Finland's zero homeless strategy (2021)

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.

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.

It can be viewed as a housing supply issue.

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...

>"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.

> 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...

If it was, it would be a tiny causal factor compared to the obvious one, lower marriage rates. Have to be married first to get divorced.

https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces

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

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

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.

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

> 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!

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

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 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.

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.

True, on all points, but it wasn't just him, it's been a decades long process of multiple parts of the economy failing imo. One does wonder though how things would be if we simply cancelled zoning and other needlessly bureaucratic development restrictions in the 80s, and enabled automatically correcting policy that was outside the hands of both property owners and politicians. Every time I see an anti tower sign in east van it makes me want to throw a rock through that person's window, and the fact this tension exists on a local level is ridiculous.

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

Housing is an inelastic commodity. Increased demand will take considerable time to lead to additional supply.

Over-supply is even harder to reduce because housing is amortized over 20 or more years.

Developers are well aware of the cyclic nature of the housing market and thus reluctant to invest in many cases.

What's funny is that I would bet money that immigrants to Canada have a higher employment rate than Canadian citizens as a whole.

I say that as a member of both groups.

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

"as long as the immigrants are working"

And their family members, and the money they work for stays in-country and is not sent overseas.

Not commenting on your stance of the costs of construction, that's ridiculous to be left there on its own.

Get more out, to get a reality check.

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

In a functioning economy, people won't be feeling pressure to move into a handful of population centers.

Canada has PLENTY of free space for construction, and modern construction is pretty cheap and efficient. But economic forces are concentrating the growth in a few areas. Well-intentioned efforts to force "affordable housing" and "walkable neighborhoods" make these forces even worse.

The root cause fix is to stop the economic forces that pack people into ever smaller areas.

Fantastic links. The same thing has come to mind when thinking about my home town. They amalgamated all the suburbs back in the 70s, and they're just these sprawling desolate rural towns still, which almost certainly cost the overall city an unsustainable multiple of what they contribute, and they're still building new cul-de-sac laden hellscapes, that sometimes don't even have sidewalks, and who's only supply of services are provided by the largest big box stores you see everywhere. It's brutal.

I have the sense that if these suburbs had to figure out they're own shorter term scaling strategy, especially without being able to infinitely kick the infrastructure can down the road, things would be required to change a bit more rapidly. What they have instead are these miserable little cabin-esque bungalows with deer running about, concrete that is literally crumbling to gravel, and a very weird thread of prejudice against apartments of any kind.

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

I can see this. I knew someone who was homeless for a time.

I asked her where she slept. She said "you don't sleep". You don't even have to run an experiment to know that sleep deprivation, even in your own home, causes psychosis. Now add the shock of being exposed to filth for the first time, poor climate control (homeless don't walk around with multiple layers of Patagonia and a nice backpack to stash them in as it warms up), the very real threat of sexual or physical assault, the shocking awareness that you are now "one of them" and know that a sizable percentage of your acquaintances would immediately distance themselves from you if they knew your plight. We're not even talking about food and vitamin quality here.

> Psychiatry has some of the worst reproducability of any science. People who are forced to live on the streets without good access to services begin to exhibit symptoms of psychosis within one to two days and lose those symptoms after a similar duration of one or two days with housing.

Is this a studied phenomenon I can read about? I'd appreciate any literature suggestions if you have them.

That's a wrong chronology. Before the 1950s we did not have effective treatments for schizophrenia other than incarceration.

In old books you read about

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catatonia

being intractable, now it usually clears up in 15-30 minutes with benzodiazepine medication. In the 1950s we got the Phenothiazines which were the first hope for many patients, there has been a huge amount of progress since then and managing most of these people outside the hospital is possible. People also came to see involuntary commitment as immoral as described by Thomas Szasz, depicted by the movie "One Flew out of the Cuckoo's Nest" and shown by this experiment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment

The trouble isn't that we tore down the old system but that we didn't completely build a new system to replace it. There are deep issues involving people's agency. Right now we are in a society that thinks it is wrong to make people to take drugs they don't want to take, a different society (maybe even ours in N years) will think is it wrong to not make people take drugs for serious mental illness.

