Given a place to live, Finland’s homeless were better able to deal with problems
I lived in Finland for a while. Being homeless in that country is pretty hard core in the winter. Which is a reason that sheltering people there is not a nice to have; you either shelter them or you collect their dead bodies in the morning. It's that simple. Places like Helsinki never had a large community of homeless people to begin with (natural selection). But it has plenty of social issues of course. Alcoholism is a big problem for example and there probably are lots of issues with drug usage and mental health as well. However, it's not a country with a lot of illegal immigration, or a lot refugees with ambiguous legal status. I.e. the vast majority of problematic people are all citizens that have full coverage under the excellent social system. So, they are insured and probably are entitled to some form of income.And the locals are very pragmatic about it not being desirable to have drunk homeless people passing out and freezing to death in the winter. So, they never had a huge problem with homeless people to begin with and what little homeless people they had were take care off via shelters and other solutions already.The "innovation" in Finland was realizing that simply providing proper housing to these people is a pragmatic alternative that actually improves their situation while lowering overall cost at the same time. Shelters cost money and they have to be staffed and when they fill up you need to spend money on emergency shelters, which costs more money. And shelters perpetuate the problem. So, providing housing lowers cost and you get a meaningful percentage of people to a level where they stop being a problem. Which frees up more resources to deal with the remaining people more effectively. And it's nice to see people get out of such a situation. Win win.That's definitely something other countries can learn from.