Finland applies the “Housing First” concept (2020)
116 comments
·March 6, 2025martinald
benrutter
The UK doesn't yet have "housing first" programmes beyond pilots (not sure about Scotland in that): https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/housing-first-pil...
I used to work in housing homeless people around 4 years ago, so things may have changes since then, if you're volunteering now you can probably tell me if any of these practices have changed:
- Own accomodation was only possible after a proven track record in hostels
- Many hostel accomodation places only possible after being "counted" homeless (need to be verified as sleeping rough)
- Housing benefit paid directly to the tenant, and if they fail to manage finances (including if there benefits are paused due to missing a form or not filling in a letter in time) they are liable to be evicted from social housing
- use of drugs is normally evictable in hostel situations causing a vicious cycle
(I don't want to imply the UK is the worst country for social housing, there's some great work, but also some really sad realities that often go unadressed)
MSFT_Edging
> because some shelters are so chaotic it is better to be out on the streets.
This is an important bit that people will usually fail to consider. I've read so many stories where living on the street can be the safer option for both your bodily health and general well being. I don't know how it is in the UK, but in the US, shelters will often require people to allow the shelter to hold their belongings for safe keeping.
What often happens is the shelter staff will throw away, lose, or downright steal those belongings. I've read stories of IDs, phones, and notebooks that have been held onto for years going missing under the watch of the shelter.
In shelters that don't require this, your things are now at the mercy of your fellow shelter borders. And things can go missing just as easily.
It makes sense people would want to avoid shelters and sleep outside if this is what happens when they choose the shelter.
These kinds of losses are extremely demoralizing and damaging. Same deal with Homeless encampment cleanups. People will lose their medicine, documents, cell phones, etc and have to start back from square one, often destroying any progress they could have made. It basically makes the homeless "problem" even worse and pushes people down worse paths. This kind of stress causes all sorts of mental illness in return, creating a cycle of poverty-> homelessness -> stress -> mental illness.
closewith
> This is an important bit that people will usually fail to consider.
This is explicitly covered by Housing First, which does not involve shared shelter accommodation. Instead, the point is that every homeless person gets their own apartment, without preconditions.
MSFT_Edging
Which is actually great for a huge number of people driven to homelessness. If it's implemented in a way where it can act fast without years of waiting lists, it'd be hugely beneficial to people recently knocked off their feet being able to recover without falling deeper.
pydry
This is also why the UK is very, very far away from housing first. The war on affordable housing is alive and well there.
Pretending that guaranteeing shelter where you are at significant risk of being raped and robbed is almost the same thing as guaranteeing an apartment of your own is dishonest. There isn't really another way to describe it.
safety1st
Are the budgets so small that they can't afford to provide each tenant with their own lockbox? I feel like being able to secure a small amount of personal property is the sort of thing which would pay for itself in terms of enabling people to get back on their feet and get out of the shelter faster
MSFT_Edging
Sometimes a small lockbox isn't enough when you carry everything you have to your name on your back everywhere you go.
bko
> One alternative would be to prescribe heroin which I think could work
We generally accept the principal that making something cheaper and easier results in more of this behavior. Few examples
- subsidize corn results in more corn products like corn syrup in our food
- make school loans cheaper and more available to students results in more people going to school
- make guns more available and easier to get results in more guns on the street
But when it comes to making it easier for people to fuel their addiction and live a more comfortable life centered around a dangerous chemical, some question that this relationship exists. I've watched videos where someone interviews people on the streets in Philadelphia which provides a lot of services around facilitating drug use and they're just living their life as addicts and pretty much okay with their status quo.
Doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to make the lives of addicts more comfortable. But we should accept the proposition that subsidizing a behavior or lifestyle makes it more common on the margin.
OtherShrezzing
>We generally accept the principal that making something cheaper and easier results in more of this behavior.... But when it comes to making it easier for people to fuel their addiction and live a more comfortable life centered around a dangerous chemical, some question that this relationship exists.
The fundamental principals of supply and demand assume that the agents participating the market are acting rationally (or approximately close to rational). Those assumptions are strained to their limit when analysing black markets and addictive substances.
skyyler
The prescribed heroin doesn't need to be cheap or plentiful. It could be the same price as the street stuff.
The point is to remove the activity from the criminal underworld. A pharmacist dispensing a medication is much less likely to sexually assault their client than a street level heroin dealer.
