I don't agree that every solution Finland or Iceland comes up with can be replicated to the rest of the world. These are ethnically homogenous countries with a small population and the majority of which is centered in a small area. Swedens perfect approach to education in the 2000's has now been debunked and even the swedes are telling everyone not to do what they did! I think the same would be true of Finlands "solution".
The US by contrast is a continent in its own right with a vastly diverse set of people and cultures. My own experience of the bay area is people are extremely giving and donate a lot of money and time towards homeless efforts. However I feel the latest backlash is born from fatigue towards no solution in sight. If homeless refuse to accept help or seek alternative options to sleeping on the street why would you want to keep helping? I am still stunned that the tiny city of San Francisco had a $300m annual budget to help less than 5000 people. Thats $60k/homeless person, this is greater than the per capita GDP of every single country on earth except the US.
Anecdotally I have a guy living in his car on my street that is filled to the ceiling with trash, he refuses to move or get into a shelter despite us trying to help him. Sadly the neighbors on the street are starting to sour towards him after 6 months of having social workers reach out to help and various charities try to assist.
Man am I tired of hearing "the US is too big, too different, too whatever" when it comes to social policies. Social policies don't have to be implemented at a federal level.
SF is doing it wrong? Fine. No one has to do things like SF. But there's no reason not to try a Finnish policy at a city, county or state level if it'd been demonstrated to work.
The fact that you can just move to SF from Alaska does make difference. Here in Europe we have sort same problem and the poor Romanians and also the people taking advantage of anothers countries social system was definitely one factor for Brexit. A lot of countries that are in the EU are slowly being even allowed to work in different countries, the integration didn't happen overnight. So I'm sure similar problems apply.
People here say a lot of homeless like to move to SF because of climate too?
There's nothing that California can legally do to stop someone from Alaska coming over and staying. But there's plenty that EU countries can do to stop exactly what you described - free movement does come with a range of limitations, like the fact that after 3 months you either have to be employed or have private health insurance to continue "exercising your EU free movement rights". If you don't then you can be kicked out. It's just that no EU country is actually enforcing this law - but it could have done if it wanted to.
> Man am I tired of hearing "the US is too big, too different, too whatever" when it comes to social policies. Social policies don't have to be implemented at a federal level.
Why is it only bought up for social policies? Why is the size and ethnic makeup never a barrier to starting a war or lowering taxes? It seems to mostly just be a lazy excuse to avoid $thingIDontWant.
It's also implicitly a white supremacist argument, "we can't have nice things because we have ethnic minorities".
I don't want to be needlessly cynical but it seems more plausible to attribute all that money being spent because the elites don't want to interact with the homeless, rather than out of compassion to the homeless.
I'm no pro on the subject but it's always worth remembering that statements of this form are almost always wrong:
"300m annual budget to help less than 5000 people. That's $60k/homeless person"
Maybe you have a killer source and I'm out of line, but the usual issues is that these numbers almost never come from one comprehensive study or source. You can't just grab two numbers without context and divide them to say anything meaningful. What exactly is that 300m/yr spent on? How many people did it successfully get off the streets or prevent from ending up there? How many new homeless people arrived over that same time span?
I don't have a meaningful answer to these questions and I'm sure you're right that there are better ways that the money can be spent. It's just that those numbers can be absolutely accurate and still fail to be a meaningful way to understand the problem.
You should look into the efforts of people trying to get a public audit of where that money goes. At that budget (now doubling), lots of companies and non-profits live on that. And some homeless.
This ”ethnically homogenous” ”small country the size of a state” stuff is a really tired excuse.
Are you guys too ethnically heterogenous to have hundreds of military bases all over the world, have the most advanced weapons technology known to mankind, and global military dominance?
Are you too heterogenous to have science and engineering facilities in the world? Too heterogenous to have the largest corporations in the world? Too heterogenous to produce some of the best art in the world? Some of the best athletes?
Being so good at so many things, being terrible at things like this sounds more like a choice rather than destiny.
