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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...

> 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/

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.

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.

** "...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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

I kept rewriting my reply until I started just looking up research. I should go do something else with my day hah but it seems the affect of speculation on price is unsurprisingly complex.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24058...

That isn’t quite right. Speculators look for good deals, meaning they look at prices N years from now and try to make money on that. They aren’t pushing prices up just for existing, they are predicting higher prices and acting to take advantage of that. They are looking for second hand property that is undervalued for the horizon they are looking at.

But yes, wealthy people have more capital and leverage to participate in time-displaced arbitrage. Gentrification is a bit more productive, since investors work at making their properties more valuable at least.

> That isn’t quite right. Speculators look for good deals, meaning they look at prices N years from now and try to make money on that. They aren’t pushing prices up just for existing

It’s that correct? Consider NFTs. They are a speculative asset with no recurring revenue attached. The natural price, I think, is zero, but speculators push that price up based on the expected return from future buyers based on predictions of how the market will move. There are no other supply and demand effects, just speculation on sale. Of course there was a bubble but housing is more grounded in reality and real value. Still, it may demonstrate that speculation alone can raise prices.

> Gentrification is a bit more productive

In the dry economic sense of “production” yes, but at the expense of dismantling communities. Perhaps more productive and less destructive would be the approach to housing taken in Vienna. The government buys land and builds affordable housing complexes on it, and once residents stabilize and their income goes up they get to stay in the housing so the buildings become mixed income and they’re pretty nice. Near where I live West Oakland is gentrifying with a wall of corporate owned housing that is replacing the front stoops and back yards of local residents with parking garages and Teslas. It seems almost as though the community is being slowly eaten alive.

> Consider NFTs. They are a speculative asset with no recurring revenue attached.

Housing isn't comparable to NFTs, all logic goes out the door when something doesn't have intrinsic value.

> In the dry economic sense of “production” yes, but at the expense of dismantling communities.

Yes: whenever cities devote resources to "clean up" a neighborhood, they are also doing this. Slums are ugly, but they are also a source of cheap housing; old buildings might not use land very effectively, but they are also a source of cheap housing (and that new dense apartment building that they knocked down the old housing to build is no longer as affordable on a unit basis).

> The government buys land and builds affordable housing complexes on it

This isn't a bad approach, though I'm not sure how it would scale to the USA. The problem with the US is that "affordable" is often a term that is applied to a few hot cities rather than in general. If all the affordable housing is in Mississippi, no one would be interested in taking it, if it is where people want to live, then we will have lots of lopsided unsustainable population movements, if we just somehow even it out affordable housing, then some people are still going to be left out of their preferred location for housing.

Yeah I was trying to reason about the affects of speculation but it turns out that of course there’s plenty of research on the topic, and the affects are broad and complex. Unfortunately I don’t have time to read this right now but you may find it interesting:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24058...

For public housing, there is also the approach taken by Singapore. This article discusses both and may interest you. What I think matters most is we understand that it is possible to have more people in stable affordable housing, and we accept nothing less.

https://www.shareable.net/public-housing-works-lessons-from-...

The Singapore model only works because they distinguish between citizens and residents. You can’t just move to Singapore one day and buy into public housing the next. It is Austria on an even more narrow scale.

While this is true you can’t really speculate on something with ample abundance. Speculation requires scarcity to work.

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

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.

> 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?

Conservative. What is likely to happen is that the Liberal party picks a new leader and that leader calls an election.

The latter. Conservatives have shown no serious interest in reducing immigration. Their politicians get all the same profits from the crisis, plus the votes of socially conservative immigrants on top. Canadian politics is full of weird alliances.

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.

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...

> 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.

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.)

> 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.)

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?

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> and already sheltering squattors

i.e. already providing housing to someone who would otherwise be homeless

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.'

Transport affects this. Berlin has a pretty extensive network that gets you from any part to any other part in an hour or less. It's thought to be a factor in why the rents rise uniformly instead of rising a lot in the middle.

I'd be shocked if you could find $800 rent in any city in Ontario, business-oriented or not.

Windsor? As a nicer Detroit, I thought they might at least benefit from weaker rents considering what’s available across the border. But that’s just a guess, I haven’t lived in that area since the 80s. Here is one source that says a 1 bedroom will set you back $1400: https://www.zumper.com/apartments-for-rent/windsor-on

Ha, I wish.

It can be viewed as a housing supply issue.

Doesn’t matter how much money in the system, if there are 100 homes and 110 people, ten will be homeless.

"People per house" is not a fixed number.

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 500€/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!

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...

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

There is plenty of cheap rural housing in places without a lot of crime in the US. The other problems still hold however.

Yeah. In that case, I was thinking more about cheaper housing in especially 2nd/3rd tier cities. Rural areas are, in general, fairly safe.

>"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.

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."

> 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.

That claim is just false. No one needs to live at exactly 123 Acorn Street, Pierre, South Dakota, USA.

They may have good reasons to want to live there, including "My job is here", "My family is here", and "The only doctor in the world who can treat my exceptionally rare illness lives here". But God will not smite them if USPS starts delivering their mail to a different address. They have many options for figuring out a different place to live, either locally in Pierre, or farther away in a different state or continent.