BigGreenJorts
Also get to ensure safety and purity of the drugs and instruments. Safe injections sites for example are more about preventing the spread of AIDs, other blood borne infections and reducing/treating overdose than they are about getting people off the drugs. Yes, they form as a space to push towards sobriety, but that is not their actual job (because it literally cannot be).
vidarh
That would be utterly insane. A large part of the problem with heroin is that it consumes addicts lives to get hold of money for it, and to get hold of the drug itself.
Last I heard, a typical daily dose of medical grade heroin/diamorphine costs 10-20 pounds from the NHS's existing suppliers (yes, the NHS has suppliers - heroin is used in NHS hospitals for pain management; if you've ever been prescribed diamorphine, it's heroin).
All but the very worst affected heroin addicts can lead relatively normal lives if they don't need to worry where their dose will come from.
There are significant societal benefits to prescribing heroin as cheaply as possible.
soupbowl
Canada tried "safe supply" giving clean and free drugs to users. It was a mess, this is an example of a "progressive" idea that in practice is terrible for the community.
catigula
Making criminal activity legal doesn't solve any of their problems except for the only problem that is entirely on them and disincentivizes their destructive behavior.
SpicyLemonZest
Purdue tried this strategy with oxycodone in the US, and it really did not work out well. Removing the activity from the criminal underworld provides massive incentives for unscrupulous doctors to become pill pushers.
naasking
I think there's a reasonable argument that getting yourself into a safe and stable situation even while addicted is a good first step to kicking an addiction.
bko
I've heard the opposite, that you have to hit rock bottom and want to change. If your life is sustainable and you get some pleasure from the substance, why quit?
AngryData
But the other extreme of your examples are also bad. No crop subsidies you get farm failures and unreliable food production. Get rid of student loans and many intelligent people end up trapped doing brainless jobs because they lack better qualifications. End gun sales and you can end up with mostly criminal organizations having all the guns and power and leave law abiding people vulnerable like much of Central and South American and large chunks of Africa.
There is a good balance point in the middle in most cases, but in the case of homelessness and drug addiction one sides cause usually amounts to not helping anyone and in many times criminalizes their existence making their situation worse and more costly upon them and society as a whole than it already was.
bluGill
> one sides
This is no one side. (one sides is grammatically incorrect so if you meant plural you need to explain yourself better).
People are complex and most people not helping are more centrist or populist, not on some extreme. You can find examples at all extremes of people who help the down and out in significant ways, and others who are doing things that (either directly or indirectly) harm the down and out.
gedy
> One alternative would be to prescribe heroin which I think could work
Yes, didn't they do just that and cause the recent opioid epidemic with prescriptions? (I know it wasn't Heroin)
s1artibartfast
Actually, denying prescriptions is part of what caused the opioids epidemic deaths. People went to the street and overdosed on fentanyl.
This could have been prevented by Prescribing to addicts while being more selective about new patients.
closewith
> The UK also has the same policy.
This is the opposite to the policy in most councils in the UK, which generally only offer temporary shelter and only with preconditions. The Finnish housing-first policy was implemented as UK-style policies were failing, as they are failing now in the UK.
> However, the number of people begging on the streets is still rising sharply, so I don't think it is the silver bullet everyone thinks it is.
A Housing-first policy has only been trialled by ~15 councils in the UK, and it has been shown to work in all of them. It's much more expensive that the UK's traditional shelter approach, which is partly why it's not national policy.
drcongo
Thanks for this clarification. The parent made a lot of interesting points but this very wrong statement at the start made it harder to trust the rest of it.
Jolter
You write “You can give these people houses but without treatment they will still be begging on the street.”
Your choice of words makes me wonder whether you would agree that an addict who sleeps in an apartment is better off than an addict who freezes their ass off in an alley at night.
Maybe solving for housing first is a way to eliminate some of the suffering in the world. By demanding that their life “is in order” before providing housing, I think we are demanding the impossible from someone who clearly is not capable of making perfect choices.
bluGill
You are both missing something important: no all homeless are addicts! There are lots of different reasons someone could be homeless. As such there is no one side fits all. This article says their policy is only about 80% effective. They are extremely good by world standards, but it is far away from perfect. The question remains what to do about that other 20% - and if you find an answer would that be better for some of the other 80%? (note that I said if - I have no ideas. Also I didn't specify all of the other 80% being helped and so we have to figure out what that means to the overall policy)
phkahler
>> Maybe solving for housing first is a way to eliminate some of the suffering in the world.
