Finland ends homelessness

Almost.

From Scoop.me

In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. The reason: The country applies the “Housing First” concept. Those affected by homelessness receive a small apartment and counselling – without any preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected thus make their way back into a stable life. And: All this is cheaper than accepting homelessness.

Finland is the only country in Europe where homelessness is in decline.  In 2008 you could see tent villages and huts standing between trees in the parks of Helsinki. Homeless people had built makeshift homes in the middle of Finland’s capital city. They were exposed to harsh weather conditions.

Since the 1980s, Finnish governments had been trying to reduce homelessness. Short-term shelters were built. However, long-term homeless people were still left out. There were too few emergency shelters and many affected people did not manage to get out of homelessness: They couldn’t find jobs – without a housing address. And without any job, they couldn’t find a flat. It was a vicious circle. Furthermore, they had problems applying for social benefits. All in all, homeless people found themselves trapped.

But in 2008 the Finnish government introduced a new policy for the homeless: It started implementing the “Housing First” concept. Since then the number of people affected has fallen sharply.

Finland has set itself a target: Nobody should have to live on the streets – every citizen should have a residence.

And the country is successful: It is the only EU-country where the number of homeless people is declining.

It is NGOs such as the “Y-Foundation” that provide housing for people in need. They take care of the construction themselves, buy flats on the private housing market and renovate existing flats. The apartments have one to two rooms. In addition to that, former emergency shelters have been converted into apartments in order to offer long-term housing.

“It was clear to everyone that the old system wasn’t working; we needed radical change,” says Juha Kaakinen, Director of the Y-Foundation.

Homeless people turn into tenants with a tenancy agreement. They also have to pay rent and operating costs. Social workers, who have offices in the residential buildings, help with financial issues such as applications for social benefits.

Juha Kaakinen is head of the Y-Foundation. The NGO receives discounted loans from the state to buy housing. Additionally, social workers caring for the homeless and future tenants are paid by the state. The Finnish lottery, on the other hand, supports the NGO when it buys apartments on the private housing market. The Y-Foundation also receives regular loans from banks. The NGO later uses the rental income to repay the loans.

“We had to get rid of the night shelters and short-term hostels we still had back then. They had a very long history in Finland, and everyone could see they were not getting people out of homelessness. We decided to reverse the assumptions.” (Juha Kaakinen, Director of the Y-Foundation)

The policy applied in Finland is called “HousingFirst”. It reverses conventional homeless aid. More commonly, those affected are expected to look for a job and free themselves from their psychological problems or addictions. Only then they get help in finding accommodation.

“Housing First”, on the other hand, reverses the path: Homeless people get a flat – without any preconditions. Social workers help them with applications for social benefits and are available for counselling in general. In such a new, secure situation, it is easier for those affected to find a job and take care of their physical and mental health.

The result is impressive: 4 out of 5 homeless people will be able to keep their flat for a long time with “Housing First” and lead a more stable life.

In the last 10 years, the “Housing First” programme provided 4,600 homes in Finland. In 2017 there were still about 1,900 people living on the streets – but there were enough places for them in emergency shelters so that they at least didn’t have to sleep outside anymore.

Creating housing for people costs money. In the past 10 years, 270 million euros were spent on the construction, purchase and renovation of housing as part of the “Housing First” programme. However, Juha Kaakinen points out, this is far less than the cost of homelessness itself. Because when people are in emergency situations, emergencies are more frequent: Assaults, injuries, breakdowns. The police, health care and justice systems are more often called upon to step in – and this also costs money.  In comparison, “Housing First” is cheaper than accepting homelessness: Now, the state spends 15,000 euros less per year per homeless person than before.

With 4 out of 5 people keeping their flats, “Housing First” is effective in the long run. In 20 percent of the cases, people move out because they prefer to stay with friends or relatives – or because they don’t manage to pay the rent. But even in this case they are not dropped. They can apply again for an apartment and are supported again if they wish.

Of course, there is no guarantee for success. Especially homeless women are more difficult to reach: They conceal their emergency situation more often: They live on the streets less frequently and rather stay with friends or acquaintances.

[The author of this piece is Kontrast.at/Kathrin Glösel ]

The best solutions to social problems are often not the free-market ones favoured by neo-liberalism.  It turns out that the Finnish solution to homelessness saves money as well as being more humane.  Will those infatuated with neo-liberalism learn from this?  Prolly not.

I'm with stupid

Queensland man arrested for wearing a t-shirt with "I'm with stupid" written on it.  So much for Queensland's freedom of speech.

The twitter response has been to mock the premier of Qld:

Amazing how fond the right is of free markets, but not of freedom

Capitalism?

Cartoon from Anti-Capitalism

This article, "Capitalism is too good a name for neo-liberal ideology"  sums up some of the things  have been thinking more and more over the last couple of years.

Many of the leading lights of free-market (neo-liberal/neo-conservative) capitalism were asserting before the crash that the market had correctly valued property, shares, derivatives and other exotic products that the “moneymen” were engaged in trading in. They failed spectacularly to predict the 2008 crash, the second largest economic crisis in history, after the great depression.

 You would think, wouldn’t you, that those high priests of neo-liberal economics would now be contrite, admit that their models of the market and human behaviour are wrong, or at least are in need of serious modification. Not a bit of it, they just carry on regardless, as if the crash never happened.

(In fact, outside the US, the economic collapse in some places--Greece, Spain, Ireland--was as severe and traumatic as the US Great Depression)

The use of the word ‘free’ in free market is a misnomer and a more accurate phrase to encapsulate the ideology would be ‘privatizing profits for the too-big-to-fail corporations and socializing losses’. As for the word ‘liberal’, all it means is giving the super-rich the liberty to exploit people without due regard for their human rights, and to pay them poverty wages. 

Lest we forget, we the taxpayers have rescued the too-big-to-fail banks from the folly of their actions to the tune of hundreds of billions, only to see that money paid in bonuses to the very bosses who were the architects of the mess in the first place. Governments then had to cut their spending through austerity programmes that affect almost everyone — apart, that is, from those who caused the crash in the first place. 

The hardships and the misery of such cuts are particularly felt by the working poor, the disabled, and the vulnerable. Our young have paid a particularly heavy price through unemployment. The adverse effect of such unemployment on societies will cascade through future generations in the foreseeable future.

If a company is too big to fail, it is also too big to be left to its own devices.  If a bank is too big to fail, it needs to be regulated so that the risk of failure is low.  Just as they used to be before untrammelled free markets in finance became fashionable.

Ha-Joon Chang, a Cambridge University economist, in his book 23 things they don’t tell you about capitalism, emphasises his enthusiastic support of capitalism and frames his criticism of the free-market model with these words:
‘Being critical of free-market ideology is not the same as being against capitalism. Despite its problems and limitations, I believe that capitalism is still the best economic system that humanity has invented. My criticism is of a particular version of capitalism that has dominated the world in the last three decades, that is, free-market capitalism. This is not the only way to run capitalism, and certainly not the best, as the record of the last three decades shows.’

The neo-liberal consensus assumed that financial markets were efficient, self-regulating and rational, and that the vastly increased inequality of wealth which resulted from embracing free markets would have no political consequences.  They were wrong, badly wrong, on both counts, as the GFC showed.  More on  both subjects to come.

Trickle