I was responding to the commenter above me discussing the phenomenon of mentally disturbed people sleeping rough and I think that's been a small phenomenon in Finland the entire time due to their different history with mental health, with economic homelessness being most of what they've reduced via housing first.

To clarify, I don't know much about Finnish mental health in particular as opposed to the general trends in Northern Europe.

> due to bad treatment options and often very inhumane conditions and cases of misdiagnoses.

I thought that it broke down due to a Supreme Court decision (O’Connor v. Donaldson, 422 U.S. 563 (1975)) but perhaps they were interrelated.

> This is completely detached from reality. I find it hard to believe you are being truthful unless you're doing some sort of gotcha where you carry a gun or are some sort of jiu-jitsu master.

As someone who has lived in San Francisco, CA for the past long-ass while, I agree with the paragraph that you're objecting to. I own no firearms, and can hardly throw a pillow, let alone a person.

Maybe try, like, talking to more homeless folks? Or at least observing them from a distance? They're folks like anyone else, and most of them (like most folks) simply don't want police attention, so doing anything more to regular folks than asking for spare change isn't in their repertoire. Honestly, I'm a LOT safer in the parts of the city where there are folks out on the street than I am places where there's noone. [0]

[0] The only times I've gotten mugged or robbed were when I was in the fancy parts of town where there's noone on the street to provide assistance... and my assailants were groups of folks who looked to be doing well for themselves, rather than rough-looking folks looking for cash for a score.

In Finland, "homeless" actually means "homeless". We don't mean "people suffering mental illness and substance abuse issues". So that's the background for the article.

I recently visited NYC and understand your specific angle, but "homeless" actually can just mean "person without a home" without connotations of mental issues or substance abuse.

There are extreme cases where people willfully live under bridges or something but that's super rare.

> This is completely detached from reality.

what's completely detached from reality is that the problem is so bad in (US) cities like NYC that it seems inconceivable that it isn't a universal truth that cities just have an indigent population that regularly threatens and sometimes follows through on threats of violence to passersby.

How did we let the problem get this bad‽

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

> This is completely detached from reality.

Well if you say so, but it's reality. Have you lived in a city? I think you would know.

> https://nypost.com/...

The post pushes right-wing propaganda; it's a Rupert Murdoch publication, the same as Fox News. Ignore it.

Manhatten is so safe it's dull. It's lost its edge, its variety, its lifeblood which is the dynamic people. Really, I'm not kidding you. Look up the crime stats. Or just go visit - if more people would stop believing the right-wing nonsense and just see things for themselves, they'd be much happier (and how about holding the the NY Post, etc. accountable?).

> Like you honestly never seen an aggressive person who is high?

No, or if they are aggressive, they are aggressive to the empty air around them - I don't engage in conversation. But people high on opiods, which is most common by far, are quiescent. Some are basically asleep standing up, drooling in place. Very scary!

I think you are taking 'nothing' (if I used that word) too literally. Of course crimes happen. People win the lottery too. That doesn't make it a trend or a crisis. All those news stories add up to five individual crimes spread onto two continents.

> you can be molested or assaulted by drunk and beligerent homed people. And, more importantly, homeless people are much more at risk

I don't know enough to say "much" more, but I think those are good points. There's nothing special about being homeless, in terms of crime, except you are much more exposed to it.

> on both visits, lone women walking down the street in broad daylight were chased after and opportunisticly molested by drunk vagrants hanging around on Robson Street. Broad daylight.

How do I spend so much time in cities and never see anything like that? I'm sure some of these stories people tell are true, but wow.

Linking to incidents in cities in the US, and the 51st and 52nd state, aren't representative of cities across the world.

Maybe """ "Nothing ever happens" says person nothing happened to.""" is honestly telling the truth that they don't concieve of anything happening to them because they live outside of this insane bubble we're in that it's just accepted for cities to just have a violent homeless population that "we can't do anything about". Maybe we're the idiots in this situation.

But you complain about fictive homeless people attacking you, with or without moral compunction.

