
|
| I'm from Ottawa where the cold is obviously deadly, as it is in
| Finland. I do feel that we need to take shelter more seriously in
| public policy compared to warm areas because of that. Last week
| someone froze to death overnight a few blocks away from where I
| was crashing on a couch with family. Walking through downtown
| Ottawa and seeing the huge empty, lit, warm buildings with people
| freezing to death right outside is striking. Any practically
| minded person can see the problem is political and philosophical,
| not practical.
|
| I can tell all the posters who think people choose to be homeless
| that I'm certainly not one of them. The comments about the
| importance of avoiding a downward spiral are certainly correct.
| Searching for work is hard enough normally and becomes
| increasingly difficult without access to things like a kitchen
| and toilet.
|
| What I see in this Finnish policy is the starting assumption that
| doing nothing is not a good option. After reaching that point
| there can a rational discussion about what to do with whatever
| money is being spent - do you pay more people to hand out
| blankets and conduct surveys or just use it to buy housing units?
| As a homeless person I would really like to see Canada have a
| policy like I'm reading in this article instead of what we are
| doing now. The crappy temporary shelters and bureaucratic
| spending strategy obviously isn't working.
|
| Even just economically, to have a government pay for years of
| schooling and subsidize advanced degrees then just be ready to
| let that person die on the street when they are ready to work but
| can't happen to find something seems like a waste. I'd rather see
| a functioning "social safety net" as described in this article.
| peab wrote:
| The housing situation in Canada is insane and is so obviously
| due to not building enough housing and bringing too many people
| into the country via immigration. The fact that it costs
| 1200$/month for a room in a rural area is incredibly damning.
|
| I went to college in Ottawa, and now I live in Austin Texas.
| It's similar in size, although Austin has been growing more
| lately. Curiously, they are also both capitols, college towns
| and they have a river flowing through them.
|
| A major difference is that Austin has a new development with
| 200-400 unites on every block it seems. Cranes are everywhere
| downtown, and even in random neighborhoods they have huge new
| developments. Ottawa has no shortage of land, there's a huge
| amount of available land to develop in either direction, but
| they evidently aren't building nearly as much.
|
| The result? I'm looking at 2 bedroom apartments, and they are
| 1000$ cheaper than they were 3 years ago when I first moved
| here. Rent has gone down and continues to go down. I'm seeing
| studio apartments in the middle of the city renting out for
| 800$ now!
| Qwertious wrote:
| >and bringing too many people into the country via
| immigration.
|
| In a functioning economy, more immigration will just result
| in _more housing being built_ , as long as the immigrants are
| working. Especially since the cost of housing construction is
| largely the cost of labor. Immigration is a distraction from
| the core inability to build more housing.
| mrkstu wrote:
| "In a functioning economy" is doing a lot of work here.
| Here _in reality_ the parent comment is 100% correct.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Yep. One might ask what happens if you don't have a
| functioning economy? Well, this kind of state. A massive
| failure for anyone but those who don't have theirs.
| Qwertious wrote:
| My point is that immigration is a distraction from _the
| nonfunctioning economy_.
| cudgy wrote:
| And yet the non-functioning economy might be a result of
| the excessive immigration. Which one is easiest to
| address?
| Qwertious wrote:
| >And yet the non-functioning economy might be a result of
| the excessive immigration.
|
| It's not. If you have a narrative for how _immigration_
| could explain why there 's record-high home prices and
| yet there isn't a corresponding spike in construction,
| then please post it. Because this is pretty obviously a
| problem of suppressed supply.
| cudgy wrote:
| I'm not implying that immigration is the only reason for
| higher housing prices. My opinion is that 0% interest
| rates and loose credit are the primary reason.
|
| However, simple supply/demand would suggest that
| immigration AND 0% interest rates both affect demand
| quickly while supply requires securing land, building
| homes and getting approval to build homes takes
| significant time. Migrations are happening at a faster
| rate than housing can be built so it definitely has an
| impact on prices.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| On HN and on tech twitter I often see this statement:
| "the reason rents are high is because we don't build
| enough houses."
|
| But I don't think that's really true, I think that's very
| simplistic. The missing observation is that housing has
| become an asset class in a way it wasn't in the past.
| Large numbers of people purchase houses to rent seek as
| landlords, and the only limit to the demand for rent
| seeking is the ability of those landlords to borrow
| money. So a major determinant of rent is now the ability
| to borrow money, the interest rate, and the number of
| people wanting to be rent seeking landlords.
|
| Increasing the housing supply by the amount physically
| practical in say the course of a decade is probably
| unlikely to make much difference to rents if the primary
| driver of rent prices is the ability of rent seekers to
| borrow to buy the new properties. First time buyers can't
| compete on borrowing because they have smaller deposits
| or less access to capital, so they are forced to rent,
| which means the rent seekers can continue to buy up
| properties.
|
| In the UK, buy to let mortgages have become a substitute
| for pensions for the baby boomer generation. Encouraged
| by the government, housing as a yielding asset has
| essentially taxed the young to pay for the boomers
| retirement.
|
| Whilst housing can be used as a rent seeking asset, it is
| very unlikely building new houses is going to lower
| rents. Landlords will simply always be able to outbid
| renters, so rent will remain at the height of whatever
| the renters can afford, I.e. extract the maximum rent
| possible. There is an endless demand for housing from
| rent seekers, provided they can rent out that property.
|
| Couple this with the fact that the government in the UK
| at least has used the property market to hide the reality
| of the economy - that the economy is basically collapsing
| - there is so much vested interest in maintaining the
| status quo that no regulation will be introduced that
| will cause rents to drop, such as limiting the access of
| rent seekers to capital, or preserving properties for
| owner buyers etc.
|
| Tl;dr - rents are expensive not because there is too
| little housing, but because we need them to be expensive.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Then why doesn't the government put limits on the no. of
| houses/flats a canadian family can buy? Allowing wealthy
| individuals to keep buying housing for rent-seeking isn't
| going to help the problem. Beyond the one for staying,
| how many more should they be able to own, if any?
|
| From the houseowners' perspective, if they can only own
| one that they stay in, what alternatives the government
| needs to structure to balance the restriction, assuming
| the restriction is put in place? Should everyone put
| their savings in stock market etc and be subject to
| losses due to it? Because they too need a stable and
| inflation pegged income for their retirement.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| > Then why doesn't the government put limits on the no.
| of houses/flats a canadian family can buy?
|
| Well, mainly the answer to this in public discourse is
| the same reason people say "we just need to build more
| flats" --- because people believe in the magical powers
| of "markets", like there's some natural law that leaving
| things to the market will lead to desirable outcomes.
|
| But the actual politics of it is that if you did this,
| then where are you going to get the boomers pensions
| from? And where is the economic "growth" going to come
| from? See my other comment.
|
| We're all in a big ponzi scheme because we exported most
| of our real welath-generating activity.
| swat535 wrote:
| The thing is even if the government did this, it's easy
| to get around it, many landlords simple setup an
| incorporation or even multiple ones to purchase
| properties. It's easy and cheap in Canada.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Why are rents going down in Austin then? Lots of rent to
| seek there with all the new housing being built.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| We've seen London prices drop recently. That's mainly
| because we've seen higher interest rates and a flight of
| capital from the UK. People aren't as confident in the
| ponzi scheme continuing. It may also be in part because
| of huge drop in population post-brexit, although AFAICT
| there are no accurate numbers on that because the
| government doesn't want to admit that Brexit is a
| disaster.
|
| I would guess Austin might be seeing a drop because it
| was "the big thing" for a while but now the consensus is
| it is not going to rival San Francisco. The rent seekers
| are moving elsewhere because there are bigger capital
| gains to be made? Just a guess, but you can probably
| verify it by checking house prices in Austin vs San
| Francisco.
| maxerickson wrote:
| In Austin, it's because they are building a huge amount
| of housing!
|
| Like yeah, it probably is less profitable to speculate on
| housing in Austin, where pricing is improving because of
| increased supply, you need to do a little more than hand
| wave of your argument is that the causation goes in the
| other direction.
| watwut wrote:
| You there are enough houses being build, people who buy
| them to extract rent are non issue.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| It would only work if you built _more_ houses than the
| demand and even then the market would have to be
| perfectly liquid.
| jfil wrote:
| This is an interesting perspective on increased supply
| that I haven't considered before. It is remarkable how
| similar the Canadian housing situation is to the UK's.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| It's the same everywhere, and even China is copying the
| model. Housing is a fixed asset and everyone needs one,
| so the moment you allow people to borrow to buy and let
| then the renters are stuck and the house prices soar.
|
| The reason it's the same everywhere is that this model
| magically creates "growth" and "wealth". My house is
| worth PS100K. House prices increase. So now there is more
| wealth in the economy (there isn't, but economists think
| there is). Now it is worth PS120K.
|
| I remortgage and - voila! I have PS20K to spend. Now I
| can spend that extending or upgrading my house, now the
| plumber and decorator have jobs, and Amazon or whoever
| sell new curtains, and everyone is happy.
|
| This is a particularly useful model to follow if you
| don't actually produce any real wealth, because you
| exported all your manufacturing jobs abroad and whilst we
| like to pretend an economy can run on services, in
| reality we run a massive trade deficit and are selling
| off assets to pay for it (guess which assets we sell ---
| we export house ownership to rent seekers from abroad! My
| last landlords were based in China and I live in the UK!
| The system works)
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| But even economists are aware of the difference between
| wealth and value : you are describing inflation.
|
| Why were you allowed to / it was a good idea to
| remortgage under ~20% inflation ?
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Can I create a small company of a half a dozen new
| immigrant trades, buy single family homes, tear them down
| and build new fourplexes? Nope this is largely banned
| (though ever so slowly changing in some areas).
|
| The severe regulation has distorted the market and
| created a housing shortage that is legally prevented from
| being addressed no matter what available new immigrant
| talent is at hand.
| lostlogin wrote:
| The continual drive for growth is a problem though. By
| definition it isn't sustainable, yet we keep adding,
| consuming, growing.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Why is a drive for growth bad? Seems like the double-
| speak of saying growth is bad while happily profiting off
| of and simultaneously restricting it is whats bad.
|
| Growing up in a prairie city I heard this sentiment from
| people who simply don't like other people constantly, and
| I'm like "When did you try growing, you stagnant
| deteriorated shithole!?", and sprawl doesn't count. They
| hate ambition, they hate people, they hate taxes, and
| have no interesting ideas. They hate traffic, but refuse
| to do anything but drive. Their healthcare system and
| infrastructure is failing, there is no new economic
| activity happening; get busy growing or get busy dying.
| It doesn't work though if you stop for 70 years and then
| try to catch up.
| lostlogin wrote:
| A lot of what you say here I agree with. I'm not sure
| that I'd define maintenance of infrastructure as growth
| though, and I too hate sprawl. Growing the economy is
| great, but only if done in such a way that it's
| sustainable. Growth or death is too simplistic, perfectly
| captured by the grandparent comment. Bringing in
| immigrants to generate growth when you can't house the
| current population seems crazy. Things don't have to get
| bigger to be successful. You could make a business and
| have zero employees and make a living. Does it need to be
| a massive company that's growing? There is always a
| limit, and something will eventually prevent growth, so
| why does it have to be an external force?
|
| Where I am we are trashing the waterways and the land in
| pursuit of money. You can't swim in most our rivers
| anymore - the recent numbers look good though, as the
| government redefined 'swimmable' and now it's 'safe',
| despite the contaminants.
| https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/explainer-new-swimmable-
| water-...
| epistasis wrote:
| Trying to house the people we have is in no way a "drive
| for growth".
| lostlogin wrote:
| The context was that immigration was being encouraged,
| while not having enough housing. Immigration being used
| to fuel growth.
|
| Housing the people is great, but encouraging immigration
| while being unable to house the current population is
| not.
| epistasis wrote:
| That's at best a less-than-complete view of immigration.
|
| For immigrants themselves, it is usually an issue of
| self-determination and freedom.
|
| I can't say I'm fully privy to the immigration debate in
| Canada, but framing it as an issue of "growth" could not
| be a complete view of the advocates of immigration.
| Especially with the level of acceptance of refugees in
| Canada.
|
| The not enough housing aspect is completely incidental to
| immigration. In my city, the overriding reason that we
| have not built enough housing for even our own children
| is that people show up to block any environmentally
| friendly housing proposal, largely arguing against
| growth. In other words, using the framework you are right
| now! And it's a rather twisted version of the "we can't
| have growth" framework because it ignores the underlying
| reason for not allowing growth: environmental
| sustainability. So instead, the only housing that gets
| built is the most environmentally disastrous type of
| housing: sprawl far away from the locations where people
| need to be for their jobs and everyday life, causing
| massive environmental destruction.
|
| I would argue that there are few more counterproductive
| ways to talk about the environment than to bring up a
| "need for growth." First of all almost nobody actually
| cares that much about growth in 2025 and secondly it has
| disastrous consequences when the rubber meets the road.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Are we both arguing against the growth we see at this
| time?
| throw5959 wrote:
| Everybody cares about growth. The world will end the
| minute we finally stop growing. The entire economic
| system and society will unravel
| dns_snek wrote:
| I don't care about growth, nor do most people I know. We
| don't need to endlessly consume to be happy. The world
| won't end when this economic system unravels either, it's
| not the first and it won't be the last one to fail.
| throw5959 wrote:
| Lol, you have no idea what you're talking about. I lived
| through the collapse of the Soviet Union. You don't want
| to live like that.
| lostlogin wrote:
| It was massive turmoil for sure, but world didn't end
| (I'm referencing your earlier comment, not downplaying
| the devastating fall). How would continual growth work?
| We will run out of everything.
| throw5959 wrote:
| We are not limited to Earth.
| epistasis wrote:
| Do recessions unravel the economic system? Is the UK
| ready to collapse as a system after an extended period of
| stagnation?
|
| I guess it depends on your precise definition of "growth"
| but I am having trouble finding one that can fit with
| your assertions.
| throw5959 wrote:
| Recessions are slowdowns of growth.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Recessions are consecutive quarters of negative growth.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| What's funny is that I would bet money that immigrants to
| Canada have a higher employment rate than Canadian citizens
| as a whole.
|
| I say that as a member of both groups.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Cost of housing is influenced by much more than labor and
| raw material.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| In our current, over-regulated market: yes absolutely. In
| a healthy market, cost of low-end housing should approach
| the cost of labor + raw material (plus necessary overhead
| for e.g. inspections, plus a reasonable risk-adjusted
| return on construction). Cost of materials/labor simply
| slides/scales with additional stories / more difficult
| terrain.
|
| Land/space, while not an infinite resource, is hardly
| limited on the scale necessary to house people outside of
| extremely small niches. Views of central park are always
| going to be expensive, but there are a lot of square
| miles <45minutes to times square where someone would very
| profitably build and run (e.g.) an SRO if they were
| allowed to.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Also in healthy market bottom end should be housing build
| decades ago and already fully paid for. Now it would mean
| large mid-rises. But still, entirely reasonable standard
| of living when you are not been brainwashed into needing
| expensive wasteful single family buildings.
| cyberax wrote:
| In a functioning economy, people won't be feeling pressure
| to move into a handful of population centers.
|
| Canada has PLENTY of free space for construction, and
| modern construction is pretty cheap and efficient. But
| economic forces are concentrating the growth in a few
| areas. Well-intentioned efforts to force "affordable
| housing" and "walkable neighborhoods" make these forces
| even worse.
|
| The root cause fix is to stop the economic forces that pack
| people into ever smaller areas.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| People have been moving from rural areas to cities since
| the beginning of the industrial revolution. People want
| to improve their economic lot, and that is the most
| likely way to do it. I didn't know of it is even possible
| to stop that in a capitalist society.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| And even before, but cities used to be much more deadly.
| summeroflove20 wrote:
| "as long as the immigrants are working"
|
| And their family members, and the money they work for stays
| in-country and is not sent overseas.
|
| Not commenting on your stance of the costs of construction,
| that's ridiculous to be left there on its own.
|
| Get more out, to get a reality check.
| oezi wrote:
| Housing is an inelastic commodity. Increased demand will
| take considerable time to lead to additional supply.
|
| Over-supply is even harder to reduce because housing is
| amortized over 20 or more years.
|
| Developers are well aware of the cyclic nature of the
| housing market and thus reluctant to invest in many cases.
| blktiger wrote:
| At least some of the difference is that building codes can be
| a lot more lax in Texas as compared to Canada. It rarely gets
| as cold, and certainly not for as long.
| cyberax wrote:
| > The result? I'm looking at 2 bedroom apartments, and they
| are 1000$ cheaper than they were 3 years ago when I first
| moved here. Rent has gone down and continues to go down. I'm
| seeing studio apartments in the middle of the city renting
| out for 800$ now!
|
| That's not a result of new construction. It's a result of the
| Austin population declining in absolute numbers: 978,763 in
| 2019, 975,418 in 2022. It bounced back a bit to 979,882 in
| 2023.
|
| Travis County grew a little bit, but all the growth is in the
| suburban areas.
| simoncion wrote:
| Honey, you can't math.
|
| That 2023 number is roughly a thousand larger than that
| 2019 number. The changes to all of the numbers you're
| quoting are in the noise as far as considering changes to
| the cost of housing.
| Rendello wrote:
| > Ottawa has no shortage of land
|
| Relatedly, post-amalgamation Ottawa is very big:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/fb3tzy/the_size_of.
| ..
|
| This is also an interesting (if less relevant) Ottawa size
| comparison:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/Suburbanhell/comments/ov59fv/round_.
| ..
| brailsafe wrote:
| Fantastic links. The same thing has come to mind when
| thinking about my home town. They amalgamated all the
| suburbs back in the 70s, and they're just these sprawling
| desolate rural towns still, which almost certainly cost the
| overall city an unsustainable multiple of what they
| contribute, and they're still building new cul-de-sac laden
| hellscapes, that sometimes don't even have sidewalks, and
| who's only supply of services are provided by the largest
| big box stores you see everywhere. It's brutal.
|
| I have the sense that if these suburbs had to figure out
| they're own shorter term scaling strategy, especially
| without being able to infinitely kick the infrastructure
| can down the road, things would be required to change a bit
| more rapidly. What they have instead are these miserable
| little cabin-esque bungalows with deer running about,
| concrete that is literally crumbling to gravel, and a very
| weird thread of prejudice against apartments of any kind.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| > bringing too many people into the country via immigration
|
| The housing situation has clearly severely declined post
| pandemic at the same time that immigration was restarted and
| increased, but I gotta point out that Vancouver has had a
| severe homeless crisis my entire life, long, long before this
| recent government changed immigration rates or even came to
| power.
|
| As far back as 2007 I was reading articles about how
| Vancouver was net _losing_ the sort of affordable housing
| that those most at risk of homelessness depended on.
| Unsurprisingly the amount of homeless in Vancouver has
| continued to increase.
|
| https://thetyee.ca/News/2007/07/10/SRO-Losses/print.html
|
| But you're absolutely correct that the core of this problem
| is a severe lack of building. Both a lack of construction of
| market product and below market publicly owned housing.
| Building more homes is the solution to get our way out of
| this crisis and end homelessness.
|
| If there is any real villain here to blame IMO it is Jean
| Chretien, who with the severe austerity budget of 1993
| completely got the Federal government out of all social
| housing development and building of housing plunged to near
| nil for decades.