The fact that the supply and demand curves seemingly move slower in the housing market compared to e.g. the electricity or food markets, which are arguably much more basic "infrastructure goods" (you can survive being homeless if you have food - you can't survive living in a mansion with nothing to eat), doesn't mean they stop being subject to the laws of supply and demand. At worst it means "Plan carefully, because if you miss the mark you will lose a lot of money for a long time." At best it means "Sweet - I wonder if I can make these markets more dynamic with a new company?"

Pushing and pulling water/sewer/gas/trash/food/electricity/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.

> 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...

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.

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.)

I always wondered if housing affordability was the real reason for falling divorce rates.

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

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).

It's not too difficult to rent a room in a shared house/apartment as a single person in these cities, regardless of age.

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.

Indefinitely, if you can't afford to live alone. It's obviously not something you'd want to do, but it's much better than being homeless.

I've shared a house with people in their 40s (or more) when I was in my 20s in London. I'm sure they would have preferred their own place, but it was much, much cheaper for them to share.

If someone in their 40s ends up or insist on living in shared accommodation in London, it's probably a hidden message from their own destiny.

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.

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?

You sure about this? Not every single person works in service, hospitality or blue-collar jobs.

> 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.

Why not leave SF and move to where you can afford to live?

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...

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.

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.

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).

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...

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.

Sure sure. The motivations are certainly different. However, in both cases, a conscious person is being confined against their will.

They're referring to psychiatric civil commitment

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.

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.

There's a chart in this whitepaper where you see how they may have shifted from mental hospitals to jail/prison when US policy around that changed in the 1970's.

https://freopp.org/whitepapers/reimagining-the-policy-approa...

Scroll down to "The Homeless Have Moved from Hospitals to Prisons"

"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.

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.

> 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 Jyväskylä!

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 Jyväskylä 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?

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.

> I was told by locals that it was explicitly

My experience with Finnish people is that it can be hard to tell when they are joking and they have a dark sense of humor. Great poker players too.

True! That said, I wasn't fooled. I'm very good at Finns. It might be incorrect but they believed it for sure :-)

So are they committing people who are drunk? That would explain why the number is so high, but that also seems like overkill.

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.

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.

It’s 966 in Florida

https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ps.201900477

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.

The timeframes are fuzzy, but it looks like the current Finnish mental health regime was enabled by a law passed in 1990. Since that point, given the 5.6M population times the 214/100,000 rate, we get a total of ~12,000 people committed.

The graph in the linked article shows a reduction in homelessness from about 17,000 to about 4,000, a reduction of approximately 13,000 people.

So I think it's fair to say that Finland's mental health changes have been responsible for the overwhelming majority in the reduction of Finland's homelessness problem. This is consistent with the point that I was trying to make elsewhere in this thread [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42660372

> 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...

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.

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.

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.")

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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?

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.".

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.

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?

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.

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!

> 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...

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.

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

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.

It'll get worse: https://minnesotareformer.com/2023/08/31/ending-minimum-park...

The usual misery pushers are already celebrating the win.

So... you want all new buildings to have parking minimums? First of all, pass, but secondly what about that article justifies your cynicism, and lastly what exactly is the root of your anger? Do you just love being isolated to the point that you think everyone else hates or should hate living somewhere where they don't need a car?

I'd be pretty annoyed about only being able to own something that had to have a dedicated parking space. What a waste.

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...

> 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.

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.

> 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).

You keep referring to people who like cities that function as cities as "misery pushers" and then in the same breath doing as much as you can to create an association between increased density and all these hypothetical negative possibilities. Likewise it just seems as though you've developed some level of prejudice based on the negative experience you're contending with in your neighborhood, and then extrapolating that quite severely, because you think you've been lied to. It's tricky to reconcile how if you were inclined to be optimistic about the prospect of urbanism to begin with, you'd be so intensely and easily convinced otherwise, or surprised that the creation of an arbitrary higher density building didn't turn your low density town into European capital city overnight. Like how does it happen that you lived in no specific place in Europe for example, then to where you are now, and one thing gets built which convinces you that actually every city in Europe is and has always been wrong.

Your chart shows two lines that seem to represent sales of something over time in nearby cities, which may or may not be relevant, but are at most a narrow slice of what one would need to look at in order to understand what's going on over in Minneapolis if anything.

You then create a strawman who thinks the removal of zoning restrictions will automatically lead to a utopia in which we have no other human problems or economic systems to contend with, even going so far as to dismiss someone on the basis of a lacking argument against a claim that nobody made.

> You keep referring to people who like cities that function as cities as "misery pushers"

That's an apt description.

> in the same breath doing as much as you can to create an association between increased density and all these hypothetical negative possibilities.

Why are they hypothetical? Density has long been associated with worse outcomes (higher crime, etc.). I can provide plenty of citations to scholarly literature.

> Like how does it happen that you lived in no specific place in Europe for example, then to where you are now

I grew up in Russia (Izhevsk), moved to Germany (Karlsruhe), then to Ukraine (Kyiv), and (briefly) to the Netherlands before coming to the US. I did not have a car in any of these places.

> and one thing gets built which convinces you that actually every city in Europe is and has always been wrong.