It's unfortunate that the culture in the US is so deprived of compassion and so focused on the "punish first" reaction to anything outside of the ordinary that it will be difficult if not impossible to get anything like this solution adopted.
It's plan to see, even in the comments in this forum so many are really quick to jump to "but mental illness..." "but drugs..." etc...
It makes me sad to realize this is unlikely to change during my lifetime.
Beautiful. Homes for the home-less, who'da thought that'd work better than spending $25K/capita pushing them around all year long?
"... housing comes first, services later. Clients do have to pay some rent — either 30 percent of income or up to $50 a month, whichever is greater."
And those homes don't have to be big, sprawling, 1000-footers either. An address, bathing, electric, a share in the cost ... is a leg up and a way to escape the terrors. Has to be a hell of a relief.
It doesn't just make me sad, it enrages me. I did everything I was "supposed" to and still lost. I usually avoid making any political statements because it just causes fights and solves nothing, but its just wrong how we treat each other. My life is really miserable through no fault of my own and I am on the verge of losing it entirely. I am terrified of ending up on the streets, would not survive it, and never imagined it possible before. Living in the US Midwest I hear constantly how people in need are leeches and lazy and should just "work harder" etc. A major part of my hopelessness is the cultural norm and beliefs of the people I have to be around, and I have to be around them because I cannot manage to be anywhere else after my life was stolen. Some people are born empathetic, but culture has such a strong effect on how people view others than in many cases even when they suffer themselves they still cannot see the reality and continue to victim blame and rationalize. I hate the egos and excuses that come out every time the topic comes up. I hate how there aren't basic social protections like the rest of the first world has...housing, healthcare, humane things. I am tired of all of it and have failed to get anywhere better for me permanently because of the same reasons that put me here in the first place. It's a trap once you get in it in the USA. It only goes downhill for the overwhelming majority who find themselves here.
The sad thing is that the right thing to do is generally also the logical thing to do.
Housing homeless is less costly than providing jails + ambulances + other services needed when people are on the street.
The data is all there, but people will use sophism to make arguments that are either not proven, or that have been actively disproved. I mean, many arguments against helping the poor can be boiled down to: 'it isn't good enough, so let them rot'.
There's a moral hazard there though - if we're housing homeless for free, then why buy/rent a house, when you can just declare yourself homeless and live in one for free?
Doesn't really work like that though. In the Utah example, it was "experience years of homelessness and other problems" then you get your house. Hardly a great choice of lifestyle.
There's a youtube channel where a guy interviews homeless people. A lot of them just chose to live on the streets over the the pressures of making rent money in a job. They chose to check out of society. If there's a program that says "live on the street for 3 years and you get a free flat", I'm betting it would be an ok deal for some.
Especially after trauma. I know for me the stress of earning rent is WAY, WAY orders of magnitude less than living on the street. For many people it is that way, that is why they choose not to. Most people on the street don't want to be there (though you wouldn't know it, they are working poor who mostly sleep in their cars, what you see as homeless is only a small percentage of homeless)
You could experience trauma too. It can change anyone. A little empathy goes a long way.
They don't have full time. Many of the worst jobs in our society are given on part time/hours basis only.
And most landlords now a days do background checks. If you have been in prison, had a foreclosure, bankruptcy, etc many places won't rent to you at all. So you have to go to predatory places which charge way more than your regular housing.
However, this is all very basic information on this topic.
Since you seem to not know these very basic facts, may I suggest not holding an opinion or judgement until you may do a little reading on the topic.
It's my experience in my life that when I gave an opinion on something I was ignorant on, I generally felt ashamed afterwards. It's been a big motivator in me trying to know a little before giving an opinion. I think it's made me a better person.
So you are essentially not solving a problem for fear of a minuscule amount of suckers?
Two decades ago, there was a big press campaign in Germany over "lazy professors" with some prominent illustrative examples (which I am sure existed). As a consequence academia was covered with bureaucracy to prevent this. Now professors do paperwork instead of science or teaching.
For the greater good society should be able to cope with a few free-riders.