|
| The chart from this article is remarkable.
| https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/04/22/Why-Cant-We-Build-
| Lik...
| brailsafe wrote:
| True, on all points, but it wasn't just him, it's been a
| decades long process of multiple parts of the economy
| failing imo. One does wonder though how things would be if
| we simply cancelled zoning and other needlessly
| bureaucratic development restrictions in the 80s, and
| enabled automatically correcting policy that was outside
| the hands of both property owners and politicians. Every
| time I see an anti tower sign in east van it makes me want
| to throw a rock through that person's window, and the fact
| this tension exists on a local level is ridiculous.
| cyberax wrote:
| We have a natural experiment: Minneapolis vs. Madison.
|
| Minneapolis abolished the single-family zoning and
| parking requirements in 2018. And it worked, developers
| swarmed the city like vultures attracted to carrion.
|
| Madison did no such nonsense.
|
| Can you guess the impact of these policies on housing
| costs?
|
| The house price growth in Minneapolis _accelerated_, just
| like in the nearby Madison. Here are the price growth
| charts: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1COwL
| tacitusarc wrote:
| I defy the data [1].
|
| There is too much complexity in that single example and
| the law of supply/demand has been proven too frequently
| for it to not make sense that increasing demand to meet
| supply would reduce cost.
|
| 1. For clarity, this phrasing is from here
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vrHRcEDMjZcx5Yfru/i-defy-
| the...
| cyberax wrote:
| > I defy the data.
|
| Sorry. The reality doesn't care about your defiance.
|
| Upzoning does not lead to lower housing prices. Even the
| most extreme urbanists admit that:
| https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-
| might...
|
| > and the law of supply/demand has been proven too
| frequently
|
| Ah, here it is. Have you considered that there, you know,
| might be "too much complexity" for "Economy 101" to fully
| explain the situation?
|
| The _only_ way to decrease the housing prices is to BUILD
| MORE SUBURBS. Or even new cities entirely.
|
| You don't have any other options. Sorry again.
|
| Well, maybe one more: the Detroit route. Reduce the city
| population and the prices will go down.
| tacitusarc wrote:
| Firstly, your link is focused on zoning changes,
| specifically how they are insufficient to prompt addition
| supply to be built.
|
| From your linked blog post:
|
| > Freemark finds extremely mixed and uncertain evidence
| for the effects of upzoning, and one of several reasons
| he identifies is that the link between upzoning and
| actual housing production is tenuous. In other words,
| "Are they allowed to build it?" is a different question
| from, "Are they building it?"
|
| Secondly, building more suburbs and more cities increases
| the supply... which indicates agreement that the price
| problem is one of insufficient supply.
|
| EDIT: To be perfectly clear, the data I disagree with is
| that increasing supply in Minneapolis failed to impact
| price. This is the contention of the comment I responded
| to, and it is fundamentally different from the claim that
| zoning changes fail to increase supply.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Firstly, your link is focused on zoning changes,
| specifically how they are insufficient to prompt addition
| supply to be built.
|
| Yeah. The misery pushers (urbanists) can't admit outright
| that their ideology is leading to disaster, can they? So
| they now need not only zoning restrictions lifted, but
| the state must also build housing and give it out to
| "deserving" people for cheap.
|
| > Secondly, building more suburbs and more cities
| increases the supply... which indicates agreement that
| the price problem is one of insufficient supply.
|
| I'm not arguing against supply-and-demand in general (I'm
| not a communist idiot). I'm arguing against the _density_
| increases.
|
| > EDIT: To be perfectly clear, the data I disagree with
| is that increasing supply in Minneapolis failed to impact
| price.
|
| But it did. The real estate transaction index clearly
| shows that there were no positive effects from the new
| construction.
|
| Moreover, I analyzed all the real estate sales in the US,
| Canada, and parts of Europe since 1995. I have not found
| a single example of a large (>100k population) city that
| decreased the housing sale prices by increasing density.
|
| Even during the crash of 2007, the dense housing crashed
| less than comparative nearby sparse housing.
|
| The scholarly literature is also unambiguous. The best
| effects of density increases are either mild (transient
| effects on rent), or indirect (migration chains).
| tiahura wrote:
| _The _only_ way to decrease the housing prices is to
| BUILD MORE SUBURBS. Or even new cities entirely._
|
| Preach brother. Might I also add the possibility of
| encouraging migration from Metropolises to regional 100k
| - 200kish cities?
| cyberax wrote:
| Yup. It's pretty much the only way to fix the housing
| crisis.
|
| I think that 300k is the threshold for a good city size.
| verall wrote:
| What about Austin, where they have aggressively upzoned
| and built, and now housing prices are down?
| cyberax wrote:
| Austin is an interesting case. It tripped me up a bit
| when I saw it.
|
| But it turned out that my prediction was correct because
| the Austin population went _down_ during the pandemic.
|
| Population:
|
| 2019 - 978,763
|
| 2022 - 975,418
|
| 2023 - 979,882
|
| The overall Travis County population went up a bit. And
| the prices, in the places other than Austin, are also up.
|
| I can also give a prediction, if Austin population growth
| recovers (not a given), the price growth rate will
| quickly outpace the surrounding Travis County.
| tacitusarc wrote:
| *increasing supply to meet demand
| waveBidder wrote:
| Those abolishments are way less intense than you're
| thinking. There's still a ton of restrictions that make
| building even the triplexes that they technically
| legalized actually get built. Things like floor/area
| ratios and setbacks, which make building dwellings that
| people want difficult.
|
| https://streets.mn/2023/10/24/mapping-minneapolis-
| duplexes-a...
| cyberax wrote:
| The abolishments actually fundamentally changed
| Minneapolis: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-
| analysis/articles/...
|
| Most of the new units are in massive multi-apartment
| buildings. And these buildings have a huge
| disproportionate impact on the quality of life.
|
| It's now going to be sliding into shittier and shittier
| conditions. More crime, more congestion, higher housing
| prices.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| FWIW: as a Minneapolis resident, my experience is that
| there is active hostility and grassroots rejection of
| adding dense housing in neighborhoods that are
| traditionally single family homes. I would be curious to
| see how much dense housing has actually been built
| post-2018 relative to the historical norm, as the small
| number of apartment buildings I've seen go up along light
| rail and buss corridors have fought tooth and nail
| against certain demographics in the neighborhoods.
| cyberax wrote:
| It'll get worse:
| https://minnesotareformer.com/2023/08/31/ending-minimum-
| park...
|
| The usual misery pushers are already celebrating the win.
| epistasis wrote:
| There is a concerted disinformation campaign out there to
| prop up homeowner and landlord property values by denying the
| housing shortage. Not just in Canada, but throughout the
| Anglosphere.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| >>> there's a huge amount of available land to develop in
| either direction
|
| You are missing the point. Its not how much land there is, or
| there isn't. Its what regulations will prevent you from
| building anything.
|
| Contrast what's happened in the last 2 decades in Austin, TX
| vs Boise, ID for example. Both cities with huge amounts of
| land available. Both cities attracted major migration. Yet,
| only one of the 2 has very little building code preventing
| things from being built. Boise rents for a single family
| house (2 bed 2 bath) went from $500 per month in 1995 to
| ~$3100 in 2022, for example.
| svnt wrote:
| Peak confirmation bias.
|
| The market is correcting from that thing that was in full
| swing three years ago (the pandemic) and drove prices way up
| for a number of factors, basically none having to do with
| construction:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/texas/comments/1grxqur/the_austin_t.
| ..
|
| The same thing is happening in many cities that do not have
| the same policies as Travis County.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| The fact that it costs 1200$/month for a room in a rural area
| is incredibly damning.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| > The fact that it costs 1200$/month for a room in a rural
| area
|
| Does it really? In a about a week of searching, I was able to
| find a number of rooms in downtown Toronto for less than 1500
| including utilities.
|
| I know this is just my experience, so I could be way off, or
| not filling a criteria you expect. (I'm a student, so my
| standards are low.)
|
| Can you say more about these 1200 $/month rooms in rural
| Canada?
|
| I always find it hard
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| With all due respect, why volunteer? I notice this with a lot
| of homeless people I chat with (there's a lot here in Boulder)
| - many of them volunteer their time at various charities while
| being homeless.
|
| Wouldn't it be better devoting 100% of your spare time to
| getting back on your feet, and _then_ volunteer, or donate?
| thfuran wrote:
| Why do most people have only one job? Wouldn't it be better
| to spend evenings at a second job and then have leisure when
| you retire?
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| I guess you're trying to make some point, but I don't
| really see it.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| I think the point is that one can only devote a finite
| amount of time and energy searching for a job each day
| before they hit diminishing returns, due to both mental
| fatigue and physical limitations. Though as another
| commenter pointed out, volunteer work is a common resume-
| building and networking tactic.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| The poster above you is making a comparison between
| working a job and finding a job.
|
| Working a job: you spend 8-12 hours at the job and then
| spend your leisure time doing other things, like studying
| or meeting friends or watching tv.
|
| Finding a job: you spend 8-12 hours trying to find a job,
| and then you spend your leisure time doing other things,
| like volunteering.
|
| The question you posed earlier was, why wouldn't someone
| just spend all available time (let's say 16 hours per
| day) trying to find a job, instead of doing anything
| else, like volunteering. The poster above you was
| responding to that, trying to demonstrate how the same
| suggestion would be ridiculous in the context of working
| a job, and it should be equally ridiculous in the context
| of finding a job.
| beedeebeedee wrote:
| Volunteer work can come with benefits other than payment,
| such as food, access to facilities, etc. It can also provide
| a support network and contacts for finding work.
|
| With that knowledge (despite not knowing specific
| circumstances), it sounds like a highly effective way to cope
| with the situation as an individual.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| From my experience you can't devote 100% of your time to
| getting back on your feet and search for jobs. If you have
| trouble finding a job it gets too depressing after a while
| and you need something positive where you actually see
| results.
| blackguardx wrote:
| When I was unemployed in Boulder during the last recession, I
| wasn't homeless but spent a lot of time in the library
| applying for jobs and browsing the internet around homeless
| people. I think volunteering helps people have a sense of
| community and keep sane during an isolating period.
| justlikereddit wrote:
| While I'm not homeless, the existence of USB(powerbank) heated
| clothes have been a very comfy discovery of mine recently. A
| bit fiddly at times sure but having hours of comfy warmth
| available at the press of a button is worth it.
|
| I've wondered if this is something adopted by the homeless
| already? and if not, look into it.
|
| You still need proper insulating layers on top of the heating
| ones, and many of the cheapest chinese varieties might have
| undersized heat pads that might not use the quick charge
| ability and merely provide warmth as opposed to heat. But I'm
| welcoming every extra watt of heat whenever cold.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Where I went to college there was a local homeless guy who
| was friendly and well known enough that the coffee shops
| wouldn't bother him if he came in and plugged in his electric
| blanket to warm up.
| mmooss wrote:
| Stay warm! And thank you for stepping forward to share your
| story and perspective. HN needs much more of it.
| ricksunny wrote:
| I look after a citizen science-driven phytochemistry research
| activity and would be interested to understand more about your
| background. My email is in my HN user page.
| jojojo50000 wrote:
| I'm confused about how you haven't been able to find a job. I'm
| a student in Ontario and have received multiple job offers.
| They're not great jobs (fast food, warehouse work, etc.), but
| it's better than having no job at all. Everyone I know has also
| been able to get offers for low skill jobs as well.
|
| How have you not been able to get even a low-skill minimum wage
| job despite searching since May? I'm not trying to insult you
| or anything, just trying to understand your situation.
| bjourne wrote:
| Here are some links explaining why it is difficult:
| https://www.bcchvt.org/community-updates/2023/3/2/why-
| cant-h... https://www.shp.org.uk/homelessness-explained/why-
| is-it-hard... https://upperroommission.ca/why-dont-homeless-
| people-just-ge... Hope that helps!
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I recently visited Finland (I lived there for 3 years at some
| point). If you go to Helsinki, there's a shiny new library in
| the downtown area that is warm, cozy, modern, and has plenty of
| space for people to work, study, work on art projects, etc.
| They have books, 3d printers, studios, co-working options, etc.
|
| Anyone is welcome there. Including homeless people, unemployed
| people. Anyone. You don't see people camping out there (they
| have other options so they'd be kicked out) but they do provide
| an environment that welcomes anyone that wants to to come and
| learn and develop themselves and can behave themselves.
|
| It's a good example of Finnish pragmatism. It might be a bit
| socialist/idealistic. But it also is a good idea that might
| actually work. If you find yourself in Helsinki, it's called
| Oodi and is right next to the train station. Beautiful
| building. Worth visiting for the architecture alone.
|
| My point here, the Finnish approach is not fighting symptoms
| but fighting the root causes: mental health, poverty,
| education, etc. Those things go hand in hand. If you are out of
| a job, you get poor. If you are not educated, you can't find a
| job. If you are poor you might develop mental health issues,
| become homeless, and become even harder to employ, etc.
| Breaking that cycle is the key. Get people healthy, teach them
| stuff, house them.
|
| It's a mix of ideology, compassion and pragmatism that drives
| Finland to do these things. You don't have to buy into the
| ideology. But most people are not cold sociopaths and are
| capable of having empathy. Pragmatism is what makes the
| difference here.
|
| Especially when ideology gets in the way. Which I would say is
| the main challenge in many harsh, capitalist doctrine dominated
| societies that are leaving people homless. There's plenty of
| empathy and charity there but it's mostly limited to giving
| people access to shelters and soup. People donate but also
| oppose real solutions. So, things get worse.
|
| Oodi is a pragmatic solution. So is the Finnish way of
| addressing problems with people being homeless. And realizing
| that education is part of the problem.
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| This point of yours resonates with me (paraphrased): if we
| assume that inaction is not an option, the conversation can
| progress to solutions.
| johnea wrote:
| So, they reduced homelessness by giving people a permanent place
| to live?
|
| Inconceivable! Who would have ever thought of that?
|
| Those commonist Scandinavians, they just don't understand the
| "power of the market"...
|
| Why would anyone even live indoors if it mitigated investor ROI?
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| I thought building houses was a skill lost to history, like
| Damascus steel!
| deanc wrote:
| Helsinki, at least is an interesting place. Much like any other
| capital if you go to certain neighbourhoods you can see drug
| dealers, drug users (many which are living in shelters) - even in
| downtown. They kind of blend in, are part of the scenery and on
| the whole only interact with their "own kind". You might hear
| some grumbling, shouting, smelly folk on the tram - but they
| aren't treated with the same contempt at existing as I've seen in
| other countries.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| "Building flats is key: otherwise, especially if housing supply
| is particularly rigid, the funding of rentals can risk driving up
| rents (OECD, 2021a), thus reducing the "bang for the buck" of
| public spending."
|
| So, yes, if you want low homelessness, you build a lot of housing
| and make sure that rents are low. This is true, and a good
| strategy.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| And don't "fix" the problem at the expense of the paycheque-to-
| paycheque lower-working class.
|
| Otherwise it's zero sum and you create a homeless for every
| homeless you remove and disincentivize work.
| TinyBig wrote:
| How would it be possible to fix the problem at the expense of
| the lower working class?
| markus_zhang wrote:
| For example just add tax to shoot at the target, eventually
| salary owners get hurt while riches can get away with an
| army of lawyers and accountants.
| fooker wrote:
| If you force owners to artificially reduce rent for a
| single class of properties (here: cheap flats made for the
| homeless) the rent for others go up a bit.
|
| This has happened in several US cities.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| But that's not what is being discussed. Increasing supply
| is being discussed, which would lower prices for
| everyone.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > How would it be possible to fix the problem at the
| expense of the lower working class?
|
| Not sure if you intended to phrase your question as you
| did, but if you give cash to the unhoused to rent housing,
| that takes supply from the bottom of the rental market if
| you don't build any more.
|
| Builders tend to build for those that can afford to pay and
| don't target the bottom of the market.
|
| Most stock of low-cost housing is due to building neglect
| or depopulation rather than being purpose-built, in a free
| market anyway.
| vkou wrote:
| I mean, yes, it doesn't matter how you distribute money,
| when there are 9 beds in town, and 10 people, someone's
| going to be sleeping rough.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| This is obviously true, but misses the point
|
| Even if there are 10 beds and 10 people, if 9 people can
| afford to pay 2000 for their beds, and that last one can
| only afford 500, that last one is still going homeless
|
| Because the person selling the last bed is going to want
| around 2000 for it, just like the other 9 are paying
|
| Edit: and no, telling them they have to give up that bed
| for 500 is not a real option
| Scoundreller wrote:
| sufficient vacant property taxes can make it a real
| option
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Taxes! Of course; there is no problem just taking more
| money from other people can't solve.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| Taxes have made our modern societies possible, so yes
| they are often the answer to a problem. The American
| insistence taxes are wrong or "theft" is a malign view
| that, if adopted widespread, would destroy the ability of
| most democracies to function.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| > And don't "fix" the problem at the expense of the
| paycheque-to-paycheque lower-working class.
|
| More supply means their rent goes down too.
| enaaem wrote:
| People hate om commie blocks but it was an excellent solution
| to mass produce affordable housing in war torn Europe. The free
| market is full of cheap mass produced stuff. Why can't housing
| be mass produced? Why are there not more economic options? It's
| almost always restrictive regulations that stops these
| solutions from happening.
| teractiveodular wrote:
| Good luck getting commie blocks pushed through planning
| approvals today. NIMBYs in general are violently against any
| kind of public housing.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Large scale public housing is driven by the state or
| federal governments, which can simply ignore NIMBYs and
| local zoning laws. The issue with public housing is not
| NIMBYism.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Large scale public housing is driven by the state or
| federal governments, which can simply ignore NIMBYs and
| local zoning laws.
|
| No, they aren't. They are generally run by local housing
| authorities with state and federal financial
| participation, and, in any case, there have been
| basically no major new public housing projects in the
| several decades, with many existing projects
| decommissioned, and public housing assistance shifting
| from project-based to tenant-based vouchers.
|
| Traditional government housing projects started falling
| out of favor in the 1950s and 1960s as the new projects
| were often both viewed as worse than the slums they were
| supposed to replaced _and_ failed to even replace most of
| the housing units that were destroyed in the urban
| renewal efforts that created them, and support for them
| was essentially completely halted by the Nixon
| Administration in 1973, though it is possible (though,
| again, rare since the 1980s) for project-based subsidized
| housing to be created under Section 8, as well as the
| (far more common) voucher-based aid under Section 8.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| There have been no large scale public housing projects in
| a long time. The only time those were a thing, they were
| driven at the federal and state level. It's simply not
| possible for local governments to operate at the scale
| and expertise needed for this.
|
| The world is larger than the US - state and federal level
| public housing can be done and it can be done well, and
| at a scale it's only way it can be done. The fact it
| hasn't in the US doesn't mean it's impossible.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > NIMBYs in general are violently against any kind of
| public housing.
|
| It's more complicated than that. I'm massively pro public
| housing. I hate living next to it.
|
| A poorly managed emergency housing facility is just a shit
| show. Violence, noise, rubbish, human and animal abuse,
| property damage, police attendance, debt collectors, smell,
| rodents, animal attacks, threats, overgrown plants etc, all
| within the last year, at my neighbouring house. If it was
| ever managed properly, people might view it differently.
| Managing it costs money, and then people oppose the cost
| when it doesn't come with more housing.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Nobody wants to live next to the poors. Best way to do
| that is to keep housing expensive.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >People hate om commie blocks
|
| people tend to hate on the decades old, usually cheap because
| under heavily financial constraints Eastern bloc version, but
| Finland relevant to the topic of the thread to this day is
| heavily inspired by that kind of architecture, and a lot of
| modern neighborhoods being built are basically the same
| thing... just nice and with a bit more cash on hand.[1]
|
| It's an eminently sane way to house people, and I'm pretty
| certain a lot of people everywhere would take a nice, central
| apartment if they could actually see that it cuts their rent
| and energy bills in half. In places that are used to sprawl
| and high costs there's just too much inertia.
|
| [1] https://cdn.thedesignstory.com/editor/editor-
| fflo-1645278651...
| enaaem wrote:
| Looks great. I have heard Finland has very affordable
| housing.
|
| Yeah I do agree we should build better housing now than
| post WW2 economies. The main point I want to make is that
| affordable housing is already solved.
| spauldo wrote:
| Just search for "Habitrail for Humanity" (and make sure you
| read that right).