What will you do with this person after you've committed them? It turns out that forcing people to detox isn't effective. Addiction is a disease with no reliable cure; you can't just give someone a round of antibiotics.

But if you think it's possible, demonstrate it to the world: Get yourself addicted, then detox, and you should be fine!

> Nearly all of the people who stay homeless in the long term have some severe mental illness (including addiction)

The problem is that people can end up homeless for all sorts of reasons, and even if that reason is some sort of mental illness, being homeless is an often-traumatic experience that easily exacerbates and worsens a person's mental condition.

There was a period of my life where I slept rough (long story) and I can personally confirm that a lack of sleep security (not to mention "stuff security", the fear of having my meager possessions stolen) will start someone on the path to mental illness; some amount of paranoia and mental fog seems almost inevitable in those conditions.

A stable environment is certainly going to dramatically increase the chance of overcoming an addiction. It obviously does not guarantee success but it's a crucial first step in the process. As pointed out in the article the housing first approach is actually saving money in the long run by reducing subsequent costs incurred by social services, so the "everyone else is paying for their addiction" argument does not really work – there are going to be costs either way, and an addict who has a home is easier and cheaper to care for than one who is roaming the streets.

Most addicts end up recovering

[flagged]

this is such a dishonest characterization. the issue people have with free needles is that they end up everywhere but a sharps container. they throw loose needles in every park, walking path, bus stop, etc. in the entire city. my city has had this issue for years now.

you should use some of the superhuman empathy you have to explore other perspectives on the issue. even for just a minute.

Finland rich? Not as such. Small and homogenous definetly (pop 5.6M).

US is rich. Vastly richer than Finland. PPP GDP for US in 2023 was 73k $ and for Finland 64k $.

The systems are quite different. But it’s not about total wealth as such. If we use GDP as rough back-of-the-envelope estimate (problematic I know!) us could implement similar system economically but politically probably not.

The gini coefficient gives some hints about these differences (US 0.48, FI 0.28). In Finland people are taxed until there are very little income differences and then that money is used for social policies and healthcare. So everybody gets high quality healthcare for all of the serious stuff (until you reach best-before-date and government pulls the plug), you never need to freeze to death, go hungry (in theory at least) and your kids will have free education. Based on my limited understanding of US politics and social structure I find similar arrangement improbable.

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

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

Not sure if you intended to phrase your question as you did, but if you give cash to the unhoused to rent housing, that takes supply from the bottom of the rental market if you don’t build any more.

Builders tend to build for those that can afford to pay and don’t target the bottom of the market.

Most stock of low-cost housing is due to building neglect or depopulation rather than being purpose-built, in a free market anyway.

If you force owners to artificially reduce rent for a single class of properties (here: cheap flats made for the homeless) the rent for others go up a bit.

This has happened in several US cities.

For example just add tax to shoot at the target, eventually salary owners get hurt while riches can get away with an army of lawyers and accountants.

Looks great. I have heard Finland has very affordable housing.

Yeah I do agree we should build better housing now than post WW2 economies. The main point I want to make is that affordable housing is already solved.

> NIMBYs in general are violently against any kind of public housing.

It’s more complicated than that. I’m massively pro public housing. I hate living next to it.

A poorly managed emergency housing facility is just a shit show. Violence, noise, rubbish, human and animal abuse, property damage, police attendance, debt collectors, smell, rodents, animal attacks, threats, overgrown plants etc, all within the last year, at my neighbouring house. If it was ever managed properly, people might view it differently. Managing it costs money, and then people oppose the cost when it doesn’t come with more housing.

Large scale public housing is driven by the state or federal governments, which can simply ignore NIMBYs and local zoning laws. The issue with public housing is not NIMBYism.

They don't cost $1M a unit just because. The article you posted highlights a number of reasons it was as expensive as it was, many of them policy choices that could be undone with the stroke of a pen and a round of votes. There is nothing about building housing in cities that makes it that expensive other than the regulations, many of which could use a re-think or a re-scope.

