After a certain point, alcoholism is no longer a choice or preference, it's a debilitating disease. And before that point, it's frequently self-medication for untreated mental problems. Consider this: alcohol is the only mood-elevating drug sold freely, of course a percentage people will jump on it if they have massive problems.

Not going to criticize the Finnish system as I know nothing about it, but probably the only way to get to those people is give them homes, food and clothing and try (again and again) to get them to reduce alcohol intake and/or get psychiatric treatment - and accept you won't be able to get all of them to accept that.

Interestingly, perhaps, I rather feel it might only be poverty - the need to afford food instead - that's kept me from affording enough alcohol to abuse. I'm in a much better place now.

The point is that "give poor people food, clothing, and a home" is not an answer in general. One needs people who are equipped and who care for you ... finding people who actually care is beyond democratic governance.

You make it sound like they just shrugged and decided that that's the life they want, but I don't think that's how people end up homeless. There are decisions involved, but they're probably not quite as voluntary as that.

It is thus very difficult to understand why there are homeless people. But I once went (with work) on a trip with a homeless person (this is a charity, you pay and homeless people take you one trip and talk about their lives). And indeed the people on the streets always have psychological issues. Extreme ADHD, abused as a child, depression but just a little bit to afraid to die to really end it. If they want help it is there, always. Homeless shelters, places to get a postal address for free to apply for subsidies and minimal social income etc. But some just go crazy while waiting or go crazy while sleeping with other people in one room. Or they walk barefoot in the winter until their feet are so rotten that they can't walk anymore, too afraid to get help because they believe help means they will be abused again or mind altered or something strange. Most of them are constantly afraid and not a danger to others, more like very shy animals afraid of other humans, so they retreat and suffer while their fear of death keeps them alive, just barely.

One woman we spoke to had her child murder her other child and she just started drinking. How can you help such a woman? So much pain.

Also, I think the current method of making alcohol really expensive through levies is not working. It only makes homeless addicted people poorer and more likely to turn to crime.

The rest of us don't give a shit how much it costs, we don't use much of it anyway. The price is never a factor in getting addicted or getting off it.

All it is is the government profiteering of people who can't help themselves.

But no one likes the alternative, which is to say there is no more alcohol, because it's just another human being saying you can't have more of this that you crave.

I agree alcohol is a drug and should be treated as one.

Really this definition needs to be more strict. In San Francisco, you could be drugged up, throw needles and broken alcohol bottles on the street, openly defecate, and this behavior is still considered not dangerous.

A better way to deal with this is to allow people to reject welfare, but if they do, they still need to live as a decent member of the society. No littering, no public nuisance (shouting, spitting, harassing people), maintaining hygiene (no public urination/defecation, no risk of disease transmission etc.), no permanent encroachment of public property and so forth. Otherwise, it just ends up in a slippery slope that creates a sinkhole of billions of dollars in costs to the economy, at the expense of others.

And if they refuse to "live as a decent member of society"?

Rehabilitation, reeducation and basic assistance should always be the first step (Welfare). But if you opt out and willingly chose to continue to damage the overall society, you should then also be willing to face the consequences. Just like criminal justice system, for minor offenses, you get off with warnings, but if you show up for the fifth time at a courthouse for a drunken disorderly conduct, you go to jail.

You, presumably, are not mentally ill, mentally disabled, or suffering from severe substance addiction. The majority of homeless people (besides Roma) in most European countries are some mix of these.

When you say "just fine/jail the homeless for bad behavior", what you are really saying is "mentally ill/disabled people should not be helped, they should be jailed". Do you still stand by that statement?

> The majority of homeless people (besides Roma) in most European countries are some mix of these.

The number is less than half for mental health patients and about half if you account for substance abuse. That number is lower in the US.

But regardless of the number, in your hurry to virtue signal someone over the internet, you completely missed the point. The argument was pretty simple, rehab and assistance is the first step, the rest was for people who actively refuse that.

For the mentally ill who refuse help, would you rather have them live a life of abuse and then die in misery on the streets or have them institutionalized? And for the drug abusers/alcoholics who refuse rehab, at what point does individual accountability start kicking in? Society is willing to help you, but if you still reject it, at some point you need to face the consequences.

I stand by my statement.

I make a point of talking to people across the political spectrum and I have heard all kinds of answers, from things which are basically "stick them in camps" (from both left and right-wing people!) to "ignore them" to various rehabilitation approaches.