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It helps to have a winter.
| emh68 wrote:
| 1. Build a house for each homeless person
|
| 2. Remove them from the homeless count, because they now have a
| house.
|
| 3. Reach zero homelessness!
|
| 4. There are still people living on the streets... But we don't
| call them homeless!
| erehweb wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. From the article,
| basically no one was sleeping on the streets in Finland in
| 2020.
| eesmith wrote:
| I don't know where the #4 is from, but I can point to
| https://kritisches-
| netzwerk.de/sites/default/files/homelessn... with a more
| complete breakdown: Types of homelessness |
| Living Alone | Long-term homeless
| ----------------------+--------------+-------------------
| Temporarily living | 2 773 | 522 with
| friends and | | relatives
| | |
| ----------------------+--------------+-------------------
| Outside, in | 721 | 186
| stairwells, in | | temporary
| | | shelters, etc. | |
| ----------------------+--------------+-------------------
| In dormitories | 489 | 195 or
| hostels | |
| ----------------------+--------------+-------------------
| In institutions | 358 | 151
| skirge wrote:
| at least now they can't say there's no home for them, it's just
| choice - some prefer that way.
| 127 wrote:
| Also -40C winters might have something to do with it.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| If you're going to use -40, why include the "C"?
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| It's a fun fact that -40 c == -40 f, but if you leave off the
| units people who aren't 'in the know' would be confused. Also
| they might (adversarially) wonder if the units are in a
| lesser known scale like romer
| pyuser583 wrote:
| I use nerdy in-jokes a bit too much.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| Sorry if I took your original comment too seriously -- I
| do legitimately think it's a fun fact!
|
| As penance, here's a bonus fun fact: wtf is 0F???? It's
| the temperature saturated brine freezes at! (It's very
| close but not exact, because Mr Fahrenheit wasn't
| perfect)
| yard2010 wrote:
| I for one have no idea how much is -40f, is it colder or
| hotter than -40c?
|
| I do remember -32 or something is the same?
| andriamanitra wrote:
| -40degC is extremely rare in Southern Finland where most people
| live. In Helsinki the average temperature is about -6degC in
| the coldest months of the year, and at worst it might drop down
| to around -15 to -25degC (depending on the year).
| 127 wrote:
| That's what the peak was a couple of years ago or so.
| andrewla wrote:
| Without digging too deep into the nature of the statistics they
| use, I'm a little skeptical of this.
|
| The transition to using the word "homeless" has resulted in
| transforming something we can't easily measure -- "drug addicted
| or mentally ill people being a public menace" -- into something
| that we can measure -- "people without a good living
| arrangement".
|
| Sure, the latter is important in a lot of ways too. And there
| housing is a tolerable solution.
|
| But the former is the actual problem that we care about. It's
| nearly impossible to measure. It's nearly impossible to fix. The
| horrors of involuntary commitment vs. the horrors of not having
| involuntary commitment vs. the horrors of using the criminal
| justice system vs. the horrors of not using the criminal justice
| system.
|
| The fact is that we have no real model for treatment of severely
| mentally ill people. We have a number of effective drugs, but
| they rapidly become ineffective if not taken. Our ability to
| treat or "cure" people in these conditions is essentially non-
| existent.
|
| The question I would ask of Finland before considering this data
| or analysis to be interesting is what is their state of
| involuntary indefinite commitment.
| wesselbindt wrote:
| Have you ever considered that it may be the other way around?
| That the horrors of living on the street (and "horrors" is an
| appropriate term here, you are fighting for survival every day;
| it is beyond the realm of comprehension of the housed) might be
| causing the mental illness and drug use, rather than the other
| way around?
|
| If I want to get a homeless person off of drugs, it sure as
| crisps is not going to happen until they have a roof over their
| head. The core issue is the lack of affordable housing. That
| should be priority number 1.
| mmooss wrote:
| In fact, that's one thing the article talks about. Finland's
| successful plan focuses on 'housing first'.
|
| _" Finland's success is not a matter of luck or the outcome
| of "quick fixes." Rather, it is the result of a sustained,
| well-resourced national strategy, driven by a "Housing First"
| approach, which provides people experiencing homelessness
| with immediate, independent, permanent housing, rather than
| temporary accommodation (OECD, 2020)"_
| Xortl wrote:
| I'm happy to read evidence I'm wrong (I _want_ to be wrong -
| it would make me much more optimistic about a fix), but my
| own life and everything I 've read suggests the opposite -
| once someone develops a serious drug or alcohol addiction it
| leads to them destroying everything good in their lives and
| inevitably they either sober up or end up homeless. Nearly
| all of the people who stay homeless in the long term have
| some severe mental illness (including addiction). Short of an
| involuntary commitment which is its own kind of hell, helping
| these people is incredibly difficult.
|
| I have multiple family members who fit this pattern and it's
| absolutely godawful. The addiction literally rules them. They
| will perpetually ask for money for "needs" then spend it on
| drugs. If another family member houses them, they will
| sneakily maintain their addiction and steal from family to
| support it when necessary. If you offer them housing on
| condition of getting sober, they will choose addiction and
| homelessness. If you offer them housing without condition,
| they will use it to stay an addict in perpetuity, who
| everyone else is paying for. I don't think this last is a
| remotely viable solution with the number of addicts out
| there, which is only growing.
|
| I'm not saying this to condemn addicts/mentally ill people. I
| just want to give an idea of just how hard this problem is to
| fix.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> Nearly all of the people who stay homeless in the long
| term have some severe mental illness (including addiction)_
|
| The problem is that people can end up homeless for all
| sorts of reasons, and even if that reason is some sort of
| mental illness, being homeless is an often-traumatic
| experience that easily exacerbates and worsens a person's
| mental condition.
|
| There was a period of my life where I slept rough (long
| story) and I can personally confirm that a lack of sleep
| security (not to mention "stuff security", the fear of
| having my meager possessions stolen) will start someone on
| the path to mental illness; some amount of paranoia and
| mental fog seems almost inevitable in those conditions.
| andriamanitra wrote:
| A stable environment is certainly going to dramatically
| increase the chance of overcoming an addiction. It
| obviously does not guarantee success but it's a crucial
| first step in the process. As pointed out in the article
| the housing first approach is actually _saving_ money in
| the long run by reducing subsequent costs incurred by
| social services, so the "everyone else is paying for their
| addiction" argument does not really work - there are going
| to be costs either way, and an addict who has a home is
| easier and cheaper to care for than one who is roaming the
| streets.
| sugarplant wrote:
| do people really believe this claim up front?
|
| providing active junkies:
|
| 1) completely free units to destroy 2) 24/7 emergency
| care teams 3) completely free healthcare and mental
| healthcare 4) no sobriety expectations of any sort 5) no
| possibility to be kicked out of the program for any
| reason
|
| is going to be cheaper than putting them in jail or an
| institution? wow sounds almost too good to be true
|
| it would be interesting (or funny) to get a summary on
| exactly how they are deriving the cost metric for this. i
| would just about guarantee they've taken creative
| liberties to make the numbers fit.
|
| according to HUD[0] infestations, flooding, and fires are
| "typical behavior problems" in housing first programs.
| only in "extreme circumstances" does this warrant
| switching them to another unit. there is no way these are
| cheap damages to fix.
|
| housing first programs are often mixed into ordinary
| developments too. i bet families living near or adjacent
| to these units really enjoy living next to completely
| unstable addicts. housing first programs explicitly
| prioritize the least stable, most mentally ill addicts
| too. but it's the humane thing to do at everyone else's
| expense.
|
| a lot of cities in the US have a housing first program,
| among many other programs in a similar vein (ie safe
| injection sites). take san francisco for example. they
| spend billions of dollars every year on programs for the
| homeless. from what i hear the situation is still
| terrible. there are even businesses moving out of SF
| directly citing quality of life.
|
| the cost of living in my city is so expensive that there
| are adults that work full time who have to have roommates
| to live at subsistence level. there are also housing
| first programs here that give junkies units for free to
| continue getting high in indefinitely. this is a
| ridiculous situation. either way i would rather it cost
| more to have people institutionalized or put in jail for
| breaking the law. this would also do good for actually
| having resources to help the ones who are actually down
| on their luck.
|
| [0]https://www.huduser.gov/portal/publications/hsgfirst.p
| df
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| I think perhaps your biases are showing in the language
| you deploy (junkeis, free to destroy). You're asking for
| evidence that's readily available, if you want it, from
| studies to meta studies. The evidence ranges from
| conclusive to inconclusive, which isn't surprising given
| the many different types of implementation and existence
| of support ystems (or lack thereof).
|
| In terms of cost, we need to look at the total social
| cost. If (big if) we were to assume that property
| destruction in housing units costs money, it is no strech
| to think that any marginal decrease in for example
| medical expenses (much more expensive in total social
| resource terms) more than make up for it. And a marginal
| improvement in a long-term expensive social problem would
| easily justify a high initial upfront cost.
|
| I'm not saying you're wrong for asking the question, just
| that I have no problem accepting the findings that
| housing first is a cheaper solution in the long run if it
| gets more people clean and off the streets--as the
| evidence indicates.
| sugarplant wrote:
| >marginal decrease in for example medical expenses
|
| why would there be a decrease rather than an increase?
| they're linked up with a full time care team as well as
| paths for more healthcare services. they also are allowed
| to continue to destroy their body with drugs. a local
| newspaper just ran an article here about how many health
| problems they have when they get into the local program.
|
| yes i am very bias about the topic, and it wouldnt matter
| to me if it were much cheaper. but it truly doesnt sound
| plausible. i do not think setting up society so that
| people can comfortably get high all day, for free, at
| everyone else's expense, is a good or fair setup. there
| are many people struggling to stay afloat. maybe we could
| focus on solving that first. or focusing on the sober
| homeless.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| > yes i am very bias about the topic, and it wouldnt
| matter to me if it were much cheaper.
|
| So is what the US is doing right now working? Just the in
| healthcare, the US pays more per person when addressing
| this problem than anywhere else in the world, and gets
| nearly the worst result. Isn't that alone worth trying
| something else?
| andriamanitra wrote:
| I'm sure there are extreme cases but the vast majority of
| homeless are not much different than you and I. It does
| not need to be cheaper for every single homeless person
| individually, just cheaper on average. If you can
| rehabilitate even 20% that's a lot of savings and extra
| tax dollars to offset the costs (in addition to simply
| being the humane thing to do).
|
| > 1) completely free units to destroy 2) 24/7 emergency
| care teams 3) completely free healthcare and mental
| healthcare 4) no sobriety expectations of any sort 5) no
| possibility to be kicked out of the program for any
| reason
|
| > is going to be cheaper than putting them in jail or an
| institution? wow sounds almost too good to be true
|
| Both of those are very expensive (about $100 a day for
| incarceration [1] and up to around $1000 a day for
| psychiatric treatment [2]) - and obviously a housing
| first program is not a drop-in replacement for them
| either as being homeless in itself is neither a crime nor
| a mental illness. I would also wager a destructive addict
| in their own home causes less property damage (on
| average) than one in temporary housing / on the streets.
| A 24/7 emergency care team is not a thing in assisted
| living facilities in Finland, and the housing provided by
| housing first programs is not at all limited to assisted
| living facilities - it is often just a completely regular
| rental apartment. And healthcare and mental healthcare
| are (nearly) free for anyone, not just "junkies". And the
| other two points are not even related to costs.
|
| > housing first programs are often mixed into ordinary
| developments too. i bet families living near or adjacent
| to these units really enjoy living next to completely
| unstable addicts.
|
| Actually I think it's beneficial if addicts are not
| lumped together in a stigmatized "housing first
| development". To maximize chances of rehabilitation and
| integration in society addicts need to be surrounded by
| well-functioning people, not other addicts. Otherwise
| you're just creating a slum where being an addict is
| normalized, and the problems continue to spread and get
| worse.
|
| > housing first programs explicitly prioritize the least
| stable, most mentally ill addicts too.
|
| Of course sufficient resources must exist to help
| everyone so the prioritization does not mean some people
| get no access to help they need. In Finland we use a
| broad definition of homelessness which includes people
| staying with relatives or friends. Providing housing to
| those groups helps prevent long-term homelessness. [3, p.
| 13-14]
|
| > the cost of living in my city is so expensive that
| there are adults that work full time who have to have
| roommates to live at subsistence level. there are also
| housing first programs here that give junkies units for
| free to continue getting high in indefinitely. this is a
| ridiculous situation.
|
| I agree the situation is ridiculous. An essential part of
| the housing first approach (that seems to be entirely
| neglected in the US) is to build enough affordable homes.
|
| [1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/11/19/
| 2019-24...
|
| [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22588167/
|
| [3] https://ysaatio.fi/wp-
| content/uploads/2018/01/A_Home_of_Your...
| sugarplant wrote:
| >I'm sure there are extreme cases but the vast majority
| of homeless are not much different than you and I.
|
| i have seen estimates saying 50% are addicted to
| substances. in any case housing first prioritizes the
| most unstable and mentally ill to give immediate housing.
| this is a very typical feature of the program. if you are
| finnish, you should check out some videos of what our
| homeless are like. it's obviously not the same for
| multiple reasons.
|
| >Actually I think it's beneficial if addicts are not
| lumped together in a stigmatized "housing first
| development".
|
| again, to everyone else's detriment.
|
| >An essential part of the housing first approach (that
| seems to be entirely neglected in the US) is to build
| enough affordable homes.
|
| this is a funny statement considering wages in finland vs
| real estate prices. ive been told by a top 5% income finn
| that buying a house is not really possible for most
| people there currently. you can only inherit. the wages
| are lower, the taxes much higher, and real estate more
| expensive. of course you probably mean the technical
| "affordable housing" definition which just means housing
| for anyone making under median area income. the money to
| fund these things comes from somewhere, and it seems to
| typically always be the middle class.
| andriamanitra wrote:
| > this is a funny statement considering wages in finland
| vs real estate prices. ive been told by a top 5% income
| finn that buying a house is not really possible for most
| people there currently. you can only inherit. the wages
| are lower, the taxes much higher, and real estate more
| expensive.
|
| Income is lower but actually taxes are fairly similar in
| the lower income brackets thanks to progressive taxation
| (and I'm not too concerned about the top earners
| starving). Buying a home in Helsinki - which is the only
| place in Finland where real estate prices are actually a
| problem - takes about 9 year median income, quite similar
| to cities in the US. Outside the Helsinki metropolitan
| area real estate prices are not bad at all. Either way if
| you're top 5% income you can easily afford to buy a
| house.
|
| > of course you probably mean the technical "affordable
| housing" definition which just means housing for anyone
| making under median area income. the money to fund these
| things comes from somewhere, and it seems to typically
| always be the middle class.
|
| Abundance of apartments affects prices for everyone
| including the middle class. The only ones not benefiting
| from affordable housing are (literal) rent-seekers, the
| people and companies owning real estate purely as an
| investment.
| sugarplant wrote:
| >Outside the Helsinki metropolitan area real estate
| prices are not bad at all.
|
| outside the area where 30% of the entire country lives?
| ok. the actual number of years for helinski metropolitan
| area appears to be 10, and is higher than boston and nyc
| which are both INCREDIBLY expensive places to live. note
| that is generously comparing the actual cities to the
| metrpolitan area of helsinki.
|
| the next largest metropolitan area is tampere, which is
| 6.9 years at median salary. this is very slightly cheaper
| than where i live which is also a very expensive city to
| live in. the city i live in is straight up not affordable
| to buy a house in at median salary.
|
| >Either way if you're top 5% income you can easily afford
| to buy a house.
|
| they are able to, but this wasnt the point of what they
| said. you have to be top 5% to comfortably own. doing
| some number crunching with chatgpt (lets pretend its
| accurate) to own at median salary in tampere requires
| more than 50% of your post tax income. that's with a 20%
| downpayment on a 300k house.
|
| if i got any of those numbers wrong, feel free to
| correct. in the interest of time, they were done with
| chatgpt. i believe the prompts and data asked for should
| be simple enough to be accurate.
|
| >and I'm not too concerned about the top earners starving
|
| should also be noted that this top earning income is the
| equivalent of 80k USD. if they lived in the US they would
| be making double that. in the us, this is near median in
| a lot of places, and quite attainable in most.
| 0xDEADFED5 wrote:
| Most addicts end up recovering
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Addicts of what? Surely, there are different recovery
| rates for different drug addictions.
| m2024 wrote:
| A lot of words to say that doing anything at all must be
| impossible.
|
| Not understanding how homelessness (or poverty generally) leads
| to mental illness is remarkably disconnected.
| Aunche wrote:
| > "drug addicted or mentally ill people being a public menace"
|
| Finland also is rather aggressive with involuntary detention of
| those deemed to be a potential danger to themselves or others.
| annzabelle wrote:
| My understanding is that Northern Europe has a much more robust
| system of using Long Acting Injectable Antipsychotics (under
| court order if nessecary) and various group home options or
| Assertive Community Treatment teams that have nurses visit
| patients daily. They are also quicker to use lithium and
| clozapine when indicated. They also do much longer hospital
| stays when needed than our revolving door policies here. Also
| they don't have meth and fentanyl epidemics yet.
|
| We know that the longer psychosis goes untreated/the more times
| someone goes off the meds, the harder it is to treat, and that
| what happens in the first few years of someone developing a
| psychotic disorder makes a huge difference in long term
| outcomes.
|
| An American might develop psychosis in their mid 20s, end up
| committed for a few weeks and placed on antipsychotic pills
| until they're no longer floridly psychotic, and then go home,
| not follow up with doctors/refill meds, and end up on a cycle
| of this with more and more brittle symptoms until they're
| homeless and have no real chance of recovery.
|
| The same person in Northern Europe would likely be hospitalized
| for longer initially, started on an injectable that only needs
| to be given once a month, and they leave the hospital with
| fewer residual symptoms. They're then followed by an ACT team
| with a nurse visiting to check on them and make sure they're
| eating and keeping housing, and ensuring that shot goes in
| their arm every month. They don't necessarily fully recover,
| but a lot of them end up being able to do some kind of
| schooling/employment/volunteering and they are either stable
| enough to keep housing without being evicted for disruption, or
| are shuffled into staffed group homes.