Otherwise, what's Finland's secret? Are they building houses for the homeless in the middle of nowhere? How do they manage to build public housing in the city without it ballooning into a $1M per unit boondoggle?

They’re not just trying to be close to museums, hip bars, and top notch ethnic food. Homeless people want to live in cities because if they can’t afford an apartment, they probably can’t afford a car, suburban areas rarely have any resources for them, there’s safety in numbers, and most bored suburban and rural cops wouldn’t let people camp even 5 minutes on public land, let alone tolerate it long enough to be tenable. Cities are the only place a significant homeless population can feasibly exist in the US.

The reason it's expensive is or because the US is bigger. It's because the people in cities want to keep people out so they make it very expensive. Which in turn fuels homelessness.

The desire to exclude, the refusal to permit enough housing, and the rejection of density are the fundamental cause.

The scale of the US has nothing to do with it. It's merely a cultural choice by a prior generation that younger generations have not yet been able to overrule. But they will.

That has less to do with the size of the US but everything to do with the lack of size in the US. We make it impossible to do things by making each city small independent, and having a lack of unity.

Our government is not more complex than Finland's because we have more people, it's because we chose to make it inefficient and complex.

Removing local cities' power to be different for the sake of complexity would solve the issue quickly. If the Bay Area had a regional government rather than tiny fiefdoms devoted to allowing wealthy people to extract the maximum economic value from shared business interests, while willing away their own tax dollars in tiny enclaves that are protected by minimum lot sizes and apartment bans, not only would we have far less homelessness to begin with, but we could solve the leftover homelessness much better, refuse crime and poverty, and have a far better functioning society.

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

Your numbers don't contradict my message, look at the demographics of US which shows real complexity [1]. You should also take into consideration the evolution of demographics not just a single point. Last, but not least you should take into account their refugee programs [2] and how power is really distributed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...

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

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

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

Why not? Am I worse than others?

I'm not bothered by if you think it's a good idea or a bad idea. If you want to learn about the largest undertaking of the exact housing idea you are proposing, there is a wealth of knowledge available from programs that involved entire nations and isn't just an idea in your head.

I can say all day that my ideas are 'good.' But the only place in the modern era that has tried mass 'free housing' are communist ones and all those societies stopped doing it or failed altogether. That doesn't seem like it has worked out as a 'good idea.'

It’s an interesting phenomenon that seems universal. People point to any failure anywhere in a system and then right it off in its entirety.

Is there every a system of any sort that someone doesn’t try to exploit?

I hope you’re right.

It’s very difficult to address culture in the US without being accused of victim blaming or bias.

But the uncomfortable truth is that some cultural practices simply do produce better neighbors and coworkers and compatriots than do others.

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

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

> I’ve been to every major city in the US and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a homeless Indian.

1) I have.

2) There are plenty of homeless or impoverished people in India, they just don't come to the US. Immigrants need a visa or permanent residency, and that usually comes with a requirement to maintain a job or have some level of financial security. Later generation Indian-Americans are, hopefully, kept out of poverty by the work their parents and families put in to establish a foothold in the US. But none of this is guaranteed; homelessness can happen to just about anyone if they have the right run of bad luck, and one's culture is only a small part of that equation.

Mental illness is a major factor that makes it hard to help people. A majority of homeless people don't have mental illness, but a large fraction do, but those are the hardest to help.

I have a friend right now who is in a precarious housing situation who has schizophrenia but does not have a DX and has no insight into her condition. If my wife tries to set a time to pick her up and take her out to our farm, odds are 1/10 that she will really be there, will really get in the car, will not get out of the car for some hare-brained reason or otherwise not make it out. You've got to have the patience of a saint to do anything for her.

If she had some insight into her condition she could go to DSS and get TANF and then get on disability and have stable housing but she doesn't. No matter how I try to bring up the issue that she does have a condition she just "unhears" it.

Indians and other people from traditional cultures have stronger "family values" and won't wash their hands of intractable relatives the way people who grew up in the US monoculture will. (Or if they do it, they'll do it in a final way)

> It’s definitely cultural. I’ve been to every major city in the US and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a homeless Indian.

