West Coast baby
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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No, there aren't statistics about these people. Just experiences and the experiences of others who work with them.
Many homeless people refuse to take up help like housing because they do not want to cooperate with helper organisations. And they also don't want to get interviewed: https://idw-online.de/de/news765112
We don't even really know how many there are because there are no reliable statistics. How would you count them anyway?
All housing first projects pre-select the people they give a home to. The reason is clear. They don't have homes for everyone, so they take those which will give the best results. In Berlin, Germany they literally have to write applications for the project: https://www.berlin.de/sen/soziales/besondere-lebenssituationen/wohnungslose/wohnen/housing-first-1293115.php
https://housingfirst.berlin/aufnahme
And they need to already be in the welfare system!
The same goes for Finland, which is the model country for a housing first approach. Putting people who already are in the welfare system in homes with help offers has the best results. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/periodicals/cityscpe/vol22num2/ch4.pdf
Best results means it works for about half of homeless people.
For the other half, they need a step-by-step approach to have them able living in a home again (or for the first time in a long time). You can't just put them in an apartment with an address for counseling and that will work out.
Source: you can read about that in the PDF above, for example. Or any other study about the homeless which usually mentions at least the many who fall through the cracks.
These are migrants without refugee status and people with severe drug and alcohol abuse issues or other mental illness. It won't work to "put them out of sight out of mind".
Homeless people aren't a homogeneous group of people. And while it works for some, housing first is not the solution. Because it leaves an estimated half of them behind. It also omits that there a still a lot of help going on in the background. It's not just give them a home and that magically solves all their problems. Far from it ...
Even if it has issues, housing first solves far more problems than any other solution. If you are so opposed to housing first initiatives, then propose an alternative solution that will work better.
I'm waiting.
You can't.
Why do you think I am against housing first? I never said that I am against that. I said it does not solve homelessness. You need additional systems in place to solve it.
I'm on mobile and can't read German, I'll have to wait until later to run those articles through a translator to see what they're getting at.
But I do wonder about you saying we can only halve homelessness instantly, and the next quarter needs some help, and the next 10% needs a lot of help and after that things get more diffocult: that means it doesn't work and isn't worth trying at all
Wouldn't halving homelessness be pretty damn successful?
Of course it is great but it won't solve homelessness. Which is what the image suggests. And obviously it doesn't.
What's your tolerance threshold for a solution? One source I quoted elsewhere said it would solve up to 75% of homelessness.
People are allergic or immune to penicillin, that doesn't mean that its not a solution to bacterial infections.
If someone said "Penicillin solves bacterial infections" I would also say this is not true. There are bacterial infections which can't be cured by penicillin and some people can't take it at all.
Understood. How should one phrase a vast majority success with a tolerance of a minority of failures in casual conversations?
I am not sure a vast majority success is correct if people interpret the concept literally (like in the meme).
Finland is the country with the best results, afaik.
These are the numbers of those homeless who are accounted for and got help (so missing those who are not in welfare for example and therefore the numbers are estimates): https://www.ara.fi/en-US/Materials/Homelessness_reports/Homelessness_in_Finland_2022(65349)#:~:text=At%20the%20end%20of%202022,a%20decrease%20of%20185%20people.
They started the housing first approach in 2007. There is a steady decline in homelessness, so I would say it's an important part of the new solution.
But if you look at the organisations which allocate the housing you see they also hired hundreds of extra personal, invested heavily in the help networks, anti-drug abuse and other programs.
Many of the housing complexes have staff on site or they visit the scattered apartments.
And Finland invested additionally into prevention methods to counter people getting homeless in the first place. They changed laws and built teams and places to help people not get homeless.
What do you call it than? It just seems wrong in the way it was put in the meme.