Yes. I'm able to compare the life in the US and in Europe first-hand. And Europe has plenty of dark secrets of its own. For example, Copenhagen in Denmark became the world's most liveable city by ruthlessly controlling its population. It still has not reached its peak number in 1970-s. Bet you didn't know that?

> Your chart shows two lines that seem to represent sales of something over time in nearby cities, which may or may not be relevant, but are at most a narrow slice of what one would need to look at in order to understand what's going on over in Minneapolis if anything.

I have real estate data with street-level information. It's not a public dataset, so I'm replicating my results using public datasets.

> You then create a strawman who thinks the removal of zoning restrictions will automatically lead to a utopia

No. I'm saying that removal of zoning limits to allow increased density does NOT lead to lower prices. It leads to increased density and increased misery as a result.

Minneapolis is simply a good example of this. There is another very good one: Seattle (where I live now). It increased its density by 25% over the last 12 years, many times leading the nation in the number of active construction cranes. The result? Faster price growth than even in SF.

> No. I'm saying that removal of zoning limits to allow increased density does NOT lead to lower prices. It leads to increased density and increased misery as a result.

I never made that claim.

> It's not a public dataset, so I'm replicating my results using public datasets.

You'll need to do better than just comparing real estate sales. If you're going to make a coherent argument based on data, it should at least attempt to show the relationship between more datapoints than just arbitrary sales and time, especially with only a 6 year timespan. Whether there's something there or not, you're not providing a substantial enough analysis to be compelling here.

It's fine if you don't like denser areas. Plenty of people who grow up in denser cities move out because they feel like they're sick of people, but cities wouldn't be cities if they're wasn't a reason to be there, and many people prefer it. There's not a chance in hell I'd move back to a car dependent hellscape, because I grew up in one, and that's true misery to me.

> It increased its density by 25% over the last 12 years, many times leading the nation in the number of active construction cranes. The result? Faster price growth than even in SF.

Again, weird cherry-picked comparison that wouldn't surprise anyone who's aware of the two tech hubs.

What about Austin, where they have aggressively upzoned and built, and now housing prices are down?

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.

Looking at the population of Austin proper is pretty silly here, and similar just looking at Travis. The city proper lost population from 2019-2020 as many cities did during the early pandemic, but grew each year since. The Austin metro area has grown every one of these years.

In every comparable city in the country, housing prices are up. In Austin, they are down.

> In every comparable city in the country, housing prices are up. In Austin, they are down.

Now compare the population. Travis County population (sans Austin) went up, so the prices are also up. And Travis County actually has _more_ new units than Austin proper.

The driver for the price decreases in Austin is the population drop, not the new construction.

Population dropped 2019-2020, but population has increased each year since 2020, both in Austin proper and austin greater metro area. Housing prices increased until about 2022 when they started dropping, and (along with rent) have been trending downwards since.

If your point is, "construction has to outstrip population increase in order to decrease prices", then well, yeah, we agree fully.

If your point is that huge amounts of new units going on the market in Austin does not have a significant impact on prices, I don't think that's supported by any evidence or makes any sense.

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?

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.

*increasing supply to meet demand

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...

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.

You live near one of these developments? Your reaction may be correct, but my experience has been that the density has brought amenities. A brewery, a cafe, and a good restaurant moved into vacant/underutilized spaces. My street hasn’t been had issues with long-term parkers. Crime’s no issue. IDK. My experience doesn’t align with your certainty.

I actually do live in a neighborhood affected by densification, although not in Minneapolis. The "amenities" got worse, a couple of local small stores were demolished and replaced with apartment buildings. A couple of these apartment buildings are "low barrier housing", meaning that they are given to junkies. So the property crime in the area skyrocketed (not helped by newly opened transit), and we don't have a single 24-hour pharmacy in the area anymore.

The street parking is now oversubscribed, so my friends often have to circle around the area for quite a while to find a spot when they visit me.

These changes actually made me look into the question of density. Before that first-hand experience, I used to be a pro-urbanist victim of propaganda. And yes, I lived in Europe and I got my driving license when I was about 30.

That’s unfortunate. Maybe it can be done well or be done poorly. From my experience as a homeowner in Minneapolis, the dense housing has been net neutral/positive.

I don't think you read and understood the article you just linked. That is talking about a very broad set of reforms, not the single family home zoning abolishment.

> higher housing prices

Have you ever heard of a market?

>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.

"In a functioning economy" is doing a lot of work here. Here in reality the parent comment is 100% correct.

My point is that immigration is a distraction from the nonfunctioning economy.

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.

And yet the non-functioning economy might be a result of the excessive immigration. Which one is easiest to address?

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Why are rents going down in Austin then? Lots of rent to seek there with all the new housing being built.

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.

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.

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.

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 £100K. House prices increase. So now there is more wealth in the economy (there isn't, but economists think there is). Now it is worth £120K.

I remortgage and - voila! I have £20K 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)

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 ?

I think inflation is when the value of money drops ie it can buy less of everything. But this is simply the cost of one asset rising.

There are things we can do besides/in addition to permitting more housing construction. Namely, lowering the barrier to entry for construction:

If we reduce the minimum lot size, then we reduce the minimum land purchase required in order to construct housing. And of course, lower upfront investment means lower risk and more newcomers are financially capable of buying in in the first place.