| andrewla wrote:
| Do we have any numbers on the number of people that are in
| this system? I'm frankly curious if the numbers in the
| original article can effectively be completely explained by
| this system rather than the policies listed in the article.
|
| In the US the system broke down in the 50s and 60s and
| collapsed completely in the 70s and 80s due to bad treatment
| options and often very inhumane conditions and cases of
| misdiagnoses. The widespread misdiagnosis problem only
| stretched the system further and compounded the existing
| problems. I would be curious to see where Finland's
| trajectory in this regard lies.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| > due to bad treatment options and often very inhumane
| conditions and cases of misdiagnoses.
|
| I thought that it broke down due to a Supreme Court
| decision (O'Connor v. Donaldson, 422 U.S. 563 (1975)) but
| perhaps they were interrelated.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| That's a wrong chronology. Before the 1950s we did not have
| effective treatments for schizophrenia other than
| incarceration.
|
| In old books you read about
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catatonia
|
| being intractable, now it usually clears up in 15-30
| minutes with benzodiazepine medication. In the 1950s we got
| the Phenothiazines which were the first hope for many
| patients, there has been a huge amount of progress since
| then and managing most of these people outside the hospital
| is possible. People also came to see involuntary commitment
| as immoral as described by Thomas Szasz, depicted by the
| movie "One Flew out of the Cuckoo's Nest" and shown by this
| experiment
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment
|
| The trouble isn't that we tore down the old system but that
| we didn't completely build a new system to replace it.
| There are deep issues involving people's agency. Right now
| we are in a society that thinks it is wrong to make people
| to take drugs they don't want to take, a different society
| (maybe even ours in N years) will think is it wrong to not
| make people take drugs for serious mental illness.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| I really don't understand society's attitudes here. Why
| is it more humane to give a psychotic person agency,
| resulting in them living in filth like an animal,
| dangerous to themselves and others, than to commit them
| to a mental hospital? If you let a baby or an old person
| wallow in their shit, it would be considered abuse. Why
| is this not abuse?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Part of it is the burden on the caregivers.
|
| It can be exasperating to care for an elderly person with
| dementia, they can range from very agreeable to rather
| disagreeable but most of them have had enough experience
| with caring for people and being cared for that they can
| have some empathy with their caregiver -- even if they
| have a hard time remembering it.
|
| People with serious mental illness have disturbances in
| those relationships (remember how Freud asked "tell me
| about your mother?") and are much harder. And if they
| want to kill you because they think you are something
| other than what you are they're more able to do it.
|
| Communities that adopted "housing first" early on had
| great success with it. In the fentanyl age there's a lot
| of fear that a volunteer or someone who isn't paid nearly
| enough will open a door from time to time to discover a
| dead body.
| simoncion wrote:
| Another part of it is the (somewhat justified) worry that
| "inconvenient" people will declared mentally incompetent
| and effectively imprisoned in mental hospitals (or
| -worse- mental hospitals that _know_ they 're being used
| to jail "inconvenient" people, so they don't really
| bother to provide actual treatment).
|
| IMO, I'd rather have to mitigate that hazard if it meant
| we got actual, effective treatment for folks with super
| fucked-up brains than have what we have today in the
| US... but I'm in no position to change the country's
| policies.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The Soviet Union might be the only place where people
| were routinely diagnosed with schizotypy.
|
| On the other hand I'm still a touch angry that it was
| missed in a psych eval I had in school that, I'm told,
| was a really superior psych eval for a kid in the 1970s.
| (Kohut's _Analysis of the Self_ was a major discovery for
| me when I did a round of research trying to understand an
| crisis at work circa 2006 but I missed the literature
| connecting his work to schizotypy in the 1980s; a really
| good monograph came out in 2013 which fell into my hands
| a year ago... and I think "now it all makes sense" but
| "I lost so much time") It's hard to come out because (i)
| so much about it is offputting, and (ii) I find
| schizotypes on YouTube to be so annoying I can't stand to
| listen to them for more than 30 seconds. Those of you who
| think there's something weird about what I write here are
| right... It's what you get when you mix verbal
| intelligence too high to measure with a good measure of
| line noise. At least I find it easy to emphasize with
| people with schizophrenia and schizoaffective because
| "thought disorder" doesn't seem so strange to me.
|
| I was at risk but dodged the bullet to get schizopherenia
| but I worry about psychotic dementia.
| jldugger wrote:
| Because the alternative was also abuse. Forced shock
| therapy. Lobotomizing children. Court ordered
| sterilization.
|
| At least in the US, it's basically seen now as a
| violation of due process to be imprisoned like that
| without committing any crime. Psychiatric services are on
| offer, but can be refused.
| annzabelle wrote:
| I was responding to the commenter above me discussing the
| phenomenon of mentally disturbed people sleeping rough and
| I think that's been a small phenomenon in Finland the
| entire time due to their different history with mental
| health, with economic homelessness being most of what
| they've reduced via housing first.
|
| To clarify, I don't know much about Finnish mental health
| in particular as opposed to the general trends in Northern
| Europe.
| teractiveodular wrote:
| Sleeping rough has always been rare in Finland for the
| simple reason that it gets down to -20 quite often in
| winter. Freezing to death is not an uncommon fate for
| alcoholics.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| There's a reason why you have lower homeless population
| in the temperate zone than in the tropical zone of the
| world.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Temperate usually means "mild", or easily survivable.
|
| If using the technical term, I think you might mean
| "Continental climate".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperate_climate
| m0llusk wrote:
| Psychiatry has some of the worst reproducability of any
| science. People who are forced to live on the streets without
| good access to services begin to exhibit symptoms of
| psychosis within one to two days and lose those symptoms
| after a similar duration of one or two days with housing.
|
| In Europe such a policy might make sense, but in America
| where being dumped on the street is rather common the
| situation is different. Also, in America the general social
| situation is quite different from life in Finland.
| TOMDM wrote:
| > Psychiatry has some of the worst reproducability of any
| science. People who are forced to live on the streets
| without good access to services begin to exhibit symptoms
| of psychosis within one to two days and lose those symptoms
| after a similar duration of one or two days with housing.
|
| Is this a studied phenomenon I can read about? I'd
| appreciate any literature suggestions if you have them.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| There is a lot of literature on acute sleep deprivation
| causing symptoms of psychosis, and there is a lot of
| literature on acute sleep deprivation as a result of
| homelessness.
| dsajames wrote:
| I can see this. I knew someone who was homeless for a time.
|
| I asked her where she slept. She said "you don't sleep".
| You don't even have to run an experiment to know that sleep
| deprivation, even in your own home, causes psychosis. Now
| add the shock of being exposed to filth for the first time,
| poor climate control (homeless don't walk around with
| multiple layers of Patagonia and a nice backpack to stash
| them in as it warms up), the very real threat of sexual or
| physical assault, the shocking awareness that you are now
| "one of them" and know that a sizable percentage of your
| acquaintances would immediately distance themselves from
| you if they knew your plight. We're not even talking about
| food and vitamin quality here.
| magnetowasright wrote:
| That is my experience too. Of course being sleep deprived
| as a result of having a ...tenuous relationship to
| safety, shall we say, fucks with a person. Understatement
| of the century lol
|
| It's popped up in the news (and in the comments here too)
| a bunch about how parts of the US's prescribed
| 'solutions' to this is to put people on antipsychotic
| medications. One big effect is that these medications
| sedate. If someone has passed out and has an inability to
| be roused and can hardly function if roused is an insane
| risk for homeless people. People aren't getting no sleep
| for funsies. Antipsychotics being used to chemically
| restrain the inconvenient is just abhorrent. Making them
| considerably less safe as a result is just inexcusable.
|
| Not to mention the extrapyramidal side effects of
| antipsychotics that compound chronic health problems like
| metabolic syndrome. I'm sure that the nurse who's hardest
| science class was in high school who's now allowed a
| prescription pad after an only only diploma mill
| 'masters' is prescribing complex medications
| appropriately and managing overall health impacts of such
| meds when even experienced psychiatrists fuck it up (but
| NPs are a rant for another time.).
|
| Having been homeless and on antipsychotic medications
| (thankfully not at the same time) it's just nuts to me
| that it's even considered a possible solution to homeless
| people having mental health issues (arising from
| circumstance or not) or being 'nuisances' is to just
| sedate them and leave them for dead.
|
| Disclaimer: Antipsychotics are a tool and they can
| greatly impact a person's life in positive ways. Also in
| negative ways. They're also not just used for psychosis.
| I just wanted to clarify I think there's nuances in my
| anti antipsychotic rant here lol
| mmooss wrote:
| You're assuming others share your perspective and
| understanding.
|
| > The transition to using the word "homeless" has resulted in
| transforming something we can't easily measure -- "drug
| addicted or mentally ill people being a public menace" -- into
| something that we can measure -- "people without a good living
| arrangement".
|
| > the former is the actual problem that we care about
|
| The word homeless is pretty old, not something people have
| 'tranistioned' to any time recently.
|
| I haven't seen anyone trying use 'homeless' as a euphemism;
| they are actually concerned about people without housing. That
| is the big problem.
|
| You apparently believe "drug addicted or mentally ill people
| being a public menace" is a comparable problem, but your
| comment is the first time I've heard that. Nobody is conspiring
| to hide it; they just don't think about it like you do.
|
| I spend a lot of time in cities and know others who do too.
| None feel menaced by people who are unhoused - why would that
| be menacing? - or high. High people generally don't know you
| are there, and are easily avoided. I've had zero problems; I
| don't know of anyone else who has.
|
| Also, the subtext is about eroding human rights. You have no
| more rights than a homeless or high person. Feeling 'menaced'
| is not sufficient to compromise someone's freedom. That's what
| freedom means - of course people can always do things that
| others don't mind; freedom means doing things other people
| don't like. I find your comment menacing; who decides who gets
| locked up?
| amiga386 wrote:
| > I spend a lot of time in cities and know others who do too.
| None feel menaced by people who are unhoused - why would that
| be menacing? - or high. High people generally don't know you
| are there, and are easily avoided. I've had zero problems; I
| don't know of anyone else who has.
|
| "Nothing ever happens" says person nothing happened to.
| Meanwhile, these are just some examples that made the news:
|
| * https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-67386865 "A
| suspect has been arrested two days after former US Senator
| Martha McSally reported being sexually assaulted while on a
| run in Iowa [...] The suspect, who is thought to be
| homeless,"
|
| * https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-65569357
| "Derby homeless man raped women who offered to help him"
|
| * https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41484206 "A "manipulative"
| homeless man who turned on a family who befriended him has
| admitted the "frenzied" murder of the mother and her 13-year-
| old son."
|
| * https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/life-sentence-
| for-... "A severely mentally ill man was sentenced to life in
| prison on Friday for beheading a Hollywood screenwriter [...]
| a homeless former Marine described by his lawyer as "very,
| very mentally ill", pleaded guilty [...] in a crime without
| motive."
|
| * https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/long-beach-woman-
| sex... "Long Beach woman sexually assaulted by homeless man
| in broad daylight"
|
| Fortunately I haven't witnessed any murders or rapes, but the
| most shocking for me was that I've visited Vancouver twice in
| my life, and on both visits, lone women walking down the
| street in broad daylight were chased after and
| opportunisticly molested by drunk vagrants hanging around on
| Robson Street. Broad daylight. They had absolutely no shame.
| And other than the molested women fighting them off and
| running away, nobody did or said anything.
|
| Everyone has a right to walk about in public _unmolested_ ,
| and I would want the police to arrest those men and prosecute
| them for sexual assault.
|
| You're delusional or misinformed if you think _this doesn 't
| happen_. Of course it happens.
|
| On the other hand, you can be molested or assaulted by drunk
| and beligerent _homed_ people. And, more importantly,
| homeless people are _much_ more at risk of assault or rape by
| the homed, than the homed are of being assaulted and raped by
| the homeless. For all the articles I linked above, they are
| _dwarfed_ by news reports of homeless people being shot,
| beaten, stabbed, set on fire or raped.
|
| So, overall, homeless people as a whole are neither saints
| nor devils. They are who they are, and each individual has a
| different situation. We should feel a lot of empathy for
| them, and want to help them into a less precarious
| position... but we also want to do it because we're mindful
| of the danger to the public that untreated mental illness
| poses.
| fragmede wrote:
| Linking to incidents in cities in the US, and the 51st and
| 52nd state, aren't representative of cities across the
| world.
|
| Maybe """ "Nothing ever happens" says person nothing
| happened to.""" is honestly telling the truth that they
| don't concieve of anything happening to them because they
| live outside of this insane bubble we're in that it's just
| accepted for cities to just have a violent homeless
| population that "we can't do anything about". Maybe we're
| the idiots in this situation.
| mmooss wrote:
| I think you are taking 'nothing' (if I used that word) too
| literally. Of course crimes happen. People win the lottery
| too. That doesn't make it a trend or a crisis. All those
| news stories add up to five individual crimes spread onto
| two continents.
|
| > you can be molested or assaulted by drunk and beligerent
| homed people. And, more importantly, homeless people are
| much more at risk
|
| I don't know enough to say "much" more, but I think those
| are good points. There's nothing special about being
| homeless, in terms of crime, except you are much more
| exposed to it.
|
| > on both visits, lone women walking down the street in
| broad daylight were chased after and opportunisticly
| molested by drunk vagrants hanging around on Robson Street.
| Broad daylight.
|
| How do I spend so much time in cities and never see
| anything like that? I'm sure some of these stories people
| tell are true, but wow.
| vasco wrote:
| > I spend a lot of time in cities and know others who do too.
| None feel menaced by people who are unhoused - why would that
| be menacing? - or high. High people generally don't know you
| are there, and are easily avoided. I've had zero problems; I
| don't know of anyone else who has
|
| This is completely detached from reality. I find it hard to
| believe you are being truthful unless you're doing some sort
| of gotcha where you carry a gun or are some sort of jiu-jitsu
| master. Here's an example of people being afraid of the
| homeless and another of drug addicts, just from last year in
| NYC but there's thousands of examples.
|
| - Why throngs of NYC's homeless are choosing Penn Station
| over shelters -- and leaving commuters in a constant state of
| fear https://nypost.com/2024/08/28/us-news/nycs-homeless-
| cheer-pe...
|
| - Business owners and residents along Midtown Manhattan's
| "Strip of Despair" are so frequently robbed and harassed by
| drug-addled "psychopaths" that they've stopped trying to
| resist -- or even bother calling the cops for help.
| https://nypost.com/2024/06/17/us-news/horror-stories-from-
| ny...
|
| I don't mean to say with this that ALL of them are dangerous,
| but you trying to portray that you never even heard of
| someone being afraid of homeless or drug addicts and the
| trouble they sometimes create is like saying you don't know
| which color the sky is. Like you honestly never seen an
| aggressive person who is high?
|
| Anyway if not, I can tell you I've had a drunk homeless guy
| throw a bottle at me for no reason other than walking home.
| The next day I talked to him and now I know Cyril, my local
| homeless drunk and high Russian guy, and sometimes give him
| socks, but even he admits that when he drinks and huffs
| nitrous he gets a bit crazy.
| fragmede wrote:
| > This is completely detached from reality.
|
| what's completely detached from reality is that the problem
| is so bad in (US) cities like NYC that it seems
| inconceivable that it _isn 't_ a universal truth that
| cities just have an indigent population that regularly
| threatens and sometimes follows through on threats of
| violence to passersby.
|
| How did we let the problem get this bad!?
| mmooss wrote:
| > like NYC
|
| You don't know how ridiculous that is. Stop watching
| propaganda and just visit NYC. I'm tempted to buy you a
| ticket. Or just ask someone who lives there.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| You can tell when people don't live somewhere and get
| their opinion of that place strictly from social media.
|
| Makes you wonder how badly social media is distorting the
| rest of our lives.
| simoncion wrote:
| > This is completely detached from reality. I find it hard
| to believe you are being truthful unless you're doing some
| sort of gotcha where you carry a gun or are some sort of
| jiu-jitsu master.
|
| As someone who has lived in San Francisco, CA for the past
| long-ass while, I agree with the paragraph that you're
| objecting to. I own no firearms, and can hardly throw a
| pillow, let alone a person.
|
| Maybe try, like, _talking_ to more homeless folks? Or at
| least _observing_ them from a distance? They 're folks like
| anyone else, and most of them (like most folks) simply
| don't want police attention, so doing anything more to
| regular folks than asking for spare change isn't in their
| repertoire. Honestly, I'm a LOT safer in the parts of the
| city where there are folks out on the street than I am
| places where there's noone. [0]
|
| [0] The only times I've gotten mugged or robbed were when I
| was in the fancy parts of town where there's noone on the
| street to provide assistance... and my assailants were
| groups of folks who looked to be doing well for themselves,
| rather than rough-looking folks looking for cash for a
| score.
| mmooss wrote:
| > my assailants were groups of folks who looked to be
| doing well for themselves
|
| Bitcoin bros!
| mmooss wrote:
| > This is completely detached from reality.
|
| Well if you say so, but it's reality. Have you lived in a
| city? I think you would know.
|
| > https://nypost.com/...
|
| The post pushes right-wing propaganda; it's a Rupert
| Murdoch publication, the same as Fox News. Ignore it.
|
| Manhatten is so safe it's dull. It's lost its edge, its
| variety, its lifeblood which is the dynamic people. Really,
| I'm not kidding you. Look up the crime stats. Or just go
| visit - if more people would stop believing the right-wing
| nonsense and just see things for themselves, they'd be much
| happier (and how about holding the the NY Post, etc.
| accountable?).
|
| > Like you honestly never seen an aggressive person who is
| high?
|
| No, or if they are aggressive, they are aggressive to the
| empty air around them - I don't engage in conversation. But
| people high on opiods, which is most common by far, are
| quiescent. Some are basically asleep standing up, drooling
| in place. Very scary!
| vasco wrote:
| Lived in cities all my life, 3 capitals, 2 non capitals,
| 3 countries. And gave you a personal example of my
| current local homeless guy, thanks for discounting my
| lived experience as one says.
|
| For your argument to be valid, homeless people and drug
| addicts would need to be some special breed of human that
| is much more peaceful than everyone else. I don't
| demonize them but I also don't think they are angels. And
| they certainly are more desperate. Only a lack of
| understanding of human nature could tell you that people
| aren't afraid. Remember your argument isn't even that
| they are more dangerous. Your argument is that people
| don't ever even feel afraid of them, that is ridiculous.
| mmooss wrote:
| You're a victim now because someone disagrees with you?
| Maybe cities are too dangerous for you.
| vasco wrote:
| Regular people have a stigma against the homeless and
| that perceptions of crime from the homeless are higher
| than they should be and that's detrimental to help them.
| That is clear as water. I genuinely think you're trying
| to just push some perceived overton window and are ending
| up in a nonsensical argument about nobody being afraid of
| a whole group of people. And then you say I'm too
| fearful, which was the opposing argument you made, that
| nobody ever felt fear. It's like inflammatory rhetoric
| for it's own sake.
| mmooss wrote:
| > I genuinely think you're trying to just push some
| perceived overton window
|
| Wow.