My view is that we should step back, and consider what it is that we, the folks who are the so-called decent members of society, want.

The city I live in has a big decaying area next to the downtown core, like many cities of a million or more do these days. It waxes and wanes, right now in particular in the wake of Covid it's very bad. Crime, needles, sketchy people, it's horrible. The thing is, these are neighbourhoods that should be nice; they should be full of young families living a walkable distance from downtown, not crackheads and needles.

I get that, as decent human beings, we owe each other a fundamental level of dignity. I am fine with efforts to feed, clothe, and house those who cannot do it themselves. But why does this need to extend to giving them a huge swathe of land, land that is potentially much nicer than any place I will ever live in, for them to ruin?

But what can we do - lock them up? Restrict their fundamental freedoms? Can we _really_ just ignore them and accept sketchy, scary, crime-ridden cities?

> Otherwise, it just ends up in a slippery slope that creates a sinkhole of billions of dollars in costs to the economy, at the expense of others.

So given that is it better to try and help them reintegrate with society or do we just lock them up and forget about them? Or worse?

  - Tolerate the behaviour
  - Remove their freedom
  - Kill them

The line between tolerance and removing freedoms has to be drawn somewhere. This question of yours isn't helpful to the debate - the only way to push the conversation forward is to proactively say where you want the line drawn. All that this question will do is discover that the line is drawn arbitrarily and has uncomfortable edge cases. But that is a property of any legal boundary. Nobody has yet been able to draw a line that isn't arbitrary.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be any accountability for addicts, but the fact that we completely write them off as a society says more about us than it does about them.

But when people do become homeless in Finland, their problems usually run quite deep already, and they may just be quite difficult to help.

I don't know if this is true but I've understood that in the U.S. homelessness might more often be a result of just financial downfall, while in Finland homelessness is very strongly connected to mental illness, substance dependence, or both [1]. Those people have pretty much lost control of having a normal life, or perhaps they never had one. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be helped, but it does mean helping them is likely to be an uphill battle.

Drug addiction does get judged harshly by the society in general; alcohol abuse is likely to be swept under the rug unless it causes obvious problems e.g. at work, but if it does, it gets judged as well, although not quite as harshly as drug abuse. I'd expect most social workers and medical professionals who work with the homeless to know better than to see addiction as just a moral failure, though, so the problem may rather be that it's quite difficult to treat people who have a multitude of problems that run deep. Health care professionals might be wary of committing limited public resources in cases if they don't expect it to bear fruit, so the mental health services might be limited to emergency care and general assistance by social workers.

I'm not intimately familiar with how those services work, though, so they might be more extensive than I think.

[1] That is, at least among the native population; another visible group of homeless are poor immigrants living in the streets. They probably just wanted a better life in a richer country or something, and their reasons for vagrancy are probably different.

However, there is little community will to address those circumstance and a great deal of political pressure against aiding vulnerable adults.

To see strong examples political resistance, suggest moving folks in prison for low-level, mentally ill related crimes into in-patient facilities - redirecting per-person funding from prison budgets to pay for their care.

I assume this isn't really true, and that the standard in Finland is that they're institutionalized if they're a danger to other people or themselves. The latter part is tricky, though. A person who is clearly in danger of killing themselves with a razor blade can be committed. A person who is in danger of drinking themselves to death on the sidewalk, perhaps not.

Some are just deep into a depression pit. I agree that some people are just weak, but most people hitting homelesness went through big losses that damages your motivation to lead a normal life. Grudge, sadness, loneliness, grief, abuse .. don't conclude too fast.

It can also be used for alcoholism: you provide a bar-like setting where people can go to get free drinks (rationed and served on a schedule by a trained server) and also socialize.

If this is coupled with free housing, food, medical care, and therapy, it stands a good chance of helping people where involuntary hospitalization might have failed.

I’ve volunteered serving free meals to homeless people in a restaurant style setting. People get their choice of appetizer, entree, salad, and dessert. Volunteers wait tables and then sit down to eat with people at the end of their shift. I’ve had some amazing conversations with people who have all kinds of experiences to share. It’s amazing how much of a difference it makes when you treat people like a person rather than a problem to solve.

https://youtu.be/MF5wNsfKo84

Given the severity of Finnish winters, I'm not surprised.

Try a similar approach in, say, Hawaii or the Bahamas, and see how many homeless you'll see roaming around.

