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.
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.
- [deleted]
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.
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
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].
> 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?