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| Whether the very real fear of the homeless/mentally
| ill/drug addicted is justified and rational is a big
| elephant in the room.
| mmooss wrote:
| Fear is a feeling, and I'm not sure what "very real"
| means, as if your feelings are matter of national
| importance. If someone commits a crime, then the people
| are justified in acting - in a proportionate, necessary
| way - through government. Otherwise, your fear is your
| problem. Maybe the homeless person is scared of you -
| after all, you can call the police and subject them to
| serious abuse.
|
| I agree that it's an often implied issue, but I think the
| sub-subtext, the point of it all, is far more serious:
| whether you can do things to other people - via the state
| or personally - for arbitrary reasons. That is, whether
| people have universal human rights. That is the elephant
| they are hunting.
|
| They have found their best test cases, their best steps
| toward destroying universal human rights, with homeless
| people, people without legal immigration status, and
| those engaging in progressive protests.
|
| They won't stop there, of course. It's either human
| rights for all or for none.
| fsloth wrote:
| In Finland, "homeless" actually means "homeless". We don't
| mean "people suffering mental illness and substance abuse
| issues". So that's the background for the article.
|
| I recently visited NYC and understand your specific angle,
| but "homeless" actually can just mean "person without a
| home" without connotations of mental issues or substance
| abuse.
|
| There are extreme cases where people willfully live under
| bridges or something but that's super rare.
| Boogie_Man wrote:
| I'll decide without the slightest moral compunction: If
| you're addicted to fentanyl and living on the street you're
| getting involuntarily committed.
| mmooss wrote:
| But you complain about fictive homeless people attacking
| you, with or without moral compunction.
|
| What will you do with this person after you've committed
| them? It turns out that forcing people to detox isn't
| effective. Addiction is a disease with no reliable cure;
| you can't just give someone a round of antibiotics.
|
| But if you think it's possible, demonstrate it to the
| world: Get yourself addicted, then detox, and you should be
| fine!
| kiba wrote:
| It is more painful to treat someone who is homeless and
| mentally ill as opposed to just mentally ill.
| t-3 wrote:
| Finland is cold. People without adequate housing will freeze to
| death. Not finding bodies in the spring thaw is probably
| actually important to them.
| pavlov wrote:
| What is the question you're asking here?
|
| I'm Finnish and I have a close family member with a severe
| mental illness, so I should be reasonably well positioned to
| answer your question. But it doesn't make any sense to me.
|
| How does any of this relate to homelessness?
|
| To get people off the streets, you give them a place to live.
| Then you can start solving their other problems. It's common
| sense.
| sonofhans wrote:
| In some US popular culture "drug addict" is code for "weak or
| immoral person." There's very little empathy or understanding
| of people who are much less fortunate; there's plenty of
| evidence in this thread.
|
| This misguided moral compass outweighs even sensible
| practices like harm reduction. People would rather see
| junkies die on the street of hepatitis than give them free
| housing and needles. It satisfies some primal need that,
| eventually I hope, our species will be better off with less
| of.
| sugarplant wrote:
| this is such a dishonest characterization. the issue people
| have with free needles is that they end up everywhere but a
| sharps container. they throw loose needles in every park,
| walking path, bus stop, etc. in the entire city. my city
| has had this issue for years now.
|
| you should use some of the superhuman empathy you have to
| explore other perspectives on the issue. even for just a
| minute.
| wrl wrote:
| Is the implication here that needle and syringe programs
| _cause_ needles to be left everywhere?
|
| Because, if so... let's just sit with that for a second
| and think it through.
| sugarplant wrote:
| maybe if you act just a little more condescending i will
| have a clue what you are trying to say
| wrl wrote:
| By what mechanism would reducing needle and syringe
| programs lead to fewer needles being left in public
| places? It's not like access to needles _causes_ people
| to take up an injection drug habit.
| sugarplant wrote:
| there are different ways of accomplishing a needle
| program. around here they hand out packs of 100 without
| any stipulation. to everyone's surprise, our city is now
| littered in stray needles and requires constant cleanup.
| they're everywhere. the various programs do attract
| people from other states. this much is evident by our
| shelter logs which survey where they are from.
|
| it's important to note that it's probably not a very
| large set of them that dump their needles publicly. this
| is outright sociopathic and evil, which i don't think
| most of them are. this distinction is important because
| the sociopathic homeless do make it a much more taboo
| issue to deal with.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Your local community implemented a thing poorly, hence
| nobody should ever attempt to improve anything? You spend
| a lot of time accusing others of dishonesty and
| condescending, but your own comments read much more in
| that spirit.
|
| Housing support with social services on the side can be
| done well enough to help some fraction of the drug-using
| homeless recover. Some fraction may remain drug addicted,
| but now have a safe space, which is _also_ an
| improvement. Some fraction may have lasting mental
| illnesses they struggle with, but even then a safe space
| for that struggle improves both the prognosis and the
| surrounding community.
| sugarplant wrote:
| >Your local community implemented a thing poorly, hence
| nobody should ever attempt to improve anything?
|
| the original context was a ridiculous characterization of
| anyone being against a needle program. i am giving you
| one context of why someone might be against one, from the
| perspective of how it has been going in my city. whether
| standard protocol or poorly implemented, that is how it
| has been going.
|
| >You spend a lot of time accusing others of dishonesty
| and condescending, but your own comments read much more
| in that spirit.
|
| the condescension is hard to avoid when replies are
| posing snarky rhetorical questions which make
| understanding or addressing anything difficult. if you
| felt i've been dishonest, feel free to point it out. but
| preferably not in the way you did a second ago which took
| the form of "SO WE SHOULDN'T DO ANYTHING TO IMPROVE
| EVER?" which was clearly a good faith interpretation.
| sonofhans wrote:
| With respect, you should reread my original post, which I
| think you've taken pretty personally. It's a simple
| statement -- some people think that drug addicts are weak
| and immoral and deserve to die on the street. Another
| reply at the same time as yours said as much.
|
| I don't know how you get from that to "ridiculous
| characterization of anyone against a needle program."
| Needle programs aren't even the most important thing
| under discussion here, housing is. As you're pointing
| out, knowingly or not, needle programs in isolation
| reduce some harms but increase others. Housing is often
| the root issue in harm reduction, but also one of the
| most expensive and politically charged.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| He's going off the logic that the more services you
| provide for drug addicts, the more drug addicts you get.
| It's tied to the idea that an increase in homeless
| services attracts more homeless, which is true if you
| have a federalized system like the USA where the majority
| of homeless go to one place (or city).
|
| But there's no evidence that drug services increase drug
| use.
| dp88 wrote:
| The Pandremix issue has lots of issues to fix as well that will
| probably never see the light of the day. Essentially those few
| hundred with Pandemrix-induced narcolepsy are now a permanently
| disabled minority without organized legal advocacy. The party-
| opposing party, that should not be opposing them,
| Pharmaceutical Injury Insurance Pool (LVP) has significant
| financial and legal resources. LVP has substantially broader
| access to archives and expert knowledge. The impaired
| functional capacity and financial position of those affected
| makes it difficult to advocate for their rights.
|
| The state implemented the vaccination program and transferred
| responsibility to the insurance pool system with its own
| financial interests. The pool system determines assessment
| criteria and makes evaluations without external oversight.
| Initially, there was talk of "million-euro compensations." The
| government guaranteed to finance the remainder if pool funds
| were depleted.
|
| Legal cases have been fought against LVP regarding time limits
| of confirmed cases. Compensations have remained a fraction of
| original expectations. Narcolepsy patients are too small a
| minority to influence Parliamentary politics or re-enter public
| discourse. This special group has been left alone to defend
| their rights within the pool system.
|
| The compensations were based on Kaypa Hoito Guidelines for
| accident injuries, which are unsuitable for narcolepsy:
| narcolepsy doesn't necessarily cause clear cognitive deficits
| despite its severity, and comparison to brain trauma is not
| medically possible. The drafters would probably agree if asked
| that it wasn't intended for this use. A person with narcolepsy
| can be formally capable of work, but this might consume all of
| their alert hours & energy, leaving nothing for actually having
| a life. The system may equate narcolepsy, in permanent damage,
| with injuries similar to a broken finger in workplace
| accidents, hence the permanent disability compensations are
| insufficient for dignified life.
|
| The wage compensation issue is more significant. The
| determination basis for loss of earnings compensation is
| problematic as it's based on achieved education and work
| history, although the illness has impaired these opportunities.
| The same neurological illness produces different compensations
| depending on onset timing, as those with established careers
| may fare better than those who couldn't compete for university
| placement. This particularly affects those who became ill in
| childhood/youth, as it doesn't account for lost opportunities.
| In practice, even those from educated backgrounds with academic
| potential (e.g. top grades or plans for university before
| narcolepsy) may receive compensation based on average or low
| income.
|
| Opportunity cost compensation appears unlikely. The state has
| not promoted reassessment of applicability of Kaypa Hoito
| criteria.
|
| There is insufficient monitoring of equality in compensation
| decisions and appeals, inadequate communication about
| compensations (the question whether all victims are even aware
| of their rights seems open), and questionable document
| management and decision-making transparency. LVP defines
| compensation terms, makes compensation decisions, and handles
| appeals, creating a conflict of interest as LVP has financial
| incentive for strict interpretation.
|
| Permanent damage compensations are treated as earned income by
| Kela, requiring their use for basic living expenses, though
| they're meant as lifetime compensations for an incurable
| neurological illness.
|
| (this is partly machine-translated from personal notes)
| ferociouskite56 wrote:
| No, there are not "a number of effective drugs." I interviewed
| 100 mental patients and the rare ones with hallucinations were
| not cured. Benzos help anxiety, SSRI don't do much, Cobenfy is
| promising. Involuntary commitment wouldn't be horrible if
| violating injections and ECT electrocution were voluntary.
| j45 wrote:
| Finland has figured out a number of thing it seems other than
| homelessness.
|
| Their education system is pretty interesting, and their
| policing system has some approaches to interacting with the
| community as well. If I can find the links I'll share.
|
| Skepticism is fine, but it shouldn't be a reason to discount or
| dismiss something, nor does it mean to accept it. Take it in as
| a data point.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Finland elected the most right-leaning government in the
| history of the country in 2023. A lot of the education,
| social, and healthcare system is facing deep cuts at the
| moment. Economy has not recovered from the fall of Nokia
| around 2010, so needs for social services would actually be
| growing.
| j45 wrote:
| Well, that's something else. Hopefully they don't dismantle
| their education system, and policing ways, and whatever
| else they have going.
| tehjoker wrote:
| People are on the street because they don't have homes. If they
| had homes, they would be less depressed, less drug addicted,
| and less destitute and less likely to cause public problems. So
| just give them homes.
|
| A major upside: if you lose your job, you won't be at risk of
| becoming homeless! it would allow you to take a much stronger
| negotiating position with your boss. It would allow you to take
| a much stronger position with your landlord regarding rent
| increases too.
| 1propionyl wrote:
| > It's nearly impossible to fix. The horrors of involuntary
| commitment vs. the horrors of not having involuntary commitment
| vs. the horrors of using the criminal justice system vs. the
| horrors of not using the criminal justice system.
|
| I think, frankly, and I base this on experience with family
| undergoing involuntary commitment in Europe... we really are
| still a bit collectively traumatized or basing our takes on
| what happened prior here in the US from past abuse of
| involuntary commitment systems.
|
| It can be compassionate. It can help people get psychiatric and
| psychological help they didn't know how to access. It can help
| get people back on their feet and transition them into a return
| to normalcy. It can work.
| saulpw wrote:
| It can be compassionate in other places, but I think the US
| has proven itself to lack compassion in some pretty essential
| ways.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| This really does come down to comparing small countries,
| where programs like this can actually work, to large
| countries, where the scale makes it impossible.
|
| If your country is small and rich, government can be highly
| functional. But please stop comparing it to a larger place,
| it's apples to oranges.
| grahamplace wrote:
| Charles Lehman was on the Ezra Klein show recently[1] and had a
| useful definition for disorder, re: your first point.
|
| This may not be exactly the quote, but it was something like
| "Disorder is domination of public space for private purposes."
|
| As an SF resident, that really resonated; day-to-day quality of
| life here (for me, at least) feels much more impacted by that
| type of "disorder" than "homelessness" generally (obviously we
| need housing solutions too)
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/18/opinion/ezra-klein-
| podcas...
| lostlogin wrote:
| > "Disorder is domination of public space for private
| purposes."
|
| The first thought I had on reading this was 'the world has a
| car disorder'.
| theteapot wrote:
| I'm really sick of people lumping homeless people in with "drug
| addicted or mentally ill people". There is a lot of sober hard
| working people that are homeless because they got caught out
| with some bad luck and don't have friends or relatives to fall
| back on. Once your homeless everything becomes much harder.
| more_corn wrote:
| The thing you claim to care about (drug addicted or mentally
| ill people being a public menace) is wildly easier to combat
| when the people in question have a stable living situation.
|
| The housing first initiative in Salt Lake City provides ample
| evidence that if people have a stable living situation it is
| way easier to get them to take their medication, get into
| rehab, keep them out of dangerous situations. It's actually
| more cost effective in the long term to house the chronically
| homeless instead of kicking the can down the road.
|
| If you actually care about what you claim to care about you
| should be supporting housing first.
|
| That means 1) get people housed with minimal red tape and
| basically no conditions 2) treat mental health and drug
| addiction
|
| The evidence is clear that it works and that it is more cost
| effective than dealing with the fallout when homeless people
| unravel.
|
| Unfortunately politicians who had preconceived notions about
| this topic ignored the evidence and revoked funding for the
| program. Your statement that it is impossible to treat or cure
| mental illness and drug addiction (which the evidence does not
| support) places you in that camp. You, my friend are the worst
| part of the problem. Because the evidence exists to disprove
| your stance, but you hold a strong opinion without having
| bothered to check the science.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| From what I have been able to learn from several community
| mental health friends, there are a lot of causes of
| homelessness. There are certainly nontrivial numbers of people
| struggling with mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, or
| combinations of both in public on our streets. This tends to be
| very visible and off putting. Housing is only one of many
| challenges these people are facing, but there are also lots of
| services beyond housing aimed at this population. There are
| also plenty of people who are dealing with setbacks and just
| need to get back on their feet and rebuild. This population is
| much less visible most of the time, because they are much less
| likely to be inconveniencing people in public spaces. Sometimes
| they have more of a social network to tap and can stay off of
| the streets. For this group, cost of housing and availability
| of work are the primary issues. I don't have a good sense of
| the size of this population relative to other populations
| though.
| fsloth wrote:
| Speaking as a Finn.
|
| It's foremost NOT about mental&substance issues treatment but
| general financial aid to anyone in need.
|
| I think this phraze from the article summarizes it well.
|
| "The Finnish experience demonstrates the effectiveness of
| tackling homelessness through a combination of financial
| assistance, integrated and targeted support services and more
| supply: "
|
| It's a holistic system that actually kicks-in way before one is
| in danger of being homeless, and if someone would suddenly find
| themselves homeless, the state security blanket is available to
| all. So 1. direct assistance 2. support services and 3. supply.
|
| On the first order, this is not related to substance abuse or
| mental illness, and should not be viewed as such. They are just
| a way to make sure nobody freezes to death.
|
| The way these policies link with mental&substance issues is
| that before 90's you were denied housing if you had ongoing
| substance abuse issues. This policy was dialed back to allow
| all housing regardless of any other issues, specifically
| because it was considered being homeless does not help in any
| way to resolve the above matters.
|
| So viewing this as "something only for ill people" is the wrong
| lens. It's a system for everyone. Of course mentally ill and
| those suffering substance issue are often without financial
| means so they are represented in the population receiving
| support.
|
| But the actual treatment to the above issues is a separate
| policy matter (after nobody was excluded anymore).
|
| The downside is that unless a polity has similar wide cover
| social security system in place, I have no idea what learnings
| you could get from this.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| Sounds like the result of being a small and rich country. The
| scale of these actions in a country like the US (Or India)
| would be impossibly expensive.
| fsloth wrote:
| Finland rich? Not as such. Small and homogenous definetly
| (pop 5.6M).
|
| US is rich. Vastly richer than Finland. PPP GDP for US in
| 2023 was 73k $ and for Finland 64k $.
|
| The systems are quite different. But it's not about total
| wealth as such. If we use GDP as rough back-of-the-envelope
| estimate (problematic I know!) us could implement similar
| system economically but politically probably not.
|
| The gini coefficient gives some hints about these
| differences (US 0.48, FI 0.28). In Finland people are taxed
| until there are very little income differences and then
| that money is used for social policies and healthcare. So
| everybody gets high quality healthcare for all of the
| serious stuff (until you reach best-before-date and
| government pulls the plug), you never need to freeze to
| death, go hungry (in theory at least) and your kids will
| have free education. Based on my limited understanding of
| US politics and social structure I find similar arrangement
| improbable.
|
| But it's not about country's total wealth!
| watwut wrote:
| People without good housing options are an issue even if they
| are not drug addicted yet and they don't have mental illness.
| cousin_it wrote:
| I think governments should offer free housing to everyone who
| asks, in their city of choice. "But why should taxpayers pay for
| that? It's expensive!" Yes, it would be very expensive. But you
| know what's even more expensive? The sum of everybody's lowered
| wages, bad bosses, fear for the future, fear of having kids and
| so on, due to the threat of homelessness. Yes, building housing
| is expensive, but the removal of fear will pay for it many times
| over.
| skirge wrote:
| Everyone wants to live in the centre of Helsinki, because why
| not?
| cousin_it wrote:
| I'm not saying give everyone the nicest center flat. Let's
| say an acceptable commute distance away, up to 30min by
| public transport.
| skirge wrote:
| Why not? Am I worse than others?
| cousin_it wrote:
| Yes, or just unlucky. The goal of my proposal is not to
| create equality, but to establish a minimum below which
| people cannot fall.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Who gets to determine the minimum threshold? And how will
| they enforce it?
| titaniumtown wrote:
| The government and laws?
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Which part of what government?
|
| With what legal basis?
|
| Things aren't magically legal and viable in the real
| world just because an HN user imagines it.
| wpm wrote:
| Most liberal democracies have provision within their
| founding documents and case law to allow for central
| governments at all levels to provide for the general
| welfare.
|
| You are asking highly vague implementation details about
| a small hypothetical. It comes off as incredibly rude and
| like you're fishing for some answer you already mentally
| dunked on.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Why does your opinion matter more than anyone else's
| opinion here?
|
| Even if you believe my previous questions were too
| opinionated, responding with even more can only be
| detrimental, and it is not going to lead anywhere
| productive.
|
| For example, try making a substantive argument as to how
| a credible enforcement system would come into existence.
| Otherwise the default assumption is that it will not turn
| out any better than already existing government systems.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I'll add a second opinion to that. Still feeling smug
| about it?