Lowering turnaround times for approval would also lower costs, and broadening the range of housing that gets by-right approval is a common way of doing that. Another is to just set a cap on the approval period, e.g. after 100 days, if you haven't received a response rejecting your application, then it's approved by default, and any rejection must be accompanied by a specific stated reason for rejection.

The overarching problem, though, is that there needs to be a political will to reduce housing costs (as you implied). But even that is partially missing the point, IMO - plenty of NIMBYs are acting for rational non-financial reasons - they're afraid that higher local density will increase local traffic and take up the finite local free parking spaces. Free parking is especially problematic, because paid parking will never satisfy people who see other people getting free parking in the same area. And of course the whole car-traffic problem is driven by cities being especially car-centric, with car traffic fundamentally not scaling up well compared to public transport.

You there are enough houses being build, people who buy them to extract rent are non issue.

It would only work if you built _more_ houses than the demand and even then the market would have to be perfectly liquid.

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.

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.

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.

The continual drive for growth is a problem though. By definition it isn’t sustainable, yet we keep adding, consuming, growing.

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.

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-...

Trying to house the people we have is in no way a "drive for growth".

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.

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.

Are we both arguing against the growth we see at this time?

Everybody cares about growth. The world will end the minute we finally stop growing. The entire economic system and society will unravel

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.

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.

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.

Continual growth is possible in at least two ways:

1) standard sigmoids, which never stop growing yet are also finite

2) standard ecological growth, where growth is never ending but so is death. This is much more typical of systems like capitalism than sigmoids growth. New upstarts experience exponential growth for a whole, then peak, and then die.

Of course be careful of mentioning these standard scientific observations around those in the degrowth cult, as the cognitive dissonance may cause an unpleasant explosion.

We are not limited to Earth.

What planet are you on?

Yes we are.

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.

Recessions are slowdowns of growth.

Recessions are consecutive quarters of negative growth. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession

"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.

Cost of housing is influenced by much more than labor and raw material.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And even before, but cities used to be much more deadly.

> 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_...

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.

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.

> 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

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.

>>> 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.

The fact that it costs 1200$/month for a room in a rural area is incredibly damning.

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.

> 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.

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.

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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.

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!

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.

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.

Stay warm! And thank you for stepping forward to share your story and perspective. HN needs much more of it.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

I guess you're trying to make some point, but I don't really see it.

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.

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.

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.

This point of yours resonates with me (paraphrased): if we assume that inaction is not an option, the conversation can progress to solutions.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There’s a reason why you have lower homeless population in the temperate zone than in the tropical zone of the world.

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

Nope. I used the right term. I said temperate zone not climate.

From the very Wikipedia article you shared:

> The north temperate zone extends from the Tropic of Cancer (approximately 23.5° north latitude) to the Arctic Circle (approximately 66.5° north latitude). The south temperate zone extends from the Tropic of Capricorn (approximately 23.5° south latitude) to the Antarctic Circle (at approximately 66.5° south latitude).[4][5]

> 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.

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?

> 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.

> 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.

> my assailants were groups of folks who looked to be doing well for themselves

Bitcoin bros!

_Probably_ not, no. But who knows?!?

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.

> 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‽

> 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.

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.

Whether the very real fear of the homeless/mentally ill/drug addicted is justified and rational is a big elephant in the room.

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.

I'm saying the fear people feel is real, and "valid" in the sense that the rest of us must recognize it, not dismiss it.

Only when we meet people in the fearful place they're at, and they feel heard, can we start to try to make them see that the fear is not justified or rational compared with the actual risk posed by the homeless or mentally ill or what have you.

I do agree, it's human rights for everyone or no-one.

I generally agree, but that's perhaps more appropriate for the vulnerable. For powerful, fearful people, they need to stop actualizing it or making it important before they hurt someone.

> 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!

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.

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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.

> I genuinely think you're trying to just push some perceived overton window

Wow.

Stop lying. I live in a big city and everyone agrees with him and knows exactly what he’s talking about. I’m not worried about the guys who want to sit around drinking on the sidewalk but almost every time I go outside there’s at least one of them screaming at pedestrians, yelling at nothing, blowing meth or crack fumes, etc.

If you don’t think it’s a problem then give me your address so I can yell at you through the window and poop on the sidewalk. Part and parcel of living in a big city, right?

> 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.

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.

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.

I'll decide without the slightest moral compunction: If you're addicted to fentanyl and living on the street you're getting involuntarily committed.

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!

I've not complained about anyone, fictional or otherwise.

If your assertion is that getting someone off of drugs in the short term plays absolutely no role in getting someone off drugs in the long term, then I'm not really sure what to say to you. It's my understanding that people primarily get and stay sober out of fear of losing absolutely everything and dying. The trouble with rehabilitating the homeless is that they've effectively lost everything but their lives, and yet remain addicted. In this sort of situation, involuntary commitment would necessarily have to involve serious attempts at community building to show them they can have things in their life again - if they stay clean.