I lived in communist Poland, who tried, via lots of socialist policies, to fix the "social injustices". Over time, it created an absolutely insane amount of free-riding behaviours, to the point that if you did not took advantage of the state, you were the sucker. People living in Western countries have not experienced socialism on that scale yet, so they haven't seen how corroding to the human character the state-given freebies can be.
Regarding lazy professors, we were (and still are) the exact same problem in Poland - dunno what the situation is in Germany, but here I'm convinced the laziness is absolutely prevalent, and almost no one is doing any real research. We also had the heavy buruecratic reform imposed on the academics, and the main difference is that now they expend a lot of effort pretending they're doing research, up to the point of creating collusion rings where everybody is citing everybody else (so that their citation count looks decent) etc.
On a broader scale, I don't believe that people do well in utopias imposed by bureucrats - and that's what the "help the homeless" and other socialist programs ultimately are. A lot of us just can't relate to something as impersonal as the state, and see no problem cheating it or stealing from it. What's worse, it's a slippery slope that leads to general moral corrosion. The professors are one of myriad examples of this - under socialism, most of them learned to game the system in a way that allows them to do nothing, to the point that it became a part of the Polish academic culture, which is now absolutely immoral and corrupt (just speak to young Polish scientist how actually want to do science, and who haven't yet given up and left the country). These people then pass such values to their children, who may enter different areas of live, and spill the cynicism of their parents there. Over a couple of generations, you end up with an absolutely broken and apathetic society - just look at Russia.
The linked article which you are LITERALLY commenting on is among many parts of this data gathering. The Utah experiment has tons of data also.
To say what the data is, would be to literally post the text which you are answering to (you know, the one you supposedly read before commenting)
A text which has facts that you contradicted several times in this thread.
On top of this you don't seem to know what the meaning of the words you use are. Let me help you, socialism is when the state controls the means of production. Unless you are literally arguing that helping a homeless person is the same as the government nationalizing every company on the stock exchange, then you are using words wrong. Though not surprising, given that you seem to comment on articles you haven't read.
BTW, the way Portland tried is terrible. That is why these successful experiments are so interesting to read about for those who don't have closed minds.
The linked article is not research or even data - it's a Guardian article, which has close to zero credibility as far as I am concerned (nothing against Guardian per se, newspapers are terrible sources of knowledge in general).
Even having said that, the article does not seem to have any data on what I was worrying about - i.e. to what degree subsidising homeless people is incentivising homelessness. It instead talks about a programme (not homelessness itself), which seems to be dealing with homelessness by... providing subsidised housing. They don't say how much they're spending a year (presumably many millions, judging by the scale of the operation), and in 2018 their results are... six people who stopped needing the subsidy and went on to live independently. Given the fact that they house 3500 people, a yearly conversion rate of 0.2% seems abysmal, and may actually point to what I was worrying about - i.e. homeless people not wanting to be go back to the society that much, as long as the state is subsiding their housing.
Funny aside, according to the article, 70% of homless in Finland do not actually live on the streets, but with friends or family (but, I am assuming, would prefer to live on their own). According to this standard, there are millions of homeless in Poland. Although I wouldn't be suprised if this particular bit of reporting was mangled and that the truth is more complicated.
First you say the guardian isn't reliable, but then you quote it and cherry pick data from it. So which is it? Not reliable or not reliable for facts you don't like?
Before you were talking about 'communist Portland', you also said that all initiatives to help the homeless are 'socialism'.
I honestly want to learn about this. You might have a point, but you seem to have an agenda, for example you made up up that all costs related to homeless programs are new costs (on top of existing programs) when the article clearly states otherwise.
It seems you want to play to win, not to learn and your mind is already made up. You have already made up facts multiple times in this thread and used words wrong without regard for the truth. This to me shows a lack of intelectual honesty and I don't really feel like engaging such behavior any further.
"Moral hazard" is like many other smart sounding but empty phrases coined by the powers that be: something we apply ruthlessly to the poor and we ignore with a little giggle for the rich and corporations.
I find it interesting that in an article and on a topic where no one said free, you feel the need to qualify things that way, in order to create a moral hazard. It's literally a scare crow argument.