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Smug about an argument I haven't seen? What do you
| believe is the actual argument...?
| crazyeights wrote:
| Most people have little to no money, hence being without
| the ability to afford housing. You're obviously not
| familiar with the social security system we have in place
| now. The only thing lacking is the inspiration to escape
| that system as Medicaid and social security insurance
| don't allow for any savings so participants are
| frightened to lose the only thing keeping them and their
| family alive. Provide them with housing at no expense,
| higher education at no expense, and a food stipend and
| you'll see a lot more success and a lot less homeless.
| skirge wrote:
| anyone can hide and claim they have no money, better to
| provide housing to good students with good job. We can
| call it I don't know, "credit score" or something like
| that.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Just pay them money which they can spend on housing.
| Either from free market or from social housing. Lot of
| housing in Finland is run and owned by municipalities and
| those units are rented just like others. Only the biggest
| fuckups go into system where money is directly paid to
| city for the housing.
|
| You do have leeches, but well it is probably lot cheaper
| in long run than not paying. Like for example my car has
| never been broken into. And I haven't heard theft being
| any way rampant.
| dh2022 wrote:
| Enter now a bureaucracy who will ask the right questions,
| involve all the stakeholders, foster an environment of
| trust and cooperation, coordinate across organizations,
| proactively address any issues, create a people-first
| strategy, etc... Meanwhile nothing gets built....
| skirge wrote:
| or just bribe the person who is assigning flats:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v7eSQJWxc4, because this
| system was already tried.
| wklm wrote:
| Quite an interesting perspective, sadly it'll likely never get
| implemented in any capitalistic economy
| mmooss wrote:
| That rumor is the biggest obstacle. If you believed it was
| possible, and instead told others it was possible, it might
| actually be.
| nineplay wrote:
| I'd like to live in Honolulu.
| dh2022 wrote:
| Up to a week ago I wanted to live in Palisades :)
| spauldo wrote:
| Lotsa homeless in Honolulu.
|
| Funny story, I was sitting in a pizza place in Spain talking
| with a coworker about the high cost of rent in Hawaii and the
| homeless people who wander around Waikiki. Some guy (also an
| American) overhears us and butts in, blaming the Liberals for
| all the social programs that make homeless people want to
| move there. My response: how'd the homeless people buy
| tickets to Hawaii? He didn't have a good answer for that one.
| somethoughts wrote:
| I think the challenge is that some will use it as a jumping of
| point to change their lives and some will use it to stick to
| their poor lifestyle habits and expect the provider of the
| housing to provide free house cleaning, free maintenance and
| free meals and in exchange be a community nuisance.
|
| The latter ruins it for the former.
|
| As a taxpayer, I would be willing to provide free housing in a
| lower cost of living area, in exchange for the receiver
| maintaining the home, no issues with the law and perhaps
| helping others build their homes, etc.
| cousin_it wrote:
| I think it's still much better for a country to have a bunch
| of untidy annoying people housed for free, than to have the
| same bunch of untidy annoying people live on the street and
| serve as a constant reminder to everyone: "keep working and
| don't annoy the boss or you could be homeless too".
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| They will still be on the street most of the time though
|
| The street is where they panhandle for money and get their
| drugs
| cousin_it wrote:
| They'd sleep at home and use drugs mostly at home, so
| still a big improvement. Panhandling doesn't bother me as
| much if I know the people are housed.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| What you're proposing is classical Soviet communism.
| Particularly Khrushchev era communism. Much have been said and
| written about it, if you're interested.
| cousin_it wrote:
| What nonsense. Did you hear me proposing nationalizing all
| industry? Having a state ideology? Closing the borders?
| Removing freedom of speech? No, what I proposed was giving
| people free housing. Another thing I'd propose is giving
| people free healthcare. Both these things are good ideas.
| Mentioning the USSR doesn't make them bad ideas.
| mrkstu wrote:
| I can say all day that my ideas are 'good.' But the only
| place in the modern era that has tried mass 'free housing'
| are communist ones and all those societies stopped doing it
| or failed altogether. That doesn't seem like it has worked
| out as a 'good idea.'
| wpm wrote:
| Did you read the article?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Finland does not have free housing for everybody. Finland
| has never had free housing for everybody. Finland will
| never have free housing for everybody. For historical
| examples of that idea, you have to look to the neighbour
| in the East.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I'm not bothered by if you think it's a good idea or a bad
| idea. If you want to learn about the largest undertaking of
| the exact housing idea you are proposing, there is a wealth
| of knowledge available from programs that involved entire
| nations and isn't just an idea in your head.
| fragmede wrote:
| Okay, how about this program? It's a bit dated, but it
| comes from a country I hope you won't find as
| objectionable as the USSR.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_Act_of_1949
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Isn't that just your run of the mill public housing
| program, that every country has? We were talking about
| free housing for everyone.
| timewizard wrote:
| > Yes, it would be very expensive. But you know what's even
| more expensive? The sum of everybody's lowered wages, bad
| bosses, fear for the future, fear of having kids and so on, due
| to the threat of homelessness.
|
| I doubt your supposition. Once you create free housing you
| reduce your tax base. You are creating a positive feedback loop
| of costs, lost revenue, leading to more costs, leading to more
| lost revenue... and so on.
|
| You've also not explored alternative means of solving those
| other problems on a more direct level or have any information
| as to what that might cost. You could just as well increase
| direct funding for small businesses and approach anti monopoly
| law with a renewed vigor.
|
| To me it's putting a bandaid on your eye when you've cut your
| finger. So very nearly the right idea it's a little painful.
| broadsidepicnic wrote:
| I agree up to a point, and I pay nearly 50% income tax.
|
| In my opinion this free housing should be built within an
| acceptable commute ride from city centers, maybe up to 30'
| ride? And scattered all around, not creating any slums. Hard
| problem to solve, I'm sure.
|
| Nowadays there are years long waiting lists for city housing
| because they have flats available in expensive areas, which I
| feel is not the best bang for buck from taxpayers perspective.
| cryptozeus wrote:
| Seeing comments from few homeless folks here, I wish you good
| luck and hope your situation changes. I have a very different
| image in mind when it comes to homeless people and having to live
| on roadside let alone afford a phone and time to comment on
| hacker news.
| daemonologist wrote:
| Phones are pretty cheap, and probably essential for finding
| work and staying in contact with family/other resources, and I
| imagine a homeless person has time more than anything else. I'm
| also a bit surprised at first when I see a post from someone is
| such a different economic situation here on HN but logically it
| makes sense. (I recall seeing an engineer in Palestine post in
| a recent Who wants to be hired? and I tread similar thoughts.)
| verteu wrote:
| They also do a lot of compulsory psychiatric detention:
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychiatric-bulletin...
|
| > Finnish mental health legislation takes a medical approach to
| compulsory measures, emphasising the need for treatment of
| psychiatric patients over civil liberties concerns... Finland has
| the highest rates of detention per 100 000 inhabitants, about 214
| compared with 93 in the UK and 11 in Italy.
|
| > If at the end of the 3-month period it is considered likely
| that detention criteria are still fulfilled, new recommendations
| MII and MIII are filed and the renewed detention is then valid
| for 6 months. However, this second period of detention has to be
| immediately confirmed by a local administrative court.
|
| edit: I should mention that I've seen fairly convincing cross-
| sectional evidence that homelessness is more related to the
| housing market than mental illness:
| https://www.ucpress.edu/books/homelessness-is-a-housing-prob... ,
| https://www.nahro.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/NAHRO-Summi...
| timewizard wrote:
| "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" does not
| automatically mean "good, moral, and upstanding lifestyle."
|
| To the extent that people have a natural right to exist and
| society does not I think it should be contingent on
| administrators to prove the standard they're applying is
| actually reasonable and non discriminatory.
| ty6853 wrote:
| The standard ought to be they have or imminently are going to
| harm others. Like actually harm a real victim, criminally by
| violence or taking property. If they want to live in a gutter
| worshipping lizard king, well, not everyone has the same idea
| of the pursuit of happiness.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| As a society building a public space, do we not get a say
| in how it's used? If you cannot find a place to live
| without blocking a sidewalk, one will be provided for you.
| That place will not let you take hard drugs indefinitely.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| What about babies and children? What about enfeebled old
| people? Clearly some people can't take care of themselves.
| Presumably you don't think babies and alzheimers patients
| should be left to roam free. Why are severely mentally ill
| people any different?
| simoncion wrote:
| I might be misunderstanding what timewizard is saying, but
| it seem to me that they're saying "One doesn't need to lead
| a good, moral, and upstanding lifestyle to qualify for
| life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's just
| what you get for being alive.".
| timewizard wrote:
| Is there something unreasonable or discriminatory in taking
| care of children and elderly in need? I'm not sure what I
| said that would lead you to this uncharitable conclusion.
| Of course I don't think they should "roam free," but that
| doesn't mean I think your comparison is fair. Are mentally
| ill people automatically feeble to the point of requiring
| full guardianship?
|
| If you're not quite sure what I'm getting at then you
| should examine the practice of institutionalization that
| used to occur in the United States and all the many great
| reasons we have not continued with it. Or the many famous
| examples of writers attempting to become involuntarily
| committed so they can detail just how difficult it is to
| get out and prove to these often unaccountable
| organizations that you are not, in fact, "severely mentally
| ill."
|
| I wonder about the jurisprudence of other nations that use
| these practices in ways which a US citizen might find
| decidedly uncomfortable, as was pointed out by the OP,
| particularly when it comes to the nature of involuntary
| patient /treatment/ and not just simple social separations
| for the good of the community.
| marnett wrote:
| We aren't talking about one flew over the cuckoos nest
| here.
|
| We're talking about people walking around shoeless
| covered in dirt and open sores talking to themselves or
| screaming obscenities in public while walking into
| traffic. They are public safety risks - to the community
| and themselves. Not to mention it truly is inhumane to
| let them live like this.
|
| You have to realize in threads like this you are likely
| talking to people that live in a community plagued by
| this extreme of circumstances. Living in San Francisco I
| saw what I just described just this afternoon outside my
| own window...
|
| Are you suggesting state guardianship is not warranted in
| situations like I have mentioned above? Or are you just
| not aware that in many US cities things truly are this
| bad?
| lbrito wrote:
| Edit - ok, I see the mistake. Thanks.
|
| "Finland has the highest rates of detention per 100 000
| inhabitants, about 214"
|
| If by detention you mean incarceration, that is still shy of
| half of the US rate
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...
| verteu wrote:
| They're referring to psychiatric civil commitment
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Incarceration and detention are totally different things.
| Incarceration is generally for things that have already
| happened. Detention is for things that might happen in the
| future. A convicted criminal is incarcerated. A dangerous
| patient is detained to prevent them hurting themselves or
| others going forwards.
| mrshadowgoose wrote:
| Sure sure. The motivations are certainly different.
| However, in both cases, a conscious person is being
| confined against their will.
| tialaramex wrote:
| No, these aren't _criminals_. Finland doesn 't think mad
| people have somehow committed a crime, it just won't let them
| leave. They're detained against their will until the doctors
| decide they've fixed the problem.
|
| Compare the decision not to let your five year old have
| pudding because she hit her brother and refused to apologise,
| versus the decision not to let her jump into the tiger pit
| because she might die. These are both restraints on this
| kids' freedom, but they come from very different places.
| friend_Fernando wrote:
| > I should mention that I've seen fairly convincing cross-
| sectional evidence that homelessness is more related to the
| housing market than mental illness
|
| This is absolutely the right diagnosis. For instance, SROs used
| to be very affordable.[1] Placing someone into housing was well
| within the means of local governments and non-profits.
|
| In Coppola's 1974 movie The Conversation, a large portion of
| the titular dialogue is about a homeless person Williams'
| character spots while walking around a crowded Union Square.
| That's how much homelessness stood out back then.
|
| [1] https://ccsroc.net/s-r-o-hotels-in-san-francisco/
| retrac wrote:
| Fifty years ago in Ontario, Canada if you were a single adult
| destitute with no income you would be eligible for general
| welfare which would pay about $180 a month, when the average
| rent on 1 bedroom apartment in Toronto was about $150 a
| month. Today, an adult in the same position gets about $800
| while rent is $1300. It used to be possible to afford
| (slummy) housing at market rates, even for the very poor. Now
| it is not. It can be viewed either as a housing price issue
| or an income inadequacy issue.
| verelo wrote:
| Fifty years ago Montreal was the business centre of Canada,
| now that's Toronto. That $800 rate might actually be more
| affordable in a less business oriented city, or even
| Montreal itself since it's seen a lot of decline in that
| time. Having said that, there's zero debate rents are out
| of control. I own a triplex and every time a unit turns
| over and i do my research on rent i get a bit shocked. I've
| found myself legitimately concerned how someone can ask for
| full "market" rate when i know it's simply not affordable.
| wat10000 wrote:
| A business center doesn't have to be expensive. That's
| made to happen because housing isn't allowed to be built
| in sufficient quantity, not a necessary consequence of
| success.
| SequoiaHope wrote:
| I think quantity is a valid concern but I also think
| treating housing as a speculative asset is an issue.
| Housing serves as a valuable speculative asset precisely
| because quantity is restricted by a variety of factors,
| but actually using it as a speculative asset raises
| prices significantly.
| friend_Fernando wrote:
| Relative scarcity is _the_ necessary and sufficient
| condition. Either there 's enough housing or there isn't
| (there's a bit of slack with relocations, house sharing
| and spare bedrooms but it's largely inconsequential.)
| That means that supply (i.e. quantity) is enough.
|
| It's true that if it was impossible to speculate on
| housing, there would be less incentive to create
| artificial scarcity by e.g. lobbying for restrictive land
| use policies.
| SequoiaHope wrote:
| > Relative scarcity is the necessary and sufficient
| condition. Either there's enough housing or there isn't
|
| This seems like an oversimplification. Speculation
| affects demand, so the amount of speculation is hidden
| within "relative scarcity". If there is no speculation
| then demand is directly related to the needs and finances
| of potential occupants. If there is speculation then
| demand becomes connected to the buying power of the
| wealthy, and thus demand and prices are likely to be
| higher.
|
| In particular, the wealthy investing class collectively
| have way, way more money than the renting class, so the
| finances of the wealthy class distort housing prices
| upward in ways which dwarf the supply and demand effects
| from actual renters moving in and out of an area.
| mlsu wrote:
| Yes, but this speculation is grounded on the possibility
| of extracting future rents. Which is an assumption about
| future relative scarcity.
|
| We've all decided that it's totally fine to artificially
| limit the supply of real estate. Speculation is the
| market (correctly, in most cases) betting that that will
| continue.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| While this is true you can't really speculate on
| something with ample abundance. Speculation requires
| scarcity to work.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Which is why it gets such a bad rap. Some of it is
| deserved: speculation can involve taking a scarce
| resource and making it even scarcer. But even milder
| forms can look bad, because they show up alongside
| scarcity, and that whole correlation/causation thing gets
| people thinking. M
| nikitaga wrote:
| Just saying "speculation" doesn't really paint the
| picture of what's going on. In 2010-s everyone here
| blamed foreign speculators hiding in the shadows, but we
| live in a different, worse, world now.
|
| This country's housing and immigration & temp. resident
| policies are absolutely out of sync, intentionally. In
| 2021 they've changed the rules to add hundreds of
| thousands of people overnight, but did not build anywhere
| close to the corresponding amount of housing. Then they
| did it next year again, and again, and again, and they're
| still doing it, and the next government plans to continue
| doing it.
|
| This isn't mere speculation. This is deliberate policy to
| manufacture a housing crisis. To not only keep the pre-
| existing crisis going, but to deliberately and
| methodically escalate it. Politicians profit both from
| their own investment properties and from bribes (ahem
| campaign contributions, speaking fees, board positions,
| ...) paid to them by all kinds of businesses who profit
| from oversupply of labour and undersupply of housing.
|
| "Speculation" implies taking significant risk, often in
| an under-regulated market. But the current situation is
| nothing like that - there is barely any risk, when both
| the supply (zoning & construction) and demand (population
| growth) sides of the market are heavily regulated with
| the intent to raise prices. Capital is all you need to
| reap the profits, pretty much.
| gottorf wrote:
| > the next government plans to continue doing it
|
| Asking as someone not that familiar with Canadian
| politics, is this "the next government" as in the Liberal
| one that would replace Trudeau after his resignation, or
| the (likely) Conservative one that would be in power
| after the general election?
| willhslade wrote:
| Conservative. What is likely to happen is that the
| Liberal party picks a new leader and that leader calls an
| election.
| cudgy wrote:
| And yet most large cities have sections of it that are in
| total blight with abandoned homes, with windows blown out
| or plywood covering access holes to prevent intruders.
|
| Much of the problem is that the bourgeois class wants to
| live in the popular neighborhood, bidding up rents and
| values in isolated sections of large cities. Meanwhile,
| large chunks of cities have relatively affordable, but
| not as attractive neighborhoods with homes that could be
| converted to house the homeless for a fraction of what it
| would cost to build new housing.
|
| Just the other day, I heard a news report in my area
| where they allocated money for homeless at $100,000 per
| bed in order to add more beds to an existing shelter in
| the downtown area. Yet this city has neighborhoods with
| cheap and unoccupied homes that could be bought to house
| these homeless for much less than 100,000 per bed.
| andirk wrote:
| Here in Berkeley and other SF Bay Area cities, we have
| imposed an "Empty Home Tax" [0][1] at some $ and % per
| year. As a proponent, I figured it would incentivize
| people to either rent or sell their unused properties
| which will house people and get rid of blight. Neither
| has happened much and these owners just take the hit.
| Housing as a speculative asset has some pretty terrible
| consequences.
|
| [0] https://www.berkeleyside.org/2022/10/23/election-2022
| -measur...
|
| [1] https://rentboard.berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/
| documen...
| cudgy wrote:
| I don't disagree that speculation on a critical resource
| like housing is a really harmful phenomena. Another
| concern is when people use housing as a store of value
| for diversity in their portfolio. These long term
| "investors" are less likely to care whether their houses
| are rented or occupied as they have enough wealth to
| weather the loss of revenue or even fluctuations of the
| asset prices.
|
| The empty home tax is a great idea, but my guess is the
| tax/fee is not significant enough to change investor
| behavior. Or possibly it's not being enforced at the
| level it should be?
| dbspin wrote:
| I think the principle is solid though. Tax should
| effectively be 100% of the market value of the property
| after a certain point though - say one year.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| If you want to do that, you have to first pass a federal
| Constitutional amendment repealing the 5th Amendment
| (well, just the part requiring just compensation for
| takings), or reverse the existing jurisprudence on
| regulatory takings. And while the current Supreme Court
| _is_ unusually willing to toss precedent, its ideological
| alignment is more on the side that would read the takings
| clause restrictions more expansively, so you 're back to
| an amendment.
| maeil wrote:
| > Neither has happened much and these owners just take
| the hit
|
| Then they're too low. It's impossible there exist no X
| and Y where at $X and Y% this would make them sell.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| There is no Y other than 0 which would be allowed under
| the California Constitution (Prop 13 limits _ad valorem_
| property taxes to a fixed 1% of allowed tax basis value,
| as well as limiting the annual increase in tax basis
| value, local entities can 't add selective additional _ad
| valorem_ property taxes on top of this), and there is no
| X which would make them sell which would not be
| regulatory taking without compensation in violation of
| the 5th Amendment to the US Constitution (as well as
| provisions of the State Constitutions.)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Here in Berkeley and other SF Bay Area cities, we have
| imposed an "Empty Home Tax" [0][1] at some $ and % per
| year.
|
| It's not $ and % in Berkeley, its a fixed $3,000 for the
| first year the unit stands vacant for 182 days or more,
| $6,000 in the second and subsequent years.
|
| Oakland's measure (which is older) is also a fixed dollar
| amount (varies by the specific kind of unit, either
| $3,000 or $6,000 per year), and only applies if the
| property isn't occupied for at least 50 days in a year.
|
| San Francisco's new one (like Berkeley's, passed in 2023
| and would have gone into effect for 2024 with payments in
| 2025) was struck down as a violation o both the Federal
| and State Constitution, so until and unless that decision
| is overturned on appeal, it effectively doesn't exist.
|
| > I figured it would incentivize people to either rent or
| sell their unused properties which will house people and
| get rid of blight. Neither has happened much and these
| owners just take the hit.
|
| Well, the only significant one that is in effect at all
| (Berkeley's) hasn't had much time to have an impact (it
| only applies to rental properties with units vacant for
| more than 182 days in a calendar year, and it went into
| effect Jan. 1, 2024, with the first payments due in 2025
| based on 2024 vacancies.)
| ANewFormation wrote:
| I don't think it's people just wanting to live in
| 'popular' neighborhoods, but safe neighborhoods. In the
| places you're describing you don't go out after dark,
| crime is common, and you also get to enjoy things like
| SUVs slowly cruising around at 1am with sound systems
| more fit for a stadium than a car.
|
| In places, like most countries in Asia, where crime rates
| are vastly lower, you'll see far greater levels of
| socioeconomic mixing with defacto mansions near rather
| modest houses. The same is also true to some degree in
| rural areas in the states, where you'll see a trailer on
| a couple of acres with a truck husk or two in the front
| yard right beside a house that you'd be more inclined to
| call an 'estate.'