Respectfully, your glibness and the borderline denial of reality makes it difficult to have this conversation because I don't feel as if I'm typing with someone who legitimately wants to improve the situation. Most seriously, your suggestion that I get myself addicted to drugs (which demonstrates that you've completely neglected to consider that you could be typing with a person who has had substance abuse issues - it hasn't even occured to you) indicates that you're not taking this seriously, but rather attempting to appear virtuous by banging on about freedom and being totally unafraid while preventing any possible consideration of solutions to a major humanitarian crisis.

How disappointing that you are resorting to the ad hominem attacks; we could have learned from each other; we could have connected.

That is the wages of fear. It results in attacks on the things that alarm us, including other commenters, unhoused people, and addicted people. Unhoused and addicted people are nothing to fear.

And on top of that, fear doesn't justify hurting other people. It's a very different thing being afraid and vulnerable, and being afraid and in a position of power. You have a position of power relative to unhoused and addicted people. Power corrupts; powerful people don't have a check on them; they think their hunger or fear or lust or whatever are important, are the natural priority. Your fear isn't a priority over the freedom, rights, and welfare of addicted people.

The only thing to fear is fear itself, according to someone who was smart, courageous, and who had led people through danger we can't imagine, and held positions of great power.

Your theory of how addiction and homelessness work conflicts with what I've heard from many experts I've spoken to and that I've read. That doesn't make you wrong, but look up the research.

> Your theory of how addiction and homelessness work conflicts with what I've heard from many experts I've spoken to and that I've read. That doesn't make you wrong, but look up the research.

It is telling that your opinion isn't based on talking with addicted and/or homeless people.

> How disappointing that you are resorting to the ad hominem attacks; we could have learned from each other; we could have connected.

I think you should still consider learning from what Boogie_Man said.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.pdf

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.

>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.

> 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?

You're entirely ignoring the fact that it is effective in getting people clean. That is the outcome we're trying for, and achieving with this policy.

The fact that you're paying for a drug user to be warm and safe may stick in your craw, but it helps more people get clean, and so is good for them, their families, society and even your neighborhood as they return to be productive members of society. The money spent on their childhood and education isn't "wasted". They are less likely to be a nuisance.

Your feelings of disgust towards these people is a natural reaction. But if you can manage to see past it and realize these are human beings no different than you, by far and away mostly people who want to get clean but find it impossible in their circumstances and need help doing so, then you could be part of the chorus of voices pushing for positive change.

Let's all pull in the same direction: strong social safety nets, community building and mental health care to prevent people falling to drugs. And if they do, the care and assistance they need to pull themselves out of it. Not everyone's going to manage to do it, but eveyrone deserves a solid second chance.

Do you know how much it costs to put someone in jail, and take care of them there? In Europe.

For Finland in 2021 one figure is 225€ a day, or 82500€ a year.

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...

>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.

> 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.

>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.

Most addicts end up recovering

Addicts of what? Surely, there are different recovery rates for different drug addictions.

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)"

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.

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.

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You’re not exactly demonstrating your moral strength by calling them parasites

Thank you for making my point on my behalf :)

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.

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.

maybe if you act just a little more condescending i will have a clue what you are trying to say

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Looks like you are confusing median / average. The US has more billionaires, and many many more desperately poor people than Finland does.

> us could implement similar system economically but politically probably not.

But they won't. Spending significant amounts of money on your poor is a decision made by politicians and society as a whole. Some countries choose to do it, some don't.

> But it’s not about country’s total wealth!

Again, the existence of more billionaires does not make a place rich. In fact it could prove destabilizing in the long term because billionaires use their money to lobby against policies for the poor.

The answer I suppose is that both Finland and US are rich by global standards, but the US has a middle class only because of policy decisions it made post WW2 (GI Act, housing, education, etc.) that are quickly eroding.

So yes, Finland is "richer" in the sense that a greater % of its population live better lives.

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.

> "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.

Finland is cold. People without adequate housing will freeze to death. Not finding bodies in the spring thaw is probably actually important to them.

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.

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...

> “Disorder is domination of public space for private purposes."

The first thought I had on reading this was ‘the world has a car disorder’.

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.

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.

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.

I don't think of this in terms of "causes of homelessness". These are different categories.

The "visible" homeless, ironically, are extremely difficult to measure. They often don't carry or won't present identification, they often have no family or support structure, they often make little to no attempt to use services.

The "invisible" homeless are the opposite, and can be easily measured, because they have all of those things.

When you see numbers trying to measure homeless people, it will almost always be the "invisible" homeless. Sending people out with clickers to count the homeless people on the street is nearly impossible, so the best we can do is various sampling approaches with huge margins of error.

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.

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.

Well, that's something else. Hopefully they don't dismantle their education system, and policing ways, and whatever else they have going.

It is more painful to treat someone who is homeless and mentally ill as opposed to just mentally ill.

> 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.

It can be compassionate in other places, but I think the US has proven itself to lack compassion in some pretty essential ways.

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.

People without good housing options are an issue even if they are not drug addicted yet and they don't have mental illness.

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 Käypä 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 Käypä 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)

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.

"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.

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.

How would it be possible to fix the problem at the expense of the lower working class?

> 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.

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.

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

sufficient vacant property taxes can make it a real option

Taxes! Of course; there is no problem just taking more money from other people can’t solve.

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.

So if a little of something is good, more must be better!!

No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison

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.