Since you mention the words moral hazard, and you made up an argument to bring up the point, maybe you feel a moral hazard without really having viewed the data? In which case, I'm wondering where that comes from? (truly, not trying to imply anything)
There are homeless people who just do not want to work for money - they choose "freedom" over being part of a standard society. The only home you can provide to them is free, as they won't be able to pay even for highly subsidised housing.
Adults talk about other adults who have mental health issues and who cost society more money now than it would to house them.
We talk about directing existing resources.
We talk about data and studies.
I'm afraid you are making points based on things you are just pulling out of your... head - or you can prove me wrong and point me to a study that backs up what you said, explaining the significant percentage (it has to be since you are bringing it up) of homeless who feel the way you portray. I'll be glad to issue a retraction if you do.
I previously suggested to you a little compassion. I think a little thinking and research would also do you well. Maybe then you could formulate a cohesive argument without using some extreme 1% example to try and prove that 99% of the problem is not addressable.
Or we could talk about how we have a problem where a certain % of the population can't house themselves, and the rest of us pay more in prisons and ambulances than other cities do in housing them and avoiding the high costs of prison and ambulances.
No one said free.
But no. The thought of someone getting help triggers you emotionally. So you use sarcasm and exaggerations to have to avoid a topic where you probably don't have the data to back your argument.
The majority of Americans I know have a lot of compassion for the homeless. They’d prefer they be helped, but our gov’t has yet to find a solution.
Of course some people have a negative opinion of the homeless due to negative interactions - being scammed, not really homeless, taking advantage of people.
Does that compassion extend to anything more substantial than "aww, poor them" or donating a few bucks and into sustaining meaningful change in the way we deal with the issue?
US public housing projects are some of the most dangerous places on the planet. We need to give the common person a path out of poverty that doesn't involve higher education. Once those people are able to move up the ladder, those at the very bottom (homeless) will be able to move up as well.
> US public housing projects are some of the most dangerous places on the planet.
Hyperbole, but go on. To hear it from some people the 5,000 people that died during 9/11 was the worst thing to happen to humanity, ever.
> We need to give the common person a path out of poverty that doesn't involve higher education.
Like a .................... living wage? That's not very popular with the law and order crowd.
> Once those people are able to move up the ladder, those at the very bottom (homeless) will be able to move up as well.
A nation of 180 million able bodied Americans can only tackle one task at a time. We are incapable of chewing gum and walking. The buffer will overflow!
> (some) US public housing projects are some of the most dangerous places on the planet. So we shouldn't put homeless there (because the street is better) We can address this topic when everyone is much richer.
There are things in your argument that are implicit, but you left out or it would reduce your argument. I added those implicit things back in so that the full argument has to be addressed for what it is.
I always wonder if Puritanical roots in US have something to do with it. There seems to be a general belief that people "get only what they deserve". The belief that evil and misfortune comes from within each of us and some cosmic scale is constantly judging whether each person's demons are getting the better of them. These beliefs also carried through to capitalism where individuals who out-exploit and out-hoard everyone else are able to claim most of the rewards of society but any accountability for failing is also placed on individuals who just didn't "work hard enough", or didn't "want it badly enough", weren't "strong enough". Basically if you have any genetic propensity for addictive behavior, mental illness or self-destructive behaviour, belong to a group that's discriminated against, were born in poverty or with parents who didn't have the means or the time to raise you "properly", it's nobody's fault but your own and society doesn't owe you any help, support or compassion. A very heartless and cruel culture that'll ultimately cause our stagnation and eventual downfall.
Well it's natural given the circumstances in which we exist (fighting for scraps under a perpetuated myth of scarcity).
You could say "Well, humans are just animals and we were always fighting for scraps so this is our natural state". But humans only thrived and evolved because we were so good at adapting to changes. So if now our social and economic reality is artificially rigged by those with wealth and power to stagnate everyone in some paleolithic struggle for survival, instead of being allowed to enjoy the true fruits of our advancement as a species, how natural is it really? And are we being deprived of the next step of our evolution because of the resistance to keep leveling the playing field for everyone instead of the few.
