TheEconomistDecember 21st 2019 771T
uya’s collectionof bongs occupies an
entire bookshelf in her immaculate lit-
tle flat, though she does not smoke mari-
juana—she just likes the way they look. Her
weaknesses, alcohol and pills, landed her
in a homeless shelter in Helsinki for three
years. But since 2018 she has had an apart-
ment of her own, thanks to a strategy called
“housing first” with which Finland has all
but eliminated homelessness.
Akbar has no such luck. Last month the
Afghan migrant stood in the mud of a camp
outside Paris, brushing his teeth at a hose
that served as a communal shower. For two
months Akbar had been living in a tent city
of 3,500 Asian and African migrants, hop-
ing to apply for refugee status.
Tuya and Akbar are at opposite ends of
Europe’s growing homelessness problem.
Finland is the only European country
where the numbers are not rising. In other
rich welfare states, escalating housing
costs are pushing more people into home-
less shelters. In countries with weak social
services, many end up on the street. And
everywhere, migrants with the wrong pa-
pers fall through the cracks.
Statistics on homelessness are patchy,
but dispiriting. In 2010-18 the French gov-
ernment doubled the spaces in emergency
accommodation to 146,000, yet cannot
meet demand. In Spain the number in shel-
ters rose by 20.5% between 2014 and 2016.
In the Netherlands homelessness has dou-
bled in the past decade. In Ireland, the
number in shelters has tripled. The Ger-
man government estimates homelessness
rose by 4% in 2018 to a record 678,000,
most of them migrants. All this has thrown
a spanner into governments’ plans. For
years, they have been trying to shift fromproviding beds for the night to housing-
first strategies like Finland’s. Instead they
are struggling to keep people off the streets.
The housing-first approach got its start
in North America in the 1990s. Previously
social-service agencies used a “staircase”
model: to qualify for a subsidised flat,
homeless people first had to control their
behavioural problems (such as addiction,
petty crime or mental illness). In the mean-
time they had to sleep in shelters.
But being homeless makes it hard to
quit drugs or crime. Shelters are often dan-
gerous, because they are full of desperate
people. Some homeless folk prefer to sleep
rough, though that is risky. Street sleepers
are often robbed and often get ill. When
American and Canadian cities tried first
giving homeless people a place to live and
then working on behavioural problems,
the approach saved more money on police,
jails, shelters and health care than it cost.
In 2008 Finland became the first Euro-
pean country to embrace housing first. The
number of long-term homeless has since
fallen by 21% to about 5,500. (This includes
those in shelters; the number sleeping
rough in Finland is negligible, as they
would die of cold.) Chronically homeless
people were shifted from hostels to flats
with contracts under their own names.
They pay rent with the help of government
benefits. The government saves €15,000
($16,500) per year in overall spending on
each homeless person it houses. HostelsHousing first
Oh give me a home
HELSINKI AND PARIS
Finland has slashed homelessness, but elsewhere in Europe it is rising
Europe
78 AppleandRussia
79 Christianpersecution
79 Turkeysubsidisesorganictea
80 Charlemagne: The spirit of NoëlAlso in this section