Over the past decade working in the homelessness field, I’ve come to believe that intention, applied consistently, produces results. What I saw in Finland was that same conviction operating at the scale of a national government — and producing the kind of outcomes American cities keep promising and failing to deliver.
I traveled to Helsinki with Sam Dodge, a longtime figure in San Francisco's homelessness and public works agencies, to meet with the Y-Foundation — Finland's primary nongovernmental organization responsible for housing unhoused individuals — and representatives of RETS, the country’s foremost re-entry program for those leaving incarceration.
My working theory, shaped by years of reading Nordic social-service research, was that Finland’s success had to be a function of its homogeneity. It is easier, I reasoned, to extend compassion to people who look like you. Easier to see the pregnant teen, the alcoholic, the chronically unemployed as akin to family rather than as a stranger to be managed. Without the racial and cultural divisions that shape American policy debates, I assumed, Finland could design humane systems because it had no reason not to.
What I actually found went far beyond that. Despite the poster at the airport proclaiming Finland the world's happiest country nine years running, the