So, for instance, if you had 100 potholes and paid $1 million to fix 99 of them, leaving a single pothole, this statistic would read: you spent $1 million per pothole.

Eg Chicago winters are very hard to live through if you don't have stable access to warm housing, and the West coast offers a reprieve from that.

[0] https://sf.curbed.com/2020/3/4/21152501/san-francisco-homele...

* Shelters not allowing pets - many would rather remain homeless than give up their dog * Shelters not allowing drugs * Social services officers looking too much like cops (many homeless have had bad enough experiences with cops to keep them away from anyone cop-like) * Spending on 'discomfort' measures (eg deliberately-hostile architecture to discourage people from being homeless) * Effective mitigations being politically unpopular.

For instance: cold-calling people who have just separated from their spouse to offer counseling substantially reduces the number of people you have to lift out of homelessness at very little cost. However, "free therapy" is a wildly unpopular suggestion in the USA.

This is strange. I'd guess that free therapy, or at least government-subsidized mental health initiatives, would be pretty popular on the left. That leaves me with the right. But therapy doesn't really seem like something that's easy to get jealous about. Are people going to get mad at articles about "therapy queens" that see a dozen therapists per week?

Australia does provide public housing, but I'll take a stab and say it's cut back from its peak amount.

When you travel through California (and the US in general), i'd estimate homelessness and poverty to be at least an order of magnitude worse in the US (I want to hesitate to say two orders of magnitude worse) compared to anything I see at home. Clearly there's something about society and/or the structure of social safety nets that has a real and measurable effect on poverty and homelessness overall.

/ before someone jumps onto Google to try to disprove me: I've been to both countries (several times in fact), and worked with both homelessness and official national statistics. One of the things internet pundits misunderstand is the definition and measures of homelessness/poverty between the two countries: I think my estimate is pretty fair napkin math, it might be a 4 or 5 multiple instead, but I think we're quibbling by that point.

"Homelessness then, in Australia, is more than lacking a roof over your head, it is also the absence of those features associated with “home”: permanence, security, and the freedom to come and go."

"If the world were to accept Australia’s definition and include everyone with inadequate shelter, the number would exceed 1.6 billion – roughly 20 percent of the population. Also excluded from official figures are the world’s 65 million displaced refugees in temporary accommodation."

merely being mobile or moving a lot is not likely enough to make you considered homeless by the Australian definition.

however, if you were mobile BECAUSE you were unable to obtain a secure residence and tenureship, or the residences you inhabited were of such a low standard that they didn't meet community standards for acceptable habitation, then you probably would.

I'm struggling to remember, but there would likely be a means/ intention component as well: so FIFO workers, mobile executives are not homeless, but couch surfing students or young people may very well be (even if they spent recent time sleeping under a roof). people camping (or glamping), grey nomads, for example, aren't considered homeless.

that being said, even if these people were counted, it's more of an argument that Australian official numbers should be even lower (though i'd recommend most people to focus of the primary/ first level homeless count for the common "popular" view of homelessness if we're going to reduce a complex phenomenon to a simple digestible stat: but it has the downside that people can then tend to misinterpret low homelessness for other arguments: say, how much poverty there is or how much social housing we need.

The obvious alternative explanation is that Americans might simply be less tolerant of measures to decrease the visibility of homeless.

The basic issue is that Australia naive measurements and numbers carry a three tier definition of homelessness: at the lowest level you have what we call "sleeping rough" which is probably the concept closest to what most people and Americans think of as "homeless". But the Australian definition also includes the likes of insecure accommodation and inappropriate accommodation: couch surfers, people living in accommodation with inadequate living conditions, people sleeping in their cars, in socially provisioned homeless accommodation and emergency/crisis accommodation (domestic violence, youth, men and aged issues were the traditional breakdown of most services in my day).

To compare between the two nations from official sources you have to bring them back onto a somewhat comparable basis.

Another source include homeless service provisions, but last time I looked at those they didn't always tend to be on a individual natural person basis.

lastly, homeless service provision, with a few caveats, is one of the only things that might locally and empirically show behaviours of what economists call a "giffen good". And, somewhat paradoxically, provision of homeless services can, to a point, increase the percieved systemic demand for homeless services. increased supply can also create more (real and percieved) demand. the relationship these complexities have with trying to measure homelessness is tricky to say the least...

In many of those cases the actual situation is more complicated and the actual protocol is so involved and complicated that it is very hard for a homeless man to research.