I'm not a scientist so I don't know the answers to any of these. I actually sort of believe in the idea of arrow of time so literally everything "is natural" and unavoidable. It is natural that the "few" have wrestled control of resources from the "many". And maybe it is natural that this goes on forever.. but it's just as likely or even more likely that it doesn't go on.
I'm not so interested in what is cruel and what is not (although I certainly want everyone to prosper and lead a life of fulfillment and meaning). But life of any kind is such a rare thing in the universe and keeping it going seems to be a dance on the sword's edge. So I'm more interested in what is better for ensuring that life just keeps going, rather than keeps going under a set of pleasant circumstances.
It's a classic problem of mistaking the symptom of homelessness for the problem. If a person simply has a life event that wipes out their finances and they get evicted, okay sure - providing cheap housing just for people in their situation is great. But as much as we don't like stereotypes, a lot of homeless people do actually end up in that situation because of behavioral cycles that still need to be broken. What makes it worse is that homelessness changes a person - and sometimes they are unable to be a part of society right away for more reasons than money (and sometimes they don't even want to). My family operates a hotel that will sell off excess hotel rooms to various homeless groups in the winter - and many times the homeless don't want to be complete inside, so they open windows, etc. and only be as "inside" as they absolutely need to be to survive. That does cause problems if you share infrastructure with other people.
No, what you're saying is a fallacy. After the housing bubble popped around 2008, millions of people around the world found themselves homeless. It can happen to anyone at any time for almost any reason, but often for things like healthcare costs or work accidents leading to unemployment and even bankruptcy. And it will happen again, and still nobody will remember, because of this mantra that homelessness is a lack of personal responsibility.
In fact, I would go as far as to say that your labelling of homelessness as a behavioral problem is the cause of homelessness. Repeated all around the world by countless people and politicians.
If we really want to solve poverty and homelessness, we need to start by separating the financial aspect from the behavioral aspect.
The financial aspect involves everything from vast wealth inequality, to lack of urban planning, to the divergence of wealth and automation, to regressive taxation and extortive healthcare programs. This is basically represented by 40 years of trickle down economics and complete disregard for externalities like environmental damage or displaced populations.
The behavior aspect centers mostly around mental health issues like anxiety, depression, schizophrenia and yes addiction. Things which are all present in the wealthy but properly managed by therapy, medication and a large support network made possibly by the possession of money. There's absolutely no reason we can't offer treatment to the poor. And indeed we used to, before Ronald Reagan began defunding mental health programs in the US:
Personally, I vote to maintain the separation of church and state in the US, which means that the government shouldn't have a say in what appropriate personal behavior is. Which means as a culture, we have a responsibility to pay into a system which is concerned with the care of people who need it.
Churches can still feed and house the homeless, but they shouldn't be the only ones tasked with that responsibility.
For anyone reading this, if you haven't thought about how your personal moral and religious beliefs play into the problem of homelessness, now is the time.
And indeed we used to, before Ronald Reagan began defunding mental health programs in the US
This is such a worn out trope.
No, Reagan did not single handily defund mental health.
Institutionalization became a dirty word - people held against their will. The thought was that these people could be more integrated in the community, hence institutions were defunded.
>>And indeed we used to, before Ronald Reagan began defunding mental health programs in the US:
Social welfare spending has massively increased in the US since 1970. I would be willing to put money on taxpayer-funded spending on mental health seeing a similar increase.
Blaming de-institutionalization on a federal bill passed in the 1980s is a misleading simplification of the issue that ignores the larger trends in place.
Like I said, social spending has been steadily increasing in both inflation-adjusted terms, and in terms of percentage of the GDP expended on it. What changed is an opposition to institutionalization led by sociologists, who by way, are the most left-wing group of academics in the US according to surveys.
The article you linked to points out that the first law against institutionalization was passed by Califorinia, which is usually at the forefront of left-wing reforms. The move toward "community care", where drug addicts can optionally avail themselves to mental health resources, and are otherwise allowed to wander the city un-supervised, has allowed the most vulnerable segment of the population to be mercilessly preyed upon by drug dealers.