That's probably true, but the ability to do it strongly depends (I'm thinking US centric here) on keeping the borders closed to illegal immigration. The last thing you want is a flood of people coming for the free/cheap housing. BTW I believe the US currently has a housing shortage, particularly at the lower end of the market.
bluGill
Why do we need to close the borders at all? Most people crossing the border are looking for a good life including a good job, not handouts. Let those people in and get a job and they will provide more than enough economic gain to offset the homeless. (the above is a bit too simple and thus wrong, but not nearly as simple are your analysis)
Jolter
I don’t know of any place (including Finland) that would consider people without a residence permit to be eligible for “housing first”. It is a fairly simple filter to implement, and should solve your problem.
sideshowb
FWIW I didn't read that as an argument against providing housing, I read it as an argument in favour of providing housing and treatment.
balamatom
"Here I am, working my ass off, true-believing in the eventual payoff of all that delayed gratification, stressing myself sick over making the Right Choices in this unwinnable game - and someone who is clearly not capable of making Right Choices gets their problems solved for free? The sheer audacity!"
I feel like the cognitive dissonance between the above line of thought and the social expectation to demonstrate "kindness", "generosity", "compassion" is at the root of many people's rejection of an universal social safety net. Can't let themselves realize that a homeless beggar on crack might not only be just as human, but in some ways even a more genuine human being than your garden-variety obedient nine-to-fiver with a bullshit job and toxic family in 4 kinds of debt to cokehead bankerbros.
Unfortunately, not getting one's fundamental assumptions challenged is very often a much more powerful motivator than any desire to actually reduce the actual suffering of actual beings.
bnralt
The fundamental contradiction is here: "someone who is clearly not capable of making Right Choices" yet is "even a more genuine human being than your garden-variety obedient nine-to-fiver with a bullshit job and toxic family in 4 kinds of debt to cokehead bankerbros."
Many people can accept that someone is so incapable of making the right decisions that left on their own they might die. That since they're a danger to themselves and others, the state has to step in and take care of them.
The issue is that many of these people then turn around and argue that these people are capable of making their own decisions. Housing first in the U.S. gives these people apartment with no conditions attached. In a lot of cases, the people, since they are "clearly not capable of making Right Choices," make life hell for the other residents of the building, and usually aren't able to escape their problems.
There's a similar disconnect when people say "the shelters are extremely dangerous places, of course homeless people won't stay there" and then turn around and say "how could anyone think that putting a homeless person near them could increase their danger." Apparently, the homeless are the only ones who are allowed to consider the danger of being around homeless people.
Empathy is great. It would be nice if homeless advocates occasionally had empathy for other citizens as well.
wwweston
This is probably the fundamental attribution error in play -- "my situation is a twist of circumstance but their situation is a reflection of poor character and choices that need to be policed."
The Golden Rule is an ages-old part of this conversation because it helps people confront this common bias. Imagine your situations are reversed, how would you want things done? Do that.
bluGill
Generally the rant is not about those who are not capable of making the "right choices", but about those who are capable but are not. I know a someone who was getting straight A's in school until they decided to drop out and have a few kids - I feel robbed when she is getting help because she always was able to make "good choices" and instead I'm supposed to forego some luxury I want to support her as well. I know many more people who are unable to make "right choices" and I want to help them.
strken
The social safety net relies on both altruism and self-interest. We trust that getting people into housing will improve their lives, but we are also looking to improve their interactions with us.
I don't care whether the guy who smells like piss and lies beside the supermarket door has earned a room. I would, however, like him to use the shower and laundry attached to the building. If he isn't doing those things even though he has a home now, then we're down to altruism rather than altruism + self-interest.
criddell
Who are you quoting?
BoingBoomTschak
That's not what cognitive dissonance is. That's a dissonance between what people truly think and what they want/need to display.
Nice closing joke, though, got a laugh out of me!
bluGill
> the number of people begging on the streets is still rising sharply,
There is a lot of money to be made putting on raggedly clothing and standing on a street corner with a sign. Some of the people doing that really are in a bad place unable to support themselves any other way, but many of them are normal people with normal houses who have decided to make begging their job. (I was going to write full time job, but in a good location they are working part time and pulling in a full time income).
I support someone busking on the street. I'm paying for the entertainment value there, if they provide me a smile or other enjoyment that is worth some money.