Why might it be rare to see a homeless member of a group whose members make up less than 2% of the population in the US to start with and are largely recent immigrants (15% immigrating within the last 5 years!), often under work-based visa programs targeting highly-skilled workers that are well paid?

Could it be cultural superiority of the cultures from which they are drawn? Could it be some other thing that makes them rare among the US homeless?

Hard to tell, I'm sure.

India is overwhelmed with poverty far beyond anything I've seen in the US.

The people of India started from even worse poverty and have generally made progress (especially since recently-deceased PM Singh). I'm not criticizing. But holding forth India's culture [1] as a model of preventing homelessness is pretty incredible.

[1] India may have the largest, most diverse collection of 'cultures' within one national border in the world, so which one are we talking about?

Have you ever seen a homeless Indian in India? I would assume not, since evidently Indians have intact familial cultures that churn out good citizens.

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

You say its cultural ... ok ... then you say you have never seen "a homeless Indian" ... ok ... Does Indian culture exist in India and is there virtually no homelessness in India?

I mean... even within India, the poor act nothing like they do here. I've been to India several times and witnessed abject poverty (getting better now supposedly). But the poor people in india still go home to their families (they had families!), have dinner together, and are deeply invested in educating their children to set themselves up for success.

I'm shocked when politicians in America blame our homelessness problem on poverty. Poor people do not behave this way. This is a breakdown in culture.

It's weird growing up in the 90s as an American and visiting India and thinking that America was better than that because we are so rich and no one is that poor, but 30 years later, it no longer seems that way. While India is still very poor, I think even the homeless there might have a more stable life than what I physically see on the streets of west coast America. I mean.. it may be a slum, but at least they have a permanent house, their kids are in school, etc.

Meanwhile, in Portland, I see human feces on many streets, and the homeless are drugged out zombies (Portland has enough beds for all homeless but no ability to force usage of shelter beds, and few homeless person accepts the offer).

I hate to say it, but maybe just allowing a 'proper' slum would be a better option.

Geopolitical commentary aside, the city of San Francisco has spent billions of dollars on homelessness and it has only gotten worse. I'm not opposed to paying higher taxes to house people less fortunate than me, but I expect the government to get their money's worth. If I wouldn't want to spend a million on a shoebox, then the city shouldn't either.

The US does spend tens of billions fighting homelessness though. The US is very generous in this regard.

The problem is it’s not solvable by building homes. It’s about addiction and mental illness. And because of the US constitution, it’s very difficult to help Americans that do not want to be helped.

Portland (population 622k) spent $531 million (https://www.koin.com/news/portland/shocking-amount-spent-on-...) which is 1/16 of the $8 billion that will fix homelessness according to you.

By your reckoning, Portland, which is 0.15% of the American population should have been able to fix homelessness for its entire population for $12 million. Portland spent 45 times that so we ought to be able to house the homeless in the Ritz Carlton, if your calculations are correct.

But they're obviously not. And your argument is childish.

What genocide? I'm not aware of genocide that is currently occurring that the US is funding. The US is not bombing children.

How would just giving people houses solve homelessness? Do you know what happens to places that house homeless people? How long would this solve the problem for these people? This just seems like anti-Americanism with no quantitative grounding.

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

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

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought of this, pour government money into taking anyone unemployed and give them solid jobs building/improving/managing infrastructure like housing, any public good, parks, roads, train tracks, whatever it is as long as it's a net positive.

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

i like how condescending this post is while just casually asserting multiple ridiculous things. ie: nobody ever acts decadently, all meth addicts actually have adhd, staying up for 4 days smoking meth is actually "self medicating", that the healthcare in usa (one of the most lenient places to be prescribed stims in the world) is somehow the reason why they cant get a stimulant prescription. just ridiculous.

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

The data are pretty clear that those who are not drug addicts end up coming out of homelessness fairly fast by making use of America's numerous social programs. The story of American poverty alleviation is a resounding success.

Drug addiction and mental illness is another story.

Notice how I never said they were.