>>Personally, I vote to maintain the separation of church and state in the US, which means that the government shouldn't have a say in what appropriate personal behavior is. Which means as a culture, we have a responsibility to pay into a system which is concerned with the care of people who need it.
This assumes we as a culture has a say in how much people contribute to supporting those who are incapable of taking care of themselves, but no say in whether people actually take care of themselves, and do things like show up to their job and avoid substance-abuse. So you're not removing the government's role in saying what appropriate personal behaviour is at all. Taxation is enforcing a particular type of behaviour, and you're all for that. You just don't want to restrict self-destructive behaviour that encourages dependency on programs provided at the taxpayer's expense.
> We now recognize that these patterns are indicators of chronic homelessness. Far from being the norm, only about 10 to 15 percent of people who experience homelessness are chronically homeless. But this relatively small group tends to be the most visible as well as the most vulnerable.
I would love to see a heat map of the chronically homeless. I'm very willing to bet that it is heavily clustered and this also goes into why people talking about homelessness often talk past each other; realizing that the problem is not "the homelessness problem" but rather geographically distinct subproblems would go a long way.
The people living in their cars/trailers are very different from those in large camps, which are very different from those on park/bus benches. Cold/rainy weather is also a huge selector that changes the group profile. So one person's experience with the homeless is highly impacted by exactly which group you see. The large Lord of the Flies camps are mostly hidden, but may house the majority of homeless depending on where you live.
I suspect the estimates Wikipedia lists are quite off. I think they may be good enough to give you "an idea" regarding homelessness, but I think those are very rough numbers in many cases.
That's 20th century thinking tied into the scourge of fundamental religion that blames every lack of success in any avenue of life on a moral failing despite every bit of evidence to the contrary.
Addiction is a great indication of this, it's pretty conclusive these days that it's a medical and biological issue that can be treated successfully when treated as what it actually is.
But do we do that? Hell no! Our North American protestant roots pretty much insist that we treat it as a moral failing which radiates outwards as ripples of harm on every level of society all because we can't leave some primitive dark ages way of thinking in the dust bin of history like we should.
Housing unaffordable for young people? Of course it's a moral failing, they just didn't work hard enough...cue harm to society in general as it spirals and radiates outwards from that one completely wrong and ignorant thought until we reach the point where there are desperate people everywhere with nothing to lose.
It happens with so many problems and it's lazy thinking that hurts us all.
I'd add to this, that your eligibility for housing benefits is not coupled to your eligibility for housing. You could be in the situation of losing your benefit eligibility because you got a new private income, and refuse to pay your rent (or squander your income as to be unable to pay).
I think the word "solution" is being used offhandedly here, to mean a mitigating response.
They claim that homelessness is dropping in Finland (contrary to other EU countries), but don't go so far as to say nobody is homeless.
Being homeless doesn't necessarily mean you are unable to afford accommodation; even if you have no private income, this may be covered by welfare benefits. In many cases psychological issues, drug addiction and criminal history are barriers to renting in the private market, which result in homelessness. Being "moved" out of this accomodation may not imply being made homeless again, in some cases the destination may be a more managed form of accommodation (e.g. rehab; prison).
More homes means higher supply means rents fall? And the three-month trial period, additional support services, and near-guaranteed contract in perpetuity would help get people into homes who might previously have had difficulty holding down a job, or might previously have been evicted for reasons other than rent.
I live in Salt Lake City and we were doing a pretty good job with this approach. Unfortunately, a change in the police chain of command and in the local government led to scaling back of the housing program and a switch to a more traditional model (arrest, choice between jail or rehab, various support programs, housing at the end if you make it through all that).
This new system (which is really the old system come full circle) is much less effective as is clear to anyone who walks around the city. We have a beautiful public library downtown, which is completely unpleasant to visit because it has turned into the place where the homeless stay during the day. About half the times I go I see someone either being arrested or in active withdrawal.