For those who are in trouble I donate to local shelters which take care of people who need help and also have people who can determine if help other than shelter is needed. I'm not against someone in need begging on the streets, but if you could support yourself with a "normal job" then you are scamming me by begging. Local shelters are an easy work around for that. While there are also scams in the shelters, they get audited once in a while.
vidarh
How does the UK have the "same policy".
"Provide shelter" here does not mean a shelter in the UK sense. In Finland, the "Housing First" approach means giving them a private flat.
psychoslave
>However, the number of people begging on the streets is still rising sharply, so I don't think it is the silver bullet everyone thinks it is.
The silver bullet for what? Stop letting people die of cold in the street while there are plenty of empty building out there?
I live in France and here we happily let kids which are attending school go sleep in a tent for the whole winter, more than 2000 according to the (probably minoring) official stats. Meanwhile we have MILLIONS of empty shelters.
Kudo Finland and all countries that won’t let whatever fear and bullshit metrics make look elsewhere when political decisions lead to unbearable human conditions.
https://www.publicsenat.fr/actualites/societe/2043-enfants-a...
https://www.federationsolidarite.org/wp-content/uploads/2024...
https://www.ecoreseau.fr/expressions/tribune-libre/la-traged...
https://www.statistiques.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/editi...
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z33k
Yesterday (March 5, 2025) there was a headline in the top Finnish newspaper: Shopping malls in Helsinki become a hive of homelessness <https://www.hs.fi/helsinki/art-2000011068519.html>
When it gets cold, the homeless congregate in the warm interiors of malls. The guards on duty won’t let them sleep there, but they prefer it over being out in the cold.
mind-blight
Yeah, it's definitely not a perfect solution. Portland, OR has tried a housing first policy. However, there weren't enough available houses, so that requires to build them. That's lead to years of people still being homeless and underserved while resources went into building homes.
I think it can help a lot under the right circumstances, but if the system is already overwhelmed then funding less permanent solutions for a while may actually be more effective and kind
bluGill
Building homes does not take very long if the regulations allow it. Most of the US needs to take a hard look at regulations. Often the problem is regulations won't allow a small house and so the homeless are forced on the street because they can't afford anything.
weberer
YLE's English section also covered it. Homelessness has risen in the past year.
wil421
Finland has a population similar to the US metro I live in. The rates were about the same a few years ago, 4,000 people, it would be interesting to apply similar methods here. The city and famous people bought real estate in a former open air drug market and housed people there with great results over a decade or so.
fastball
Even if the scale is the same, I'm not sure what works for a nation-state will work for a metro area, because a metro area has to deal with migratory homelessness as a result of any services or benefits provided, in a way that a nation with a strong border does not.
dredmorbius
Finland, part of the EU's Schengen zone, doesn't precisely have strong borders.
It does lack the climate which might appeal to border-crossers, however, unlike, say, Southern California which has a long-standing homeless situation.
hrududu
Finland doesn't have much in the way of open land borders, but it is part of Schengen.
darren0
"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."
There are no preconditions, but there are conditions to maintain. In this case, rent being required apparently. This is the recipe for success that I've seen. And if they don't maintain the conditions they get kicked out with the opportunity to come back and try again.
LuciOfStars
Sounds a lot better than building benches with handles that stick up your rear end.
jslezak
Effective US policy is that people must serve whatever corporation wants their labor or else they will be left to die without healthcare, shelter or food
Other countries do not have this policy
pogue
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nottorp
Well I clicked on your bitdefender link and they just list every possible harm a web site can do to you. Sounds to me like an "AI" hallucinating.
lolinder
Needs (2020). I find a recent report [0] that shows that the trend has continued, though interestingly only Helsinki has actually shown significant improvements:
> Of the large cities, Helsinki is the only one where homelessness has systematically decreased in the past five years. In other large cities, the pattern has been more irregular (Figures 4 and 5). The reduction in homelessness in Helsinki covers more than half of the reduction in homelessness in the whole country.
