How Finland Found A Solution To Homelessness

homelessness is often considered a problem that doesn't have a solution but there is one country that may have found it anyway Finland has developed a unique strategy for getting homeless people off the streets and back into the society and it aims to completely eradicate homelessness by 2027 and although Japan still has technically the lowest homelessness rate the Japanese success is actually quite questionable while Finland has been praised again and again for its results so how did Finland manage to do it and why aren't we just doing the same thing everywhere else this is how Finland solved homelessness but first a quick message if you like what I do explaining how the world works by going beyond the headlines and challenging what we think we know about it do consider becoming a supporter on my patreon bridges dollar fifty you will help me to make more and better videos and you'll get bonus content Early Access and you'll get to vote on topics I should cover next just go to patreon.com explained with Dom to check it out and now back to the video Finland is famously the only country in the European Union where numbers of homeless people are actually significantly decreasing and have been for several decades and it's not like other European countries are not trying they all have shelters organizations giving out Aid and dedicated National strategies but most of them including the UK Germany or France still see their numbers going up rather than going down so what is Finland doing differently well as they say if you want average results do the same thing as everyone else and if you want unique results you have to use unique methods as well and so the Finns have turned the traditional approach to homelessness on its head and committed to a radical strategy that became known as housing first basically there is usually a reason why someone ends up homeless whether it's because of mental illness drug addiction because they lost their job or something else but the idea behind how most countries approach approach homelessness is that the person living on the street should start by sorting out those problems first while living in a shelter and only after that they can get access to permanent housing this has been called the staircase approach because the homeless person is basically expected to gradually move up through different levels they are expected to stop taking drugs undergo mental health treatments and if they make progress they can move on with the permanent housing as a final reward but the problem is that this approach is not actually very effective quitting drugs or managing serious mental health issues is already difficult when you have a home and it's basically impossible when you're homeless in other words we expect people living on the street to do what many regular people are not able to and so it's not surprising that most homeless people get stuck on one level of the staircase as they fail to complete the tasks to move on and eventually their relapse get evicted and go back to the street so Finland seeing that the traditional approach was not very effective decided to turn this on its head and try out something very different rather than thinking of housing as a reward for successfully integrating into the society Finland based its approach on the idea that with a permanent home from the beginning solving your own problems becomes much easier and so the state started providing permanent housing in the form of small individual Apartments not as the final reward but at the very beginning and to basically any homeless person who asks for it and without strict conditions people living in the housing provided by the state are not required to give up drugs or go to a treatment and they're not evicted if they relapse they are however required to pay a small rent which means they need to have an income and they have a very strong support system which they need to take part in in most cases the housing is provided in centers with around 100 homeless people living in small individual apartments that are looked after by a team of around 20 on-site social workers and they provide support with everything from bureaucracy job hunting and getting access to addiction or mental health treatments and they also keep things from going off the rails but how it works is one thing and if it works is another one so does it well in the mid-1980s there were around 20 000 homeless people in Finland and according to National estimates in 2021 this figure has decreased to just under four thousand and so it looks like a success but is it really the critics of the Finnish system say that this just hides the problem and the numbers are artificially decreased by putting everyone in government paid housing rather than actually reintegrating them into the society and that is a legitimate criticism the results are only possible because of the continuous support paid for by the state the numbers of those who transition from government house to living completely independently are quite small and if you would remove the government support the homelessness numbers would immediately Spike once again but on the other hand that's the whole point of the policy you don't need homeless people to turn into model citizens who are addiction free and who are completely independent in The Finnish model it's already considered a success when you get them off the street and into a controlled safe environment when they're able to pay a small rent every month and when they are slowly one step at a time reintegrating back into the society now naturally this costs a lot of money The Finnish government spends a lot of money on buying apartments and turning them into homeless housing subsidizing developers who build this housing heavily subsidizing their rent and employing a lot of social workers that work with the homeless people and that's not cheap but even so according to Finnish statistics it actually financially pays off a study of financial costs shows that Finland actually saves fifteen thousand Euros a year on every homeless person it houses even though it spends money on housing and social workers it's still a lot cheaper than to bear the cost of Emergency Care policing justice system and all the costs that come with having homeless people living on the street and so in the end it's a model that kind of works for everyone it's definitely better for the homeless people who don't have to live on the street or in often dangerous temporary shelters it's better for the regular people who don't have to deal with criminality drug use and other issues that come with people living on the street and it's actually better even for the government that ends up saving money but if it works in Finland why aren't we doing it everywhere and would it be successful well that's a tricky question and there are both practical and ideological reasons why Finland is still unique in this approach first even if you wanted to it's not actually that easy to just take what Finland is doing and apply it somewhere else for example the basic condition to give away housing is that you need to have enough of it and since most countries are going through a housing crisis that's not that easy one of the reasons why Finland is able to do it is because cities in Finland tend to own most of the land and so they're able to use that to build a lot of social housing units but that's not common and so even though this policy is successful in Finland it can fail in other places California for example has been trying the housing first policy as well for the past 10 years but it hasn't really seen the same results and that's because it lacks everything that is required for this policy to be successful unlike Finland California has incredibly strict development rules and really expensive real estate which means that building social housing in large quantities is kind of impossible and even then housing is just a part of it in order to replicate how it works in Finland you also need a really strong social security system a lot of social workers and access to healthcare mental health institutions and addiction treatments but California doesn't really have any of that but even more than for practical reasons this policy is often rejected on ideological grounds there is a deep rooted idea that homeless people should deserve housing rather than just get it and that doing so creates a bad precedent even though in this case that's not really what the data and the evidence are telling us so although Finland has some unique advantages this model can be applied elsewhere but in order to be successful it requires a lot of invested resources ability to commit for decades rather than for years and in the end it needs to be just a part of a wider well-functioning system of social safety nets that help people from getting off the ground and so it looks like Finland will probably keep its unique position for a bit longer

Channel: Explained with Dom

Views: 2,526,168

Keywords: finland homeless, finland solved homelesness

Id: DPh4PN8e0ds

Length: 8min 54sec (534 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 06 2023