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Meanwhile, large chunks of cities have relatively
| affordable, but not as attractive neighborhoods with
| homes that could be converted to house the homeless for a
| fraction of what it would cost to build new housing.
|
| If they are "relatively affordable, but not as
| attractive" they are probably largely housing people
| currently, and not available to house the homeless.
|
| If they are "in total blight, with abandoned
| neighborhoods, with windows blown out", they've probably
| also been stripped, structurally compromised, and
| contaminated with hazardous materials, and already
| sheltering squattors, and would need to be cleared,
| cleaned up, demolished, and have new housing built,
| making it a _more_ expensive (excluding whatever
| differences there are in land costs) effort to use that
| space for housing than other places which might still
| require demolition and new construction, but not the
| clearing effort.
|
| > Just the other day, I heard a news report in my area
| where they allocated money for homeless at $100,000 per
| bed in order to add more beds to an existing shelter in
| the downtown area. Yet this city has neighborhoods with
| cheap and unoccupied homes that could be bought to house
| these homeless for much less than 100,000 per bed.
|
| I suspect if you research what the $100,000 covers, much
| of it is stuff that would still need to be done _after_
| buying the units. At least that 's been the case most of
| the times I've seen comparisons like this.
| cudgy wrote:
| > they've probably also been stripped, structurally
| compromised, and contaminated with hazardous materials,
| and already sheltering squattors, and would need to be
| cleared, cleaned up, demolished, and have new housing
| built,
|
| Seems like you're looking for any and all reasons to
| establish such a high standard for any housing for
| homeless people that literally sleep on the ground on top
| of a plastic bag that creating housing for them is too
| expensive.
|
| In my opinion, this type of analysis is that the root of
| the problem. There is no perfect solution, but building
| high quality housing meeting the latest standards of the
| city planning committee for 1% of the homeless while
| leaving 99% out on the street is not a useful solution.
| squigz wrote:
| I'd be shocked if you could find $800 rent in any city in
| Ontario, business-oriented or not.
| throw5959 wrote:
| It can be viewed as a housing supply issue.
| chgs wrote:
| Doesn't matter how much money in the system, if there are
| 100 homes and 110 people, ten will be homeless.
| HPsquared wrote:
| "People per house" is not a fixed number.
| lumb63 wrote:
| I live near Boston. Part of the housing supply issue here
| is the mandate for a certain amount of "affordable housing"
| in all new developments (I forget the percentage, on the
| order of 10-20% of new units?). This results in either
| housing not being built, since the developer would not be
| able to earn enough on the sale of the building due to
| below-market rent payments, or the non-"affordable housing"
| units have to pay above-market rates to subsidize/offset
| the below-market-rate units.
|
| This drives me nuts, because the goal should be for 100% of
| housing to be affordable. Stifling development or shifting
| the unaffordability to different areas of the income
| distribution do not solve the problem. More housing has to
| get built. This is a supply-demand issue, as anyone with
| basic economic knowledge can tell you. There are two ways
| out: people relocate, or more housing gets built.
| jimmydddd wrote:
| ** "...the goal should be for 100% of housing to be
| affordable."
|
| In a world where everyone had housing, I wouldn't mind if
| Taylor Swift built a house for herself that wasn't
| "affordable."
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Ooh, as an American involved lightly in real estate who
| relocated to Suomi a few years ago I always love this topic.
| Let me ramble.
|
| It's worth pointing out that, on a country-wide level,
| Finnish housing prices have been remarkably stagnant for the
| last 20-30 years when compared to e.g. the United States or
| most other European countries. That is not true of the
| cities, obviously, and cities are where all the work is, but
| it is quite possible here to find very cheap housing in the
| "middle of nowhere".
|
| Government subsidies don't change that dramatically between
| these different areas, so it's entirely possible to rent e.g.
| a studio apartment someplace like Kemi or Vaasa for
| 500EUR/month or lower and then just coast if you are willing
| to put in some effort. If you're willing to live with
| roommates, who may well be running the same strategy you are,
| it becomes even easier. (The downside is you then have to
| live there. Many of these areas have record high unemployment
| rates, for much the same reasons 3000 person towns in the
| United States do. Having done something like that for a year,
| I can report it felt like living in cryostasis.)
|
| So there's arguably an _oversupply_ of Finnish housing in
| these remote areas, and most of the country is correctly
| classified as remote (seriously, look at a map, Finland is
| huge for 5 million people). One interesting mechanism which
| might help curb that oversupply in the coming decades is the
| 15% inheritance tax - many people who live in these areas are
| older and don 't want to hand down e.g. a $50,000 valuation
| home to their kids and then force them to somehow pony up
| 7.5k in liquid capital. That incentivizes them to sell sooner
| rather than later.
|
| The more interesting question: Has Finnish housing supply
| growth in areas like Helsinki, Tampere and Turku kept up with
| demand growth? I suspect that no matter which country we're
| looking at, the one which answers that correctly today for
| their largest cities will be the best place overall to live
| 10 or 20 years from now. Personally I'll always prefer
| Finland's massive concrete suburbs to the endless, pointless
| sea of single family homes I grew up in in the States, and I
| hope we keep building more of them!
| euroderf wrote:
| > the "middle of nowhere".
|
| *"snow-where"
|
| That being said, yes Helsinki has been a magnet for
| employment at least since the Nokia boom years, but its
| population has ebbed at least once in lulls since then when
| rental demand cannot meet overpriced supply.
|
| Outlying regions do have a big overstock of housing. Even
| with low rents, I don't think you can keep any even
| moderately ambitious young person out in the sticks and
| away from Helsinki/Tampere/Oulu. Long ago one might think
| that maybe the country's policy of universal high-speed
| internet coverage might counter that tendency, but... no.
|
| FWIW some stats on population age by region here:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/529458/average-age-of-
| po...
| vintermann wrote:
| They say that in rural Norway, a new house loses half its
| value when you turn the key. Some municipalities build
| houses at a loss to try to attract young families.
| ghaff wrote:
| A lot of that probably applies to the US as well. There's
| no shortage of relatively inexpensive housing but a lot of
| people just don't want to live in those places for a
| variety of reasons. Ask a lot of the people here: it's cold
| and snows, it's not welcoming to people like me, there
| aren't a lot of good local jobs, there's a lot of crime...
| gottorf wrote:
| > there's a lot of crime
|
| This is maybe the biggest difference between America and
| other developed countries when it comes to this subject.
| You'll find that a fifth-percentile priced home in Spain,
| Korea, or Australia will be in a rural area with not a
| lot of economic prospects, but in the US you'll have the
| additional burden of finding a meth lab next door or
| being a homicide victim.
| ghaff wrote:
| In the US, it's probably more about being in a bad area
| of Detroit (or even cities that are considered much more
| elite) than being rural with a meth lab next door but I
| don't really disagree with your basic point though I'd
| have to look at the actual stats. Not sure that US rural
| areas in general have a big crime problem relative to
| areas of some cities.
| gottorf wrote:
| Yeah, you're probably right. To restate my point, it's
| that buying a cheap house in the US comes with risks to
| one's basic safety that you don't find in other developed
| countries.
| ghaff wrote:
| Although I'm not sure that's true in general outside of
| bad areas of cities--which do also exist in other
| developed countries. Maybe some rural areas are iffy but
| many inexpensive ones are really not.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| There is plenty of cheap rural housing in places without
| a lot of crime in the US. The other problems still hold
| however.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah. In that case, I was thinking more about cheaper
| housing in especially 2nd/3rd tier cities. Rural areas
| are, in general, fairly safe.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"One interesting mechanism which might help curb that
| oversupply in the coming decades is the 15% inheritance
| tax"
|
| Housing is one of the areas I do not see any problems with
| oversupply.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Pushing and pulling water/sewer/gas/trash/food/electricit
| y/fiber/police/ambulances/healthcare long distances is
| not cheap.
|
| Typically, "housing" implies those amenities nearby.
| Obviously, a little bit extra doesn't hurt, but building
| out and maintaining infrastructure is not cheap.
|
| I imagine the calculations get even tougher when 50 year
| projections are for smaller populations.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| To be precise, "oversupply" here means "supply which has
| not yet reached the market clearing price". You could
| theoretically cause San Francisco to have an oversupply
| of housing if you waved a magic wand and made everyone
| selling their homes right now double their prices, but
| they would probably fall back to the natural equilibrium.
| Or, if they didn't, and those homes actually sold, you
| could describe the current situation as undersupplied.
|
| Oversupply is almost definitionally a bad thing because
| it means 10 families are trying and falling to offload
| their $20,000 home for $80,000, and for whatever reason
| none of them are willing to lower their price to the sane
| level. That's an obvious market failure, even if its
| causes aren't well understood. And when I say "curb the
| oversupply" I actually mean "put or rent these properties
| on the market at prices where they will actually get
| used."
| worik wrote:
| > To be precise, "oversupply" here means "supply which
| has not yet reached the market clearing price".
|
| That is true for consumer goods where demand can shift to
| substitutions easily
|
| It is not true for infrastructure goods such as housing.
| (Housing is infrastructure)
|
| There is a measurable need that can be under or over
| supplied.
| nomel wrote:
| Just for comparison, some data (2011-2018) for _some_ USA
| states [1], show an even higher number:
|
| > In 24 states-accounting for 51.9% of the U.S.
| population-591,402 emergency involuntary detentions were
| recorded in 2014, the most recent year with most states
| reporting, a crude rate of 357 per 100,000.
|
| Notably, California with 400/100k. Florida with 900/100k. I
| think the _why_ would make these numbers more interesting. How
| many are drug detox /recovery?
|
| [1]
| https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/epdf/10.1176/appi.ps.201900...
| mattzito wrote:
| But by their own admission, other than for two states they
| don't uniquely count people, it's counting admissions. That
| could skew the numbers meaningfully.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yeah, I think this is a big factor. I only know maybe 1 or
| 2 people who had been committed. They definitely have
| multiple commitments though. That seems to make sense as
| it's similar to some other medical issues where once you
| have one problem there can be second admissions if it's
| unresolved or encounter secondary issues.
| xrd wrote:
| That's fascinating because those percentages almost match
| exactly the incarceration rates of those two states. Florida
| imprisons away its problems at double the rate (if they can't
| just bus them to Oregon).
| bnralt wrote:
| > edit: I should mention that I've seen fairly convincing
| cross-sectional evidence that homelessness is more related to
| the housing market than mental illness:
| https://www.ucpress.edu/books/homelessness-is-a-housing-prob...
| , https://www.nahro.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/NAHRO-
| Summi...
|
| The problem is that there are very different groups of people
| we're talking about, so much so that throwing them all under
| the "homeless" umbrella doesn't make sense. It's like saying
| car accidents are a traffic design problem, not an alcohol
| problem. Sure, both things can lead to traffic accidents, but
| they're pretty different problems.
|
| People who temporarily need some assistance to get back on
| there feet are in a categorically different group than the
| people who are currently unable to function in society. These
| are fundamentally different problems.
|
| I've seen how D.C. has tried housing first. It's given
| thousands of individuals free apartments, for life as far as I
| can tell, some in very expensive areas. It's been an enormous
| failure, since housing doesn't actually solve the very serious
| underlying problems that many of these people have. A lot of
| long-term residents to flee places that were once
| (comparatively) affordable because of rising crime and
| violence. The Washington Post has occasionally covered this
| [1][2].
|
| I watched a neighborhood meeting recently about the issue. The
| city does wellness checks on the people in the program - but
| they can just completely ignore them, and nothing happens. Long
| term residents have been forced out after people in the program
| have attacked them or threatened to kill them and the city
| doesn't do anything, and doesn't even remove them from the
| program. A councilmember was taking part in the meeting, and
| had nothing to say other than he was looking into ways that the
| city could provide more help to people in the program.
|
| The linked article is bordering on misinformation by not
| mentioning Finland's compulsory commitment, and also ignoring
| the failures of housing first in the U.S. like D.C.'s that
| haven't included that aspect. That's why a lot of these
| programs end up failing - people try to pick and choose the
| elements that they want, and ignore necessary elements that
| they find inconvenient. In the end, that doesn't help anyone.
|
| [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/dc-
| housed-t...
|
| [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/08/08/dc-
| paid-h...
| dbspin wrote:
| Downright shocking that a policy like this would be adopted
| without the necessary social supports in place. There should
| be regular visits by care workers, addiction councillors,
| mental health professionals, access to education and jobs
| programmes etc. Even in the absence of mental illness and
| addiction (which are of course both rise in unhoused
| populations) living on the street leaves people with enormous
| unaddressed trauma, skill deficits and physical health
| issues.
| bregma wrote:
| The policy gets the street people out of the line of sight
| of the wealthy and vocal while minimizing their
| participation in society (ie. their tax burden). In other
| words it buys them their own peace of mind while letting
| them keep more for themselves.
|
| An actual effective policy would mean the privileged giving
| up some of their privile. Keeping one's privilege is a far
| stronger motivator than ending someone else's suffering or
| doing good.
| verteu wrote:
| Agreed -- It also helps the rich by keeping rents & home
| values high (compared to the ideal solution of "allow
| tons of housing to be built, increasing supply and
| decreasing cost-of-living.")
| tiahura wrote:
| The problem is that one of the achievements of the
| counterculture has been the creation of a steadily
| increasing tranche of the population that has little
| ability or inclination for self-sufficiency.
|
| As long as there is steadfast refusal to recognize what got
| us here, and instead focus on red herrings like speculators
| and crisis counselors, we're going to be stuck with the
| problem.
|
| Don't feed the pigeons.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Finland has the highest rates of detention per 100 000
| inhabitants, about 214 compared with 93 in the UK ..."
|
| Wow those numbers seem high if they're counting unique people
| and not admissions and re-admisisons.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I think there is a bit of nuance to this. The UK also has
| about 500 or so homeless people per 100000 inabitants. In the
| US the number of people in prisons is about that number per
| 100K. On top of their huge homeless problem.
|
| There is the brutal reality that the climate in Finland and
| being homeless are not a great combination in the winter. And
| the summers are short. Getting people off the streets saves
| lives. If it's -20 during the night you can either lock
| people up or collect their corpses in the morning. Most
| people will seek shelter by themselves or not reject shelter
| when it is offered to them. But people with serious
| psychiatric issues, that are maybe a bit self destructive and
| under the influence of alcohol or drugs are going to have
| trouble doing rational things. So, yes, Finland does the
| pragmatic thing here. I don't have good statistics on this
| but I bet there are more than few corpses being collected in
| the US and the UK on a yearly basis.
|
| I've lived in Finland for a few years. It's a friendly place
| that is mostly safe and nice to be. There's a level of
| pragmatism and compassion with much of what they do that
| other countries could learn from. Including the business of
| incarcerating people. The US and UK are maybe a bit lacking
| with that. Finland has prisons and psychiatric wards (not the
| same thing) of course. But people don't stay in those
| endlessly. Prison sentences are generally short, and
| rehabilitation is something they put a lot of effort on. Most
| crime there relates to people doing stupid shit because they
| are drunk, mentally ill, etc. The solution usually includes
| addressing those issues after they serve their shortish
| prison terms. And with some level of success.
| skrebbel wrote:
| > If it's -20 during the night you can either lock people
| up or collect their corpses in the morning.
|
| Or put floor heating under the streets like they did in
| Jyvaskyla!