Giving people small, secure apartments would solve many of these issues along with many emergency hospital visits and many other issues.

Victims of circumstance to some extent, but not stupid nor really living their preferred life I'd wager.

I suspect you need a stable caring society for a couple of generations and still there will be some outliers. A worthy cause to address though.

Construction techniques changed after the '60s to make buildings more airtight, cheaper of course, and built quickly; Moisture was often sealed within structures (from rain or snow) because it costs money to wait for things to dry (especially in winter). This has resulted in catastrophic instances of entire brand-new apartment buildings collapsing in value. Then there's that one particular fungi that loves growing under those plastic carpets that were popular (cheap..). I've personally lived in multiple moldy buildings. Frequent eye and ear infections, strange irritability and headaches, etc. My whole neighborhood was just renovated because they found microbes, since these houses were built quick and cheap.

In my city there are not less than two public libraries where the architect thought it a good idea to put a water fountain inside the interior. One was shut off because it leaked water into the building; the other still runs to this day. Misty moisture among paper books. Yikes.

Recent cost-cutting measures of public schools shutting down their air circulation systems for the night have raised concerns over the air quality exposed on children. Teachers and nurses infamously suffer chronically from related issues since they spend most their time within these buildings.

And the worst part is perhaps that owners of buildings and apartments don't want air quality inspections because they'd have to pay for the damn repairs. People get stuck in moving spirals where they have to get quickly out of their moldy homes only to move into another one. I personally know one person whose business failed leaving her with $100k in debt because she got super ill and the doctors couldn't officially acknowledge that mold was the problem.

While Finns tend to use the term "Romanian beggars", this can be inaccurate and misleading. I understand that this confusion could have arisen because "Romani people" and "Romanian people" sound similar in Finnish and some of them are from Romania. However, many of them come from Bulgaria as well – a very large community comes from the Bulgarian town of Pleven seasonally each year.

FWIW, the ethnicity names "Romani" and "Romanian" are not actually etymologically related, it is only a coincidence that they sound similar. You would think that after a decade-plus now of having Romani migrants very visible in the Helsinki city center, people could have learned a little more about who they are, and what drives them to make the long journey to Finland.

A more prominent example would be the word "Neger" where the media tells us it's a terrible word, insulting, racial slur etc etc, yet however, it is used by normal people in a conversation without any issues. It's funny how irrational media (and some crazies) get, ignoring all context, how something and with what intention something is said. There is always a stark contrast between that and actual real life. I, for one, like to eat my "Negerkuss".

For non-Germans reading along, "Neger" used to be a common word, but is not anymore. Language is changing, society is changing, but as always, some will be left behind. If your grandpa says "neger" you gently correct him, if your peer says "neger", you are in bad company.

"Zigeuner" is less extreme, because awareness for the term is more recent. I was told in high school 15 years ago to avoid it, so everyone should have gotten the message by now. It shows a lack of education, mostly. Germans killed 200k+ Romani in the last century, so it not a wild claim that when our grandparents cautioned us about Zigeuner, that might have had something to do with racism.

(20 years ago I had friends who called Schokoküsse "Negerküsse", and my parents told me not to do that. I simply do not understand why people insist on calling them "Negerküsse", when they know it's hurtful to some. It's a shitty sweet targeted at children).

There is a small Roma intelligentsia, university-educated and aware of those international trends, who welcomes the usage of "Roma (and Sinti)" instead of the traditional word. Among most Roma, however, it is often the case that if you use the term "Roma" while speaking with them, they will correct you and say "Don’t call me that, I’m a <local word equivalent to 'gypsy'>".

Note also that in the Balkans, the Roma generally prefer to maintain their own language rather secret, for in-group use only. I wouldn't be surprise if this extended even to their ethnonym, and when outsiders say "Roma" this sounds like those outsiders are appropriating their word.

So, I called people Indians until a Native American said to me: "I prefer Native American. Indian is derogatory." When I asked her about what my previous friends said, she said "The people who want to be called Indian are ignorant people from the reservation who don't know any better"

I think it's just best policy to ask whatever term someone prefers to use, and use that.

In my experience, they tend to stop, when you gently remind them that a very similar term that means the exact same thing, but refers to jews, has fallen out of favour in recent decades.

In the press, literature and academia you will generally not find the term Zigeuner in referring to the people (but again Roma or Roma & Sinti) if it was written in the last 20+ years.

I'm not saying this to excuse the negative behavior of the Traveller or Roma communities which I've been on the receiving end of several times.