Also worth noting from that report is that it has data going back to 1986 in an appendix (page 25) and the downward trend in homelessness dates back at least that far. The homeless rate had already cut in more than half by 2008 when this program started.
mrbluecoat
Utah did the same thing two decades ago: https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni...
pmdulaney
Perhaps it is time for K-12 education to include modules on how to avoid homelessness in your future. Western democracies tend to be rather laissez-faire about drug use, for example, but surely there is a strong correlation between drug use and future homelessness. In California, where I live, the state spends large sums of money to discourage smoking, but little is done to discourage the use of recreational drugs.
hiAndrewQuinn
The American Enterprise Institute published a notecard-sized piece they call the "success sequence", which I think would fit your bill. [1]
1. Finish high school.
2. Get (and keep) a full-time job once you finish school.
3. Get married before you have children (if you have children).
Their analysis concluded that 97% of millennials in the US who follow this three step sequence are not poor by the time they reach 31 or so.
There isn't anything specific in that sequence about drugs, but I imagine the subgroups for whom drug use would be problematic would also find it hard to follow that sequence while using them.
[1]: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/IFS-Millennia...
dredmorbius
Many of the current homeless within, say, the U.S. would have come of age following "Just Say No", the War on (some) Drugs, and DARE programmes. Casual survey would say effectiveness was limited.
If you're looking for a policy angle, I'd suggest one more conducive to providing more housing and stable incomes.
cess11
Most people that use drugs do not suffer homelessness. They experience no social problems at all.
Even if there was a correlation, why do you assume there is a causation?
pmdulaney
Well, let A be the conditional probability that one becomes homeless given that he uses recreational drugs. Let B be the conditional probability that one becomes homeless if he doesn't use recreational drugs. If A does not turn out to be significantly larger than B, then my understanding is incorrect.
foobarian
Wonder how they force the homeless who don't want the shelter. Maybe it's just cold enough that it doesn't happen much.
stevekemp
Finnish mental health legislation takes a medical approach to compulsory measures, emphasizing 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.
That's one part of the solution; whether it works is left as an exercise to the reader ..
BigGreenJorts
> Finland has the highest rates of detention per 100 000 inhabitants, about 214 compared with 93 in the UK and 11 in Italy.
Wow, now that is something I have not heard at all despite how frequently I've heard about the Finland housing first approach to drug addiction/homelessness. Thank you for the reading topic!
EDIT: Where did you get these numbers and what kind of detention do they refer to? I am not finding this 214/100k number anywhere. The prisoner population in Finland seems to be about 50/100k and the pre-trial detention rate is similar (unlike where I live where pre-trial accounts for 80% of detainees due to slow courts)
EDIT 2: Nevermind, I did find psychiatric holds, which I see to be reported as 150/100k which is certainly much much higher than other countries.
pmdulaney
This is enlightening. Thank you.
Ekaros
No one can force them to live in the housing they are provided. Well police might drop them off there. But can't nail the door shut.
carlosjobim
They can and they do force them into mental institutions. In other countries the right of individual freedom is considered to be above the right of the government, so these people are homeless on the streets instead.
If you're concerned about abuses of this kind of arrangement, look for example to the Soviet Union, where a person who was against the government was of course mentally ill and put away – because how can you be against the wonderful government?
thesuitonym
> They can and they do force them into mental institutions.
Okay, but this thread is about homeless housing.
stavros
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say "they don't force them".
yieldcrv
you mean like in the US’ west coast cities? favelas aren’t normal or a baseline for societal cooperation
The UK also has the same policy. There are very very few people that are completely unhoused, instead they beg on the streets and then go back to a flat/shelter. The ones that are completely unhoused are either their by "choice" or are so chaotic they have ran out of options. In UK cities you will see a lot of people on the streets during the day but not at night.
However, the number of people begging on the streets is still rising sharply, so I don't think it is the silver bullet everyone thinks it is.
NB: some people are there by "choice" because some shelters are so chaotic it is better to be out on the streets. Some have lived outside for so long that they do not like living inside. I'm not saying that the situation couldn't be improved, but the core issue is addiction IMO to get rid of 'visible' "homelessness".
There is also a huge problem that so many people are living in "temporary" accommodation for years waiting for social housing.
The key point I'd say is the problem with homelessness is addiction treatment (and the lack of it). You can give these people houses but without treatment they will still be begging on the street. One alternative would be to prescribe heroin which I think could work, but crack/meth is different - very hard to keep people on any sort of maintenance dose of those drugs and most of the "chaotic people" are addicted to an opiate and a stimulant.
I've started doing volunteer work in this space for the past few years and it really has opened my eyes to the real problems with it. Housing is a prerequisite to the solution but it is not a solution itself, unfortunately. I didn't realise this before volunteering.