Like most social problems, the solutions are simple, but politically hard to sell, and even harder to maintain once they've been put in place.
Yeah, but the weather is mild enough that I bet many don't fully realize the risk. In Helsinki, spending the winter sleeping outside is obviously not an option.
You'd be surprised what homeless in Poland pull to just sleep inside during harsher winter.
Forging keys, breaking and entering into garbage disposal or basements and of course trespassing and squatting are some of the things I've personally witnessed and that's not the end.
Yes, there are some facilities but apparently not enough and with conditions not acceptable to some of them.
One problem of applying this to the American cities that have a homeless problem is that housing in those cities is prohibitively expensive.
Go to a city like Seattle and a 1 bed 1 bath is going to cost 300k+ to construct at density. (The city doesn't have enough land to build enough tiny houses at 30k or so a pop, so fixing the entire housing problem that way isn't doable.)
While I agree with you, in most cases that's only because they won't be policed... which also makes it a terrible place for all the other folks who need housing, when bullies move in. There are real on going labor/maintenance costs with providing housing to many homeless... even beyond the standard social services that are required.
The Finnish solution is to have a support team inside these facilities. There is also a trial period and substance usage is restricted (though per article there are places where it is more relaxed).
I recently served on a jury in Seattle. The trial involved a man who was living in a facility similar to the ones described in this article. Many of the people living there continued to use drugs heavily in their apartments, and in this case that led to a murder. It was pretty depressing to see that even with significant intervention, people's personal choices led to disaster.
It will be, give it time. They seem to be working overtime in Europe to create a welfare class, and that's going to inherit all the problems the US has. It's simply the law of economics.
Right because Helsinki is famous for it's cheap real estate. Oh wait.. Condos are pretty comparable to Seattle and single family homes in the city are very rare and expensive. Seattle has probably built more housing in the last 5 years than Helsinki proper in the last 50.
Increased investment in public transportation would make it easier to use land that's not in already-densely-packed urban areas. It's not as though the US has less land than Finland, after all.
a 1 bed 1 bath is going to cost 300k+ to construct at density
This is a problem that can be worked on that will benefit everyone across the income spectrum. No way we should be stuck with $~7500 per square foot construction costs (assuming a small 1 bed 1 bath would be 400sqft).
Government already owns plenty of land, even in most large cities. If you can get a bunch 30+ story housing cheaply and quickly, you can make a dent in the housing problem. Look at what China is doing.
Not in Seattle. The city is having huge issues finding places to build low income housing. Whenever they do identify a location, a bunch of lawsuits show up from nearby residents. Sometimes those lawsuits go somewhere, and the city has to start planning all over again.
It’s my understanding that lots of US cities have more vacant homes than homeless people, so perhaps our solution is not building homes but simply placing people in existing homes.
Finnish solution is not to put homeless people into random houses. They have created special facilities for this that are supervised by a support team ("At Rukkila, seven staff support 21 tenants.").
Does anyone here think markets alone could solve this problem? Or do you see that coordinated group action is necessary to practically solve problems markets can’t fix?
Depends on how you define "the problem". Homelessness is a symptom of several other things widely considered to be problems.
If you limit the problem to "some people who want a house don't have enough money to afford living space qualifying as a house", then broadly speaking market solutions are possible because we can assume these people participate in the market via their "demand" and their ability to "supply" something in return. Obviously there's an active debate on many market issues here, whether around too much market regulation (eg NIMBY), or too little market regulation (eg minimum wage).
However, my understanding is that there is mounting evidence that the homeless population is composed of people who have either no demand for a house ("free spirits") or no ability to supply anything to the market (mentally disabled). Obviously in these cases the market is not very useful, and only functions insomuch as those outside of the homeless population include it in their "demand function".
Homelessness would never be "solved" completely, by market or government, as there are always going to be people who transition into homelessness for unexpected/emergency reasons. Would a market prevent tenuous financial situations, broken family ties, substance use disorders, schizophrenia, PTSD, domestic violence, intimate partner violence? The causes of homelessness are too multi-factorial and hard to prevent, I think the best we can do is a dramatic reduction, not a complete solution.
