78 Europe The EconomistDecember 21st 2019
2 can be counterproductive, says Juha Kaaki-
nen of y-Foundation, the country’s biggest
social-housing group: they “create a kind
of culture of homelessness”.
The complex where Tuya lives, run by
the Salvation Army, is classified as “sup-
ported housing”. There are 20 staff for the
87 residents. Each flat has a kitchen, and
there is a jolly communal café. Social work-
ers keep track of each resident’s problems
and run work activities. Every year a few
graduate to less dependent housing, but
expectations are modest, says Antti Marti-
kainen, the complex’s director. Persuading
a troublesome resident to stop dropping
rubbish out of the window is a win.
All this takes resources. Finland has
hired hundreds of new social workers. In
2017 it built more subsidised public hous-
ing for low-income renters (over 7,000 un-
its) than England, with a population one-
tenth the size. Still, in a small, wealthy
country to which few poor people move, it
appears that homelessness is solvable.
Can big countries do the same? In
France, the national emergency shelter
hotline (number 115) gets 20,000 calls per
day. Paris’s annual “solidarity night”, when
volunteers systematically scour the city to
count everyone sleeping rough, found
3,622 people in February this year.
The poor face rising rents and precari-
ous employment, says Bruno Morel of Em-
maüs Solidarité, a housing organisation.
Each year from November 1st to March 31st
France bars landlords from evicting ten-
ants, and this year the Paris region created
an extra 7,000 temporary winter shelter
places. But Mr Morel says it needs 10,000.
Another problem is the split between
native homeless, for whom municipalities
are responsible, and migrants, who fall un-
der the national government. Dominique
Versini, Paris’s deputy mayor for solidarity,
blames the state for the migrant camps:
when the city tried to set up a reception
centre to house them, she says, the govern-
ment blocked it. (In November it closed the
camps and moved the migrants to tempo-
rary shelters farther out.)
Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor, con-
verted the reception hall of Paris’s Hôtel de
Ville into a shelter for 39 homeless women.
Visiting dignitaries brush shoulders with
women recovering from addiction and
abuse. Ms Hidalgo has also strengthened
Paris’s rent controls. The move keeps cur-
rent homes cheaper but may discourage
private firms from building new ones. The
city is building 7500 new social-housing
units a year, but Mr Morel says too few are
for the very poor.
Germany is more proactive at sheltering
migrants than France. But its public hous-
ing stock has shrunk dramatically: houses
built with government aid can be freely
sold or rented out after 30 years. Berlin,
which had 360,000 social-housing units inthe1990s,nowhasjust100,000.Rentshave
doubledinthepastdecade.AsinParis,the
citygovernmenthascappedrentincreases.
Europe’shomelessnessproblemcom-
binestwoissues.Public-housingconstruc-
tionhasslowed,andrentsarerisingfast,
becauseredtapemakesitsohardtobuild
inmanycities.Meanwhile,illegalimmi-
gration creates a homeless population
manycountries are unwilling to house.
Thatissabotagingtheshifttohousingfirst.
France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands
andothershaveallcommittedtothepoli-
cy.Buttheirprogrammesremaina patch-
workoflocalinitiativesandpilots.“Why
pilotit whenyouknowthatit works?”asks
Mr Martikainen, the director of Tuya’s
buildinginHelsinki.InmostofEurope,
thingsarenotsosimple. 7W
ho willwin the tussle between Ap-
ple, the world’s biggest company, and
Vladimir Putin, an autocrat with nuclear
weapons? On December 2nd Russia’s presi-
dent signed a controversial law that will
prohibit the sale within Russia of devices
that do not come pre-loaded with locally
produced applications. The legislation,
which will come into force next July, has
been dubbed the “law against Apple”, as it
disproportionately affects the tech giant,
known for its insistence on keeping tight
control of the apps it allows on its devices.
The law’s sponsors have described it as a
way to protect Russian internet compa-nies, as well as to help elderly citizens who
may find smartphones difficult to use,
though it is not yet known which Russia-
made apps will have to be installed. Local
digital-rights activists like Artem Kozlyuk
are worried, saying that these apps could
“secretly collect information: location,
tools and services being used and so on”.
The apps can be deleted, but only if users
know to do that—and there are suspicions
that they might leave behind backdoors
into users’ phones after they are gone.
The legislation follows another recent
law promoting a “sovereign internet”; from
November 1st the government has awarded
itself the power to sever the Russian inter-
net (known as the “RuNet”) from the rest of
the globe. This is worrying for many local
internet activists and experts, even though
there are doubts that current network in-
frastructure could support it. Even before
that, in the name of data protection, web-
sites that refuse to build data servers on
Russian territory, including LinkedIn, have
been blocked. And this week the Russian
authorities alarmed techies by raiding the
Moscow offices of Nginx, an American-
owned web-server company in dispute
with a Russian one. The Apple showdown
may be intended as a lesson to other giants,
particularly Google (which owns YouTube)
and Facebook; these companies present
grave challenges to the Kremlin’s monopo-
ly on information.
Apple officials may think the Russian
market too small to be worth the policy
change, but the company has recently
proved willing to make another controver-
sial concession. Starting in late November,
Apple’s maps and weather apps, when used
inside Russia, have denoted the Crimean
peninsula, Ukrainian territory illegally an-
nexed by Russia in 2014, as Russian. Even
when used outside Russia, the weather app
shows Crimean cities without (unusually)
stating which country they are in, while
Apple maps introduces a mysterious dot-
ted line dividing the peninsula from the
rest of Ukraine.
Apple may have offered this olive
branch in the hope of smoothing relations
with Moscow, but its actions have contrib-
uted to a growing sense of insecurity in Uk-
raine, where the foreign minister, Vadym
Prystaiko, has accused Apple of “not giving
a damn” about his country. A spokeswom-
an for Apple says that it is “taking a deeper
look at how we handle disputed borders”.
But a group of European parliamentarians
has lodged a formal complaint and damage
has already been done to the company’s
reputation.
Unlike Facebook and Google, Apple had
mostly avoided political scandal until now.
It has six months to decide whether or not
to quit the Russian market. The world, and
Ukraine, will be watching to see if it caves
in to the Kremlin’s demands. 7The Kremlin makes big demands
of a tech giantRussia and techA bite at the Apple