However, we need to look at this from both ends and accept that us (the ethnic majority) automatically treating members of a particular ethnic minority as scum doesn't help to change their behavior.

Edit: Reverse image search tells me her name is Laukku-Leena. https://www.iltalehti.fi/kotimaa/a/b225828d-c1b1-40b5-b7b1-a...

In theory that works but addictions are super powerful, so what ends up happening is that the person will still obtain cigarettes and alcohol, even if it requires begging to get the cash for it. Or they will trade their subsidized food for cash or cigarettes/booze.

There are indeed some homeless who would prefer to be on the street. There are also tens of thousands who are mentally ill, or just incapable of taking care of rent/ electric/ water, etc.

It's far from a simple problem. As the Finns are discovering.

So, Finns are already aware that Roma populations often live in tension with the major ethnicity of a country. However, the confusion about the ethnic makeup of Romania along with other Balkan countries persists due to the coincidentally similar names for these ethnicities, and lack of interest among the Finnish population about educating themselves about a region that seems far away and to which very few go to on holiday.

I guess perception will shift as these regions become more touristic.

When you posted this hateful nonsense, did you think nobody would bring you up on it? Can you provide anything to back up this assertion?

Sure it's not always perfect, errors in bureaucracy happens sometimes but getting social security is the default. If you accept it you get a house.

This is the equivalent of jumping into a discussion to say that Black people are poor because they "keep buying cellphones". It's not a serious intellectual comment, it's cloaked hatred.

You do understand that everyone gets social security as money if they need. The problems happen if they are unable to use that money to pay the rent. And yes indeed the main reason is some sort of intoxicant use, as they rather get more stuff than use the money for rent.

Legal debts are also not a reason not to pay rent, as one is protected from repaying them when it's about essentials. So that doesn't count either. As long as you're able to push the pay button in your online bank you use the default system. Only when that's not possible do you fall into the provided housing system. And not surprisingly drug use is a major reason for not pushing that pay button but rather taking the money and using it elsewhere. Does that honestly surprise you? What else could it even be?

That's why we have the second option with food stamps and provided housing. It's not perfect as people elsewhere have stated the obvious "Hey want to buy 20e foodstamp for 10e?". But still they get it.

21% are long term homeless. And that's what people generally mean when they collegially use the term homeless. That's defined as homeless that has lasted for more than a year and has significant social or health component, such as substance abuse or mental illness. The thing about mental illness is that there is also treatment for them. The solution is different for them as for the substance abusers.

If you ever see a Finn begging it's pretty much always an alcoholic who wants more beer. That's because the mentally ill cannot really beg as they're either receiving treatment or if they have unfortunately slipped trough the cracks of the system they're also unable to beg for any extended period.

As for the scale of this problem. 2019 there were 961 persons listed in the long term homeless category. That's out of a population of 5.518 million in 2019. That's 0.017% of the whole population. Also, even out of them 584 live with someone, just not with an official address. They wouldn't be counted as homeless in US.

The actual amount of people in street on that category was 177. That's 0.003% of the population.

Check out page 845 showing death by alcohol poisoning is 5x higher in the homeless population of Finland than the whole of the country.

FWIW, and anecdotally, my ancestry is Finnish and we are known for having issues with alcohol. The majority of my extended family has drinking issues. Within our Finnish-American community, it’s believed that Finns have some sort of gene that pre-disposes us to drink to excess.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08FET347Tx4

Edit: What actually might make this more interesting is that this could be how things are regarding homelessness in Western Europe in general, more or less, not just in a single country. I mentioned this in another comment, but AFAIK living in the streets in Finland, and quite possibly in Northern and Western Europe in general, is rather strongly connected to mental health issues and substance abuse problems. That doesn't mean that the homeless should be vilified, as both of those are illnesses and largely not a voluntary choice, but it could be something that's different about homelessness in the U.S. and in Western/Northern Europe.

Homelessness causes suffering which is usually self-treated with substance abuse. This is not a hateful commentary.

I'm not sure how a blanket characterization equates to "hate", when it's a lazy attribution due to indifference. Maybe disdain is the appropriate term.

Except for the evidence there is. https://www.addictioncenter.com/addiction/homelessness/

Homelessness causes suffering, which is usually self-treated with substance abuse/use, depending on how you want to play with numbers. Fair enough? That's normal human behavior.

Just so we can all be as pedantic as humanly possible, here.