But that's not what is being discussed. Increasing supply is being discussed, which would lower prices for everyone.

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.

> 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.

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.

>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...

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.

Good luck getting commie blocks pushed through planning approvals today. NIMBYs in general are violently against any kind of public housing.

> 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.

Nobody wants to live next to the poors. Best way to do that is to keep housing expensive.

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.

> 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.

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.

Just search for "Habitrail for Humanity" (and make sure you read that right).

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.

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.

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...

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?

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.

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 150k€ for tiny apartment(23m^2).

I agree. The affordable housing costs $1M per unit because that is the market price for constructing any housing in those areas.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Disagree. Due to the complexity and diversity in economic, cultural, and social value networks it's actually easier to build housing.

Yes, just like how due to the diversity of Whole Foods workers it's easier for them to unionize.

> 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.

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

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.

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_United_Sta...

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/DNK/den....

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

They will still be on the street most of the time though

The street is where they panhandle for money and get their drugs

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.

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.

Everyone wants to live in the centre of Helsinki, because why not?

I'm not saying give everyone the nicest center flat. Let's say an acceptable commute distance away, up to 30min by public transport.

Why not? Am I worse than others?

Yes, or just unlucky. The goal of my proposal is not to create equality, but to establish a minimum below which people cannot fall.

Who gets to determine the minimum threshold? And how will they enforce it?

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.

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.

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.

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....

or just bribe the person who is assigning flats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8v7eSQJWxc4, because this system was already tried.

The government and laws?

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.

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.

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.

I'll add a second opinion to that. Still feeling smug about it?

Smug about an argument I haven’t seen? What do you believe is the actual argument…?

The part where you like to go around being annoying and then when people get upset retreating to "my opinion is just as valuable as yours". Which I think is stupid, except this time I'm not even going to engage on that and directly say that I also agree with their position, which means that not only is your opinion dumb it is also in the minority.

This seems incoherent, how does this relate to the prior comment?

And why would the number of users expressing opinions even matter?

Edit: I’m not here to score points, so it seems irrelevant in any comment chain whatsoever.

Do you have an actual direction you want to take this conversation, or will you just keep asking questions like this that seemingly nobody can satiate?

What do you gain from doing this?

(Speaking in my own words again: I am going to be very, very explicit here. You have a habit of asking super vague questions which require people to do a massive amount of work for you to explain their position while you can sit and continue at little cost to you: a sort of verbal DoS. Except we're not computers, we are people, and nobody takes kindly to this. When they inform you of this you retreat to "ok, and why should I listen to you?" which is even worse. I think you should take a good look at how you communicate with other people and see if you frequently leave them upset and unwilling to continue talking to you. Maybe you should direct one of your questions at yourself for why they keep doing that, such that you have to keep replying like this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....)

This still seems incoherent, I’m assuming your the same person behind ‘saagarjha’, who entered into this comment chain and raised multiple bizarre points including “… which means that not only is your opinion dumb it is also in the minority.”

I’m not going to pretend your past comment doesn’t exist.

So the number of users opining in a comment chain is relevant… how…?

Edit: If you don’t like someone else asking questions, just leave the comment chain, otherwise don’t waste people’s time.

You're focusing a lot on my past comments (which I assure you were written by the same person who is writing this one) but I think the best response to your concerns is actually contained in what you've written yourself. You yourself raised the question of whether someone else's opinion can matter more than anyone else's here; i.e that opinions should implicitly be equal in standing. Not only is this false (and you have, long ago, said the same) but I also wanted to demonstrate that even if opinions were equal there are now two that disagree with you, which obviously leads us to believe that your singular opinion matters less.

This is of course a lot of words to say the more straightforward thing, which is that you are the one wasting people's time here, and they don't really appreciate that. You can't really ask people to leave a comment chain while also asking them to respond in a certain way that is very expensive for everyone else.

> 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.

If free public services caused this kind of feedback loop, rich social democracies wouldn't have free healthcare, free education, socially provided housing for the needy etc. Or do you see housing being special in this regard?

I'd like to live in Honolulu.

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.

Up to a week ago I wanted to live in Palisades :)

Quite an interesting perspective, sadly it’ll likely never get implemented in any capitalistic economy

That rumor is the biggest obstacle. If you believed it was possible, and instead told others it was possible, it might actually be.

What you're proposing is classical Soviet communism. Particularly Khrushchev era communism. Much have been said and written about it, if you're interested.

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.

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.

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

Isn't that just your run of the mill public housing program, that every country has? We were talking about free housing for everyone.

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.'

Did you read the article?

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.

> 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.

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.)

And then we told ourselves it wasn't possible so we could sleep at night.

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.

Didn't the British control Hong Kong from the mid-19th century until the 1990s?

When they refuse to go inside do you jail them? Some cities with big hearts have been through this before.

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.

Everything won't be perfect immediately, so let's do nothing instead! /s

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Even if it's cultural, it can be fixed. Culture can change and can be changed by choice

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.

What if culture springs from genetic inheritance? How do you change that?

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

Huh?!

Cultural evolution in genetics is a current topic of research

For example:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain...

Culture changes, but it's very hard to deliberately effect specific changes.

You know how everyone talks about the Finnish education system? That system was completely planned, designed, and transitioned into in the semi-recent past.