In my opinion, to solve all of these predisposing/causative factors, we'd need a much much stronger healthcare system, and probably UBI or a strong welfare system, to cover all the above scenarios. Even so, good healthcare and welfare won't matter that much in acute emergency scenarios, for that we need vigilance and persistence and unrelenting altruism.
Markets partially solved this problem a more than a century ago - the solution was "really shitty, cheap, shared housing". As a society we decided that such housing was unacceptable and banned it without providing a replacement.
"This enormously regulated industry doesn't yield outcomes we like for the poor! Obviously markets cannot solve this problem!" is a disturbingly common argument.
The beautiful thing with democracy is that these housing solutions that provided an actual solution to homelessness where banned, are still illegal, and thus won't be "brought back" even if they make perfect sense, were preferred by the people who used them, are a free market solution, and much cheaper than the alternatives.
See San Francisco as an example of what happens when more money is poured in the "modern" solutions - very little reduction of the problem, if any.
I usually don't like libertarian solutions but this is not a bad idea given the United States' inability to solve the issue with their current tools. Right now we're very inefficiently running a couple of slightly better but very constrained in throughput homeless shelters instead.
Who's the "we decided"? Nobody in particular did actually...
So yes, markets failed to provide very cheap housing and not for lack of cheap land or costs of construction.
It's just because they provide even worse profit margins. Deregulating the industry won't help with that.
The person you're replying to is referring to zoning and codes which preclude the economical construction of such rooming houses / SROs. These are decided on by elected government officials which very much means we decided.
On the surface this kind of solution is easy to dismiss as an expensive socialist extreme; a cost to the taxpayer that there is no political appetite for in other countries. Yet counter-intuitively this is likely a saving for the taxpayer, as hospitals and prisons often end up filling this role, at a much larger cost than simply housing people.
Said bluntly, who gives a shit about the taxpayers. Some things are to be done because they are right, not because they save money, even if they end up saving money.
The ROI-first perspective when talking about social policies has created the monstrous society the US is now.
For better or worse, taxpayers give a shit about taxpayers, so it's important to recognise when arguments made in their name, and against people who are suffering, are actually a false economy.
The savings are there, the article even talks about it. I think the socialist extreme is the government owning 70% of the housing in the city. Not that it's a bad extreme, it sounds like it works fine, but out of the ordinary.
Comparing other countries'policies to our own is like saying "but it works on mycomputer". There are too many differences in culture, rights and laws to just pretend that if something works over there, then it should work here too.
This annoys me to no end; so is this intended to make sure no one does anything about a serious problem with this Whataboutism? Or is it intended to make us care less?
What exactly is the purpose of this kind of comment? Why on earth wouldn't it work?
The literal foundations and functions of government are different between the countries, as are the rights that the residents have. It's like trying to copy a Windows program into OSX. You can't just use the .exe, the best you can do is rewrite the entire thing and hope the new OS will even support needs of the software. Personally, I'm really against the idea of just giving folks free stuff as a benefit. I grew up poor and my parents are on all the social programs you can think of, and none of them help in the way they're intended to. The government turns everything into an expensive cluster-f and doesn't ever fix the root problem. No, simple band-aids are not the answer.
The US by contrast is a continent in its own right with a vastly diverse set of people and cultures. My own experience of the bay area is people are extremely giving and donate a lot of money and time towards homeless efforts. However I feel the latest backlash is born from fatigue towards no solution in sight. If homeless refuse to accept help or seek alternative options to sleeping on the street why would you want to keep helping? I am still stunned that the tiny city of San Francisco had a $300m annual budget to help less than 5000 people. Thats $60k/homeless person, this is greater than the per capita GDP of every single country on earth except the US.
Anecdotally I have a guy living in his car on my street that is filled to the ceiling with trash, he refuses to move or get into a shelter despite us trying to help him. Sadly the neighbors on the street are starting to sour towards him after 6 months of having social workers reach out to help and various charities try to assist.