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I think that's more about keeping them ice free. There's
| a shopping street in Helsinki where they did that, I
| think.
|
| Anyway, sleeping rough in Jyvaskyla sounds like it would
| be tough. Although you might have enough material (snow)
| to try to make an iglo. Some people do that for fun even.
| Of course technically if you make an iglo your home are
| you still homeless?
| skrebbel wrote:
| I was told by locals that it was explicitly to keep
| homeless people from dying. A few streets in the center
| were heated. Like, not warm in any way, but it was kinda
| weird to walk into the center and suddenly all the snow
| was gone. Just warm enough for it all to thaw.
|
| Note, this was 20 years ago, maybe it all changed, either
| the system or the reasons. I can imagine that if you have
| a zero homeless strategy, it's weird to say that the
| street heating is for the homeless.
| giantg2 wrote:
| So are they committing people who are drunk? That would
| explain why the number is so high, but that also seems like
| overkill.
| oriolid wrote:
| No, drunk people who do stupid shit or have passed out in
| public are just locked up for night and then let go
| unless they injured or killed someone.
| poincaredisk wrote:
| In my (european) country overly drunk people[1] are
| locked up for the night in dedicated facilities, and let
| go the next morning. They also need to pay for it quite a
| lot of money (detention places are often jokingly called
| "the most expensive hotel in the city").
|
| I'm not personally a fan of that, but it's quite common
| in post-soviet countries and very normalized (people are
| actually surprised when I tell them that not every
| country does that)
|
| [1] Ultimately for their own good, not as a punitive
| measure. They are watched by medical personnel and don't
| risk dying of hypothermia. Still it's not something I'd
| like to experience.
| chgs wrote:
| It's 966 in Florida
|
| https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.201900477
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yeah, this article seems to be measuring detentions,
| including short term holds (different than longterm
| commitments), but not unique by person. So it's detentions
| per population vs unique people detained per population. I
| assume there is a high recurrence rate.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Its not a single thing
|
| In San Francisco studies of their populations revealed lots of
| segments of homeless people
|
| The one that stuck out to me the most was the most distressing:
| people that were homeless within last 12 months of the study, a
| huge percent of them were just people that left a relationship.
| _That_ was a housing price problem.
|
| I knew so many people that had broken up but still living
| together, and its crazy that the ones on the street were "the
| strong ones" that actually left
|
| (Since I was not poor and exempt from consequence, I ended that
| relationship immediately and got a place I actually liked. we
| had done all the talking I was over it.)
| CalRobert wrote:
| I always wondered if housing affordability was the real
| reason for falling divorce rates.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| If it was, it would be a tiny causal factor compared to the
| obvious one, lower marriage rates. Have to be married first
| to get divorced.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| Yes this is absolutely the case also in Europe. In Berlin or
| Munich you're not going to rent anything as a single person.
| In Warsaw or Prague you'll not afford to rent anything on one
| local income (assuming you even have a job there currently).
| summeroflove20 wrote:
| You sure about this? Not every single person works in
| service, hospitality or blue-collar jobs.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| > Not every single person works in service, hospitality
| or blue-collar jobs.
|
| What do mean, that other single professionals will better
| succeed renting in Berlin or Munich, or afford renting in
| Warsaw or Prague? My experience is that even less so.
| Symbiote wrote:
| It's not too difficult to rent a room in a shared
| house/apartment as a single person in these cities,
| regardless of age.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| How long into your life do you accept to share rooms and
| apartments?
|
| > It's not too difficult to rent a room in a shared
| house/apartment as a single person
|
| In Berlin or Munich absolutely not, even shared
| accommodation have some absurd castings. Some people
| really smell their advantage and squeeze every drop of
| humiliation they can.
| watwut wrote:
| Historically shared living was standard. You had
| multigenerational households and such too. It was not
| seen as humiliating, but as normal.
|
| It has its issues and is definitely not ideal, but
| whether you accept these has less to do with age and more
| to do with culture and economics.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| How do you start sharing multigenerational household when
| you're a foreigner hundreds kilometers away from any
| family? Culture and economics might mutually agree that
| you are obsolete and should eliminate yourself, would you
| comply?
| tiahura wrote:
| Why not leave SF and move to where you can afford to live?
| rayiner wrote:
| Wow. Finland's medical detention rate of 214 per 100,000 is on
| the same order of magnitude as the U.S. incarceration rate of
| 541 per 100,000. I wonder how many imprisonments in the US
| could be addressed by mental illness detention.
| INTPenis wrote:
| I'm proud of all the socialist policies here in Sweden, and our
| neighbors. But a lot of times these things are posted as
| comparisons with the US, and let's get real, there is no
| comparison. The United States as a country is vastly different
| from any nordic european country.
|
| So stop holding these countries with insignificant populations up
| as beacons of light. I think the problem with the US is very
| clear to me as an outsider observer. It's a vast country that is
| so big that technically it's still being colonized. And in order
| to speed up this process there is unchecked capitalism. And you
| can never rely on a benevolent billionaire to solve your
| problems. Only the government can be held responsible for its
| citizens.
| h_tbob wrote:
| My problem is this:
|
| Being homeless is not inherently wrong. But I feel when a society
| makes camping on common ground a crime - like native Americans
| did, it owes it to them to a) give them land to camp on or b)
| give them housing.
|
| It shouldn't be a crime to sleep, ever. It horrifies me that the
| "conservative" Supreme Court could deny the most fundamental
| right to existence, literally jailing people for sleeping.
| changoplatanero wrote:
| It's not going to stay common ground for very long if anyone
| can just set up camp there and claim it for themselves.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| I agree with, but maybe someone, or a group of people, could
| make a legally-defined difference between 'sleeping', and
| 'camping'. Perhaps they could start by using different words,
| plainly understood by most - or, easily researched, for each
| of the different (perhaps) activities.
| itake wrote:
| I don't think people would mind if it was _just_ camping that
| they were doing..
| sylware wrote:
| Wait, in finland, homeless means death most of the time. This is
| creepy.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| This is similar problem to "the more suicides we have the less
| suicides there will be".
| smcl wrote:
| Alright what are the odds that Finland's famous and much lauded
| approach to reducing homelessness was actually nonsense, and
| you're the first person to tell the truth: that it's actually
| because the homeless all just froze to death? That'd mean every
| news outlet has somehow ignored it, there are no whistleblowers
| and nobody else has bothered to look at any data on it.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| If life taught me something, it's that the brutal answer is
| usually the right one. The world somehow undeservedly give
| enormous credit to the social systems of Nordic countries.
| Simply look at the numbers. Finland for a country larger than
| Poland and UK has only 5m inhabitants. Another "fun fact" -
| Sweden has worse wealth inequality than Russia.
| sylware wrote:
| As far I understand things, due to the weather and climate
| over there, anybody not in a seriously built home properly
| connected to utility networks is literaly dead. And those
| home must be properly maintained, not to mention they must
| have some empty spares, which must stay empty but ready, in
| case some nasty big local event does happen.
|
| In other words, you better be welcomed over there, or
| you'll die, literaly.
|
| And with climate change, I wonder if the current weather
| computer simulations on the new climate we are creating
| will generate extreme cold events in more southern
| countries, long enough event to kill many homeless if not
| all.
| kazinator wrote:
| Almost nothing from mainland Europe, Scandinavia, Japan and other
| places (often, even Canada!) is transplantable to the USA. Yet
| these articles keep cropping up.
|
| > _national strategy, driven by a "Housing First" approach, which
| provides people experiencing homelessness with immediate,
| independent, permanent housing, rather than temporary
| accommodation_
|
| Homeless --- pardon me, unhoused --- from America, would trash
| that shit faster than you can "vodka, tar and sauna".
| tlogan wrote:
| I wanted to point out that the approach adopted by Finland may
| not be suitable for the United States. Finland has a population
| of only 5.6 million--less than two-thirds of the Bay Area--so
| their solutions, unfortunately, may not scale effectively in a
| larger, more complex environment.
|
| The other - even more important issue with all these approaches,
| however, lies in treating all homeless individuals as a single
| category. This is a common flaw in most homelessness strategies.
| In reality, there are at least 5 to 10 broad categories--such as
| former convicts, individuals with substance abuse issues, those
| with mental health challenges, people who lost jobs or income,
| refugees, and more. Each of these groups requires a unique
| approach tailored to their specific circumstances. A one-size-
| fits-all solution simply doesn't work.
|
| That said, simplifying the issue makes for great marketing, which
| is why we often see oversimplified strategies being proposed and
| success reported (as in this report).
|
| Unfortunately, this also means we're unlikely to solve the
| homelessness crisis in the U.S. anytime soon.
| epistasis wrote:
| Why would they not scale? We have more people, more capacity to
| build, and greater opportunities for economies of scale.
|
| Every homeless person, regardless of mental state, still needs
| housing. It is the one unifying aspect of homelessness.
| tlogan wrote:
| > Why would they not scale?
|
| Due to the complexity and diversity in economic, cultural,
| and social value networks. For example, the approach which is
| working for Modesto will probably not work for San Francisco.
| epistasis wrote:
| That has less to do with the size of the US but everything
| to do with the lack of size in the US. We make it
| impossible to do things by making each city small
| independent, and having a lack of unity.
|
| Our government is not more complex than Finland's because
| we have more people, it's because we chose to make it
| inefficient and complex.
|
| Removing local cities' power to be different for the sake
| of complexity would solve the issue quickly. If the Bay
| Area had a regional government rather than tiny fiefdoms
| devoted to allowing wealthy people to extract the maximum
| economic value from shared business interests, while
| willing away their own tax dollars in tiny enclaves that
| are protected by minimum lot sizes and apartment bans, not
| only would we have far less homelessness to begin with, but
| we could solve the leftover homelessness much better,
| refuse crime and poverty, and have a far better functioning
| society.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Why do you think a regional government would be any more
| altruistic and charitable than a city government? I've
| seen a regional governmental (a metropolitan council like
| you suggest) that covers multiple cities in a metro area
| that have done nothing but squander money to justify
| their own existence. It got so bad that they ended up
| getting their powers curtailed by the state.
|
| Everything else you mention is just wishful thinking that
| could be applied to any government regardless of size or
| scope.
| throwawayq3423 wrote:
| > Our government is not more complex than Finland's
| because we have more people, it's because we chose to
| make it inefficient and complex.
|
| Name an efficient government of a country with hundreds
| of millions of people.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Disagree. Due to the complexity and diversity in economic,
| cultural, and social value networks it's actually easier to
| build housing.
| devvvvvvv wrote:
| Yes, just like how due to the diversity of Whole Foods
| workers it's easier for them to unionize.
| bdowling wrote:
| Homeless people want to live in cities, for all the reasons
| other people want to live in cities. In cities, affordable
| housing is extremely expensive. For example, in Santa Monica,
| California, an affordable housing project can cost over $1
| million per unit.
|
| https://www.surfsantamonica.com/ssm_site/the_lookout/news/Ne.
| ..
| epistasis wrote:
| The reason it's expensive is or because the US is bigger.
| It's because the people in cities want to keep people out
| so they make it very expensive. Which in turn fuels
| homelessness.
|
| The desire to exclude, the refusal to permit enough
| housing, and the rejection of density are the fundamental
| cause.
|
| The scale of the US has nothing to do with it. It's merely
| a cultural choice by a prior generation that younger
| generations have not yet been able to overrule. But they
| will.
| bdowling wrote:
| The answer is to just build a lot more housing.
| Increasing the housing stock by 10% everywhere would be a
| good start. If there is so much housing available that
| buyers don't get into bidding wars and landlords have to
| struggle to find tenants, then prices will come down.
|
| Why doesn't this happen? Because developers will have to
| do more work for less money.
| epistasis wrote:
| More housing is absolutely the answer. But your cause is
| wrong.
|
| The impediment to housing in California is capture of
| land use policy by homeowners and landlords. We should
| expand the category of home builders beyond developers,
| but developers make zero money when they are not
| building. So developers are not holding back housing in
| California. The few remaining developers in California
| tend to be more land bankers than developers. But if we
| made the process for decelopnrt straightforward, then
| small builders and contractors could build all sorts of
| projects. At the moment the process is so complex and
| difficult that _getting approval_ to build on a site is a
| hugely valuable financial product that increases the
| value of a parcel of land significantly (though
| necessarily less than the cost of getting that approval).
|
| The reason we do not have enough housing all comes down
| to that NIMBY neighbor who doesn't want to allow
| apartments anywhere nearby and who has also been given
| lots of wrenches to throw into the process of approval.
| We don't have that sort of approval process for single
| family homes, it's a night and day difference. Anybody is
| allowed to build a massive mansion without any community
| input, but for anything more affordable, neighbors can
| veto it, and do.
| wpm wrote:
| They don't cost $1M a unit just because. The article you
| posted highlights a number of reasons it was as expensive
| as it was, many of them policy choices that could be undone
| with the stroke of a pen and a round of votes. There is
| nothing about building housing in cities that makes it that
| expensive other than the regulations, many of which could
| use a re-think or a re-scope.
|
| Otherwise, what's Finland's secret? Are they building
| houses for the homeless in the middle of nowhere? How do
| they manage to build public housing in the city without it
| ballooning into a $1M per unit boondoggle?
| bdowling wrote:
| I agree. The affordable housing costs $1M per unit
| because that is the market price for constructing _any_
| housing in those areas.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Policy of building social housing, well since the war. So
| there is quite a lot of social housing stock that can
| work as near last resort. Also generally prices in most
| areas have not ballooned out of reach.
|
| Being lot smaller helps, but it seems in large town new
| build pretty close to downtown is 150kEUR for tiny
| apartment(23m^2).
| epistasis wrote:
| Finland is a model of 1) good land use policy (Anna
| Haila's study of Singapore is also fantastic for
| understanding this), 2) excellent efficiency of
| organization and design in social housing (they run
| competitions and stamp out winning designs many times,
| getting economies of scale), and 3) understanding market
| economies and using the buying power of a large builder
| to be ruthlessly efficient in construction, 4) somewhat
| sane permitting processes and allocation of resources to
| social housing builds.
|
| 4 and to a lesser extent 3 above are the biggest
| differences with the non-profits that build below-market-
| rate housing in California. In California, the non-
| profits must fight like hell to get any permission to
| build, and that process can easily take years upon years,
| with uncertain delays along the entire process. In the
| meantime, funds that might go to the project will have
| deadlines on them, and any project will actually be
| assembled from a large and diverse set of sources that
| vary from grants, to loans, to LIHTC tax credits. And for
| the funding that comes from an application process to
| other organizations.
|
| All this means that the entire build must be 100%
| subservient to the needs of getting local build approval
| and funding gathered all at the same time. Any project
| that focuses on minimizing costs is going to fail because
| the other parts are so hard to pull together.
|
| IMHO there should be changes to local approval such that
| when plans are submitted, the city has 90 days to give
| final approval or rejection, with zero, absolutely zero
| extensions. And if the city rejects projects that follow
| the rules, or takes longer than 90 days, then that city
| loses any control over permitting for a year and a
| disinterested state board takes over, with the city
| paying the state for that cost.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| They're not just trying to be close to museums, hip bars,
| and top notch ethnic food. Homeless people want to live in
| cities because if they can't afford an apartment, they
| probably can't afford a car, suburban areas rarely have any
| resources for them, there's safety in numbers, and most
| bored suburban and rural cops wouldn't let people camp even
| 5 minutes on public land, let alone tolerate it long enough
| to be tenable. Cities are the only place a significant
| homeless population can feasibly exist in the US.
| friend_Fernando wrote:
| > such as former convicts, individuals with substance abuse
| issues, those with mental health challenges, people who lost
| jobs or income, refugees, and more
|
| The one thing they all have in common is how much more
| expensive it is to house them than it used to be.
| 14 wrote:
| You make great points and yes there are definitely many causes
| and they might need different approaches. But it is bullshit in
| this day and age that as a society we have people living in the
| cold and on the streets. Elon Musk has billions of dollars,
| good for him. But if he was to spend $500k each day it would
| take him around 2200-2400 years to spend it all. Ridiculous.
| There is no reason that kids have to come to school hungry or
| wear one set of clothes in this day and age. It's sad.
| Capitalism for the win. But sorry to the child who goes hungry.
| I don't think everything should come easy but having seen a kid
| steal free food from the breakfast club at school then when
| asked hey how come you are hiding food you don't need to it's
| free and he says because his little brother not yet in school
| is at home and has no food your heart fucking breaks. I pray I
| live long enough to see money and capitalism fail.
| wslh wrote:
| It's also about cultural homogeneity. Countries like Finland,
| Denmark, and Norway often have relatively uniform cultural
| frameworks, which can make it easier to implement broad social
| policies. The U.S., by contrast, is among the most
| multicultural nations in the world. This isn't a critique of
| diversity, but an acknowledgment that diversity often leads to
| more complex social dynamics and outcomes than homogeneity.
|
| An interesting case might be Israel. While it has a Jewish
| majority, there's significant diversity within that cultural
| framework: religious, ethnic, and ideological [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Israel
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Denmark
|
| > According to 2021 figures from Statistics Denmark,
| 86%[21][22] of Denmark's population of over 5,840,045 was of
| Danish descent.[23][21] The remaining 14% were of a foreign
| background, defined as immigrants or descendants of recent
| immigrants. ... More than 817,438 individuals (14%)[21][22]
| are migrants and their descendants (199,668 second generation
| migrants born in Denmark[22]). ... Of these 817,438[21]
| immigrants and their descendants: 522,640 (63.9%)[22] have a
| non-Western background (Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan,
| Thailand and Somalia; all other countries).
|
| 522.6k non-western background peoples for a country of
| 5,840,045 is not really what I would call homogeneity. The
| big cities (like Copenhagen and Aarhus) probably are even
| less homogenous.
| wslh wrote:
| Your numbers don't contradict my message, look at the
| demographics of US which shows real complexity [1]. You
| should also take into consideration the evolution of
| demographics not just a single point. Last, but not least
| you should take into account their refugee programs [2] and
| how power is really distributed.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Unite
| d_Sta...
|
| [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-
| metrics/countries/DNK/den....
| sedatk wrote:
| > may not scale effectively in a larger, more complex
| environment
|
| It's definitely more likely to scale than any other solution
| that has never been implemented.
| kmmlng wrote:
| You sound like you have a good overview. Is there any chance
| you could point me into the direction of good literature? I'm
| used to reading scientific literature and would love to learn a
| bit more, ideally through reviews and meta-analyses.
| jameson wrote:
| I wish US implement a similar system but I wonder how its going
| to work when housing prices are astonomical especially in the Bay
| Area
|
| Getting paid 250k/yr with 20% downpayment isn't enough to afford
| a house with 2 kids, so providing a "free" or "afforable" housing
| to those who aren't currently employees is only going to upset
| those who are working hard
|
| IMO govn't need to relax the regulation to build more houses and
| drive the cost down
|
| I completely agree with Finland's approach though. Permanent
| housing is the minimal requirement to reduce homelessness.
| Without placed to stay, mailing address, security, it's difficult
| to get out of homelessness
| dragonwriter wrote:
| A key to this strategy is _building sufficient numbers of
| housing units_ ; if you split these between units to be offered
| in the market (prevention) and units dedicated to permanent
| housing of the currently unhoused (cure) you bring down costs
| for people with income seeking housing in the market while
| providing immediate (as the units become ready, obviously there
| is a lag from adopting the approach as policy unless you have
| vacant capacity that can be instantly repurposed) assistance to
| those who even with greater supply are not inmediately able to
| make market rents.
|
| You can't execute a Housing First strategy effectively without
| adequate housing supply, which is the most fundamental problem
| in a number of locales, including the Bay Area. But additional
| market supply alone is not sufficient to address the urgent
| homelessness problem.
|
| > IMO govn't need to relax the regulation to build more houses
| and drive the cost down
|
| That absolutely needs to happen, and that helps with
| prevention, but except for the fairly-well-employed homeless (a
| group that actually exists and is often ignored, but isn't a
| big part of the homeless problem), adding new market rate
| supply alone _does not provide significant assistance to the
| currently homeless_.
| basicwolf wrote:
| A great video from Invisible People on the topic: "Finland Solved
| Homelessness: Here's How (Spoiler: It's More Than Housing First)"
| - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jt_6PBnCJE
| anovikov wrote:
| Easy to see how trying this in the U.S. will turn into a
| dystopia. It requires a society with much fewer avenues to
| wealth, the wealth being a lot less normalised, than America.
| pavlov wrote:
| So many people in these comments are arguing some form of:
|
| "Let's first figure out if the homelessness is actually the
| person's own fault. If we can really be confident that they're
| repentant and sober, then we should perhaps consider helping them
| find housing."
|
| This is the approach that Finland had in the 1950s! And it didn't
| work. Hundreds of young WWII veterans were dying under the
| bridges after years in the streets drinking illegal booze (and
| many also abusing stronger substances, since e.g. amphetamine was
| given to soldiers during the war). Post-war Finland was not some
| socialist wonderland but a hard, poor, unforgiving place.
|
| Finland's U-turn on treating homelessness came after the dismal
| failure that left so many of these deeply traumatized men and
| women to die. For the past decades, the policy has been to try to
| get everyone off the streets into safe and private housing, and
| then sort out the rest. And the numbers show it has worked.
|
| Many of America's homeless are also war veterans, just like 1950s
| Finland. They deserve better.
| itake wrote:
| you're not wrong, but I think the underlying premise is:
|
| "We have limited resources. Lets identify the most impactful
| places for our $$."
|
| Presumably, people with social disorders will be much more
| expensive to house than someone that is more recently
| functioning in our society.
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