Not really. People deliberately persuade the public of things all the time. Some persuade them of absolutely false, awful things with regularity.

When you say "things", I assume you don't mean "to change deeply held values and cultural traditions".

Like eating meat? We've been doing that for millenia, yet somehow there's grass roots vegetarian and vegan movements all over the place.

Sure, like women getting educated, working, and having equal rights? Universal literacy and education? Instant global telecommunications? Democracy? ... I think it can be done!

>Sure, like women getting educated, working, and having equal rights?

That only took a few thousand years and still isn't really there yet.

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.

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.

> 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.

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)

> 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.

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?

OP is referring to a homeless Indian in the US, not in India.

Do they have a vastly different culture?

No... homeless people in India behave nothing like homeless in America. Their situation is easily fixed with money.

I’m talking about Indian homeless people in the US.

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.

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.

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.

Yes I have seen plenty of homeless people in India.

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.

Canada is full of homeless Indians. There’s probably a few hundred thousand if you also count people with inadequate housing like students that share bedrooms in 10 person houses

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?

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.

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.

[flagged]

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.

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.

The point is that it isn't a money problem, so the proposed solution of diverting money is off point to begin with.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oh, that’s not a genocide, if that’s what they think it is they should look the definition.

We could use the Israeli solution and launch a rocket at every encampment to weed out the few violent people inside. Call it whatever you want. Would that be a good solution?

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).

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...

Yeah if you really want to end homelessness you will find a way, if not, you will find excuses.

70-80% of homeless people are local. Fixing homelessness in your community does not attract large numbers of additional people.

Not in California. The fact that 80% + of the local homeless come from other states is the one thing that makes the problem unsolvable.

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

That can mean any number of things. A lot of people move to LA to "make it" with no plan B, they didn't have a plan B where they came from either.

California has 30% of the US homeless population, but 11% of it's total population. It is dramatically disproportional, period.

https://shou.senate.ca.gov/sites/shou.senate.ca.gov/files/Ho...

California has the most expensive housing in America. That is the primary reason for its larger homeless population.

That doesn't explain how 11% of the population could supply 30% of the homeless. That's impossible if it was a self-contained statistic.

I think housing prices does make the homeless problem worse, but it didn't create it. Good climate and numerous public services did.

(0.9 x 30%) / 11% means that California has a homeless rate 2.5X the rest of America. That's not impossible, in fact it seems surprisingly low. California is the land of $3000/month rent. A very significant proportion of the population can't pay that.

I'm sorry where does your math come from? 1 state having 1/3 of the nation's homeless doesn't represent 2.5x the normal rate. That's 10-15x territory.

> impossible

Finland got to 0 by giving everybody a place to live, not by kicking the homeless out of their country.

Finland isn't responsible for all the homeless from Sweden and Denmark. It had a number that makes sense based on it's population and resources, therefore it was able to solve it.

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.

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.

> 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/

you should carefully reread what he wrote and reread what you linked

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?

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."

“[…] 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.

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.

‹Luke› “Amazing, every word of what you just said is wrong.”

First, the general stupidity: I didn't assert a single thing you claimed I did.

However, there's a reason stimulant medications are monitored by a doctor: escalating dosages due to normal tolerance needs to be distinguished from escalating dosages due to use and abuse of the medication for (initially) spurts of productivity and (eventually) avoiding the need to sleep. I can assure you that you can stay up 4 days on Vyvanse™ (i.e., fancy amphetamine) just as easily as you can on methamphetamine; the difference is the doctor and pharmacist keeping you to a sane dose, even if everyone involved is winking and nudging about whether you actually have adhd.

Imagine if addicts got a limited amount of their fix for pennies with very basic oversight, instead of screwing around with random chemicals that seem to make life bearable for a short period, but which quickly result in escalating dosages, health impacts and antisocial and criminal behaviour ultimately resulting in homelessness and incarceration with all of the social and economic costs involved in that.

We have free healthcare in Canada but the homeless will burn down their free housing and run away with all the copper. What can we do about people like that?

Use PEX instead of copper.

You seem unwilling to say what you actually want to say. I'm more than happy to dance around it if you are.

Not all homeless people are dangerous drug addicts.

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.

Notice how I never said they were.

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".

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?

Is anyone here saying we need to reach literally 0% homelessness? Reducing current numbers by 99% would be amazing.

Well, people have used the phrase "end homelessness", which I take to mean no homeless.

People have used the phrase "end poverty" for decades, and we still spend money on it even if we didn't get to 0%.

Japan has plenty of homeless people but you don't see them because they're staying in cybercafés.

I've seen a bunch just camping out under an overpass just outside of Akihabara station.

Is cybercafe free?

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.

> 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.

Good bait

yet

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.

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

for sure, because sellers in this area demand 300k - 600k PLN

> 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.

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.

> 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/

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.

> 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?

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...

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...

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.

What impact do you suppose this population has on housing costs?

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)

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.

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.

It's not 1% of the population hoarding the empty houses. It's your elderly relatives.

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?

The "surplus houses" are not just in Detroit but also around Central Park, NY, where people buy them as investment.

so what is the operational theory then?

one can describe the situation and its causes without prescribing solutions

Don't seem so suggest a cause unless they can be connected

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...