Good bait

yet

there are many organisations and individuals who will help you, if you are sober and non-violent, actually everyone will like cheap workforce - I know few cases like that, someone taken from street to farm or similar.

In Canada the majority of shelter beds go to refugee claimants. I believe it is highly like many illegals in the US are homeless and make up the majority of homeless people. They are not part of the numbers you provided.

according to that 'adults participating in the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions' .. It also says foreign born is 1% vs native at 1.7% - so they are both 'a tiny fraction'

Whether or not a large percentage, or a large number or small number of immigrants are homeless or not,

one must assume that if 11 million people left the US next month, the price of rent in many places may go down a bit, and some currently unhoused people might be able to afford a cheaper place.

Of course another side is that wages in some industries will rise, and that may put more people into a position where they can afford an apartment.

What I'd like to see is how inexpensive optional housing can be made.

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

My first read of this document leads me to believe that there are only about 341,000 housing units available for rent, there are some for sale at an average price of $373,000.. but many or most of the empty housing units are like second homes and such and not 'available'.

So we have 350k open units and 700k people without homes, average rent is around $1500..

just looking at the data my guess is that we have about 700k people who don't have an extra 2 grand every month to put into housing. (and I think it's way higher personally, maybe not counting the couch surfing relatives who can't afford their own place, and others who are living in over crowded situations of basements )-

I'm sure there is much more to it than the averages, like a lot of the homeless are in areas where the average rent is much higher and 1500 - and the few places where rent is $800 likely has less homeless, (and also has less other things like jobs and public transit) -

and really if it is 10 million or a quarter a million empty places, I don't see how that matters if no one can afford any of them.

What does that mean for the next steps?

Does the government eminent domain the houses, arrest the homeless, and then ship them out to Detroit or wherever the surplus houses are?

You're assuming that the major challenge is the lack of a home, because the term we choose to use as an umbrella implies that. For some people it's even true, but they tend not to be CHRONICALLY homeless, and that's the population of major concern. Chronically homeless people have extremely high rates of mental illness and substance abuse; depending on how you slice it, a third or more are schizophrenic or something similar.

Those are not people you can just stick into a house and wish them well, they need serious help for many years. In most cases that help isn't there, or comes with strings (no drugs, no alcohol) that they refuse to accept. Homelessness in the US is in many respect a mental health and substance abuse issue, exacerbated in the post-Reagan era when our mental health system was gutted and weakened.

If you want to reach those people and keep them off the streets, you need more than just empty houses.

There could be a ghost town with 50 million homes in the middle of the desert, but if there are no grocery stores or jobs there then homeless people can't move there.

The raw number of empty houses is irrelevant. Especially when some of those houses are temporarily uninhabitable, e.g. houses being renovated, or houses in LA right now near the wildfires.

I'm often skeptical of simple solutions like this. They tend to assume that the regulation causes the problem, but when looked at more critically, it's clear that the regulation is a formalization of a combination of consumer & business preference.

For example, Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations. If you get into the gritty details, you'll find that they have a whole bunch ofloopholes that seem to favor larger trucks & SUVs. Many people will point to these regulation as causing people to buy light trucks & SUVs, but the data seems to suggest consumers prefer to buy these vehicles and auto manufacture prefer to sell them (they are extremely profitable). I postulate that, if CAFE requirements were eliminated, the best selling vehicle in the USA would continue to be the F-series and other trucks and SUVs would continue to dominate the top 10, because the regulations are influenced by consumer preference, not the other way around.

I think the same logic applies to zoning. People largely want to own single family homes (SFH) in the suburbs; builders largely want to build SFHs in the suburbs. There's no reason to believe that changes in zoning will cause a meaningful shift in consumer and business preference. In the handful of ultra expensive metro areas, sure it might move the needle because economics trump preference, but in most of the USA, there's plenty of space to build housing. It's hard to imagine a developer in Pittsburgh choosing to build housing in an industrial area in the city over some empty land on the outskirts.

Paying for the social services is possible. The difficult issue is some people don't want to go to a homeless shelter because they want to maintain a level of freedom while others fear they will be robbed/raped at the shelter.

Do you force them inside?