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.

Chronically homeless make up about a quarter to a third of the US homeless population.

https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/2023-...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

>>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.

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.

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.

> 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.)

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.

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.

> 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.

>>...the price of upkeeping a beater car... ...not enough public transit in the US to avoid this reality outside of cities with high rent

It is not only the price of purchase, insurance, maintenance of a car, it is also the TIME you are condemning them to spend on commuting everywhere.

The solution is to make massively more residential development/redevelopment IN and NEAR the cities, such as now converting underutilized office space to residential, and not only passing regs favoring and encouraging such conversions (as is being done noe in Boston), but ALSO passing regs encouraging Remote Work.

And, where there IS public transit, encourage development there. Massachusetts is doing this, specifically encouraging conversion of offices to residential and overriding zoning laws within X distance of commuter rail stops.

Those are both good moves. But arguing for merely blanket 'develop anything anywhere' is literally stupid and will do more damage to society than any gains. There are reasons zoning was developed, and while a small part of it was racist/classist, most of it has very good reasons to exist. Simply overriding it is statist authoritarian, and saying people in their locales have no right to determine how they run their LOCAL affairs, from environmental, to historic preservation, to traffic patterns.

Plus, it's already been proven that cheap housing away from the city doesn't work. People can buy a trailer for $10-$30K and as spot for $400-1000/mth, or rentals for a bit more. But the locales are all away from the city. There are very few people who actually do it BECAUSE it is impractical to live so far from jobs in the city. If you want to house people more cheaply, it needs to be done NEAR their jobs. Destroying everything else for a bad idea will merely leave the problem unsolved, and destroy value.

I've watched towns have zoning, abandon it, then reinstate it a decade later because they saw what an awful idea it was to have none. I've seen towns that rezoned to "modernize" and destroy their character, and towns preserve their character and grow steadily into desirable locales. NONE of it is as trivial as you think.

> 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.

>>unless your small town has a demographically-improbable homelessness problem...nothing I said pertains to you.

Well, the current town has no homelessness problem, but there ARE most definitely laws in place (Massachusetts 40B) that specifically seeks to override local zoning and mandate low-income housing in ALL towns.

So, while we agree that what you said should not pertain to me, the people making the actual laws most definitely apply it to me.

I don't know why there is the disconnect, perhaps some misguided "it must apply to everyone everywhere" cop-out to avoid the actual complexity, but the fact is that the rhetoric is very destructive.

>>defining "the character of a neighborhood" entirely in terms of money.

The DEFINITION is "quiet, low traffic, wildlife, gardens, etc.".

The COST is defined in money as well as work.

The point is that those things are not free — they cost a lot of work and yes, money in both taxes and improvements and maintenance. More importantly, it is not cost-free to decide to destroy those valuable things. Especially when the result will not help the people you are intending to help.

Thank you for explaining your situation. I can see why that would be frustrating!

Here in Washington, the state legislature recently passed a law overriding any local zoning which would forbid multi-family housing, but the law does not apply to cities under 25K population, and its strongest provisions only apply above 75K. Oregon has had a similar law since 2019. This approach seems more reasonable to me.

Yes, those provisions in Oregon and Washington are certainly doing that better.

I had literally to take three weeks off to kill a proposed development literally in my back yard. It is a wetland habitat, so enjoys some protection from good Massachusetts environmental laws, but they can be overridden by 40B. It is also a hilly and inaccessable site, and the developer was proposing to raze the whole site and put in 300+ units of warehouse-type condos. They literally did not even have sufficient access for fire trucks because of the terrain, and would have eliminated the habitat of an endangered turtle (found by required survey/trap-releasing).

We dug hard into the laws and process, and rallied hundreds of neighbors and political influencers in town to literally make the most packed planning board hearing they ever had, but a factor of at least 10.

This ended up killing the project, for now. But the absurdity of blanket zoning overrides literally destroying highly valuable (and costly) environment to literally solve nothing except transferring some of that value to developer's pockets has not left me. I understand it is still sad to replace brownstones with 10' square garden plots out back with high-rises, but I'm fine with that, since there really isn't any wildlife habitat and there is infrastructure to move the new people around the city. I'm not fine with doing it everywhere, particularly where it will destroy habitat and where there is no good people-moving infrastructure.

That's your assumption. Instead, mine is that it would require some kind of wealth transfer to pay for the social services.

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

It's not going to stay common ground for very long if anyone can just set up camp there and claim it for themselves.

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.

I don't think people would mind if it was _just_ camping that they were doing..

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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?

I thought building houses was a skill lost to history, like Damascus steel!

> 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.

> 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?

Suffering from mental trauma does not mean that one cannot suffer from additional mental trauma.

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

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

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.

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....

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

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

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.

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.

> 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-...

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.

citation needed

> it's easier to have a high-trust society if you eschew immigration.

citation needed

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?

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?

So you mean GDP per capita?

I do indeed, thanks.

Yes!

So are there other techniques for fixing homelessness that work in these so-called "low-trust" societies?

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/

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.

Putnam found a linear correlation between diversity and social trust.

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.

> 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.

FWIW, the share of Swedish (the other official language) speakers in Finland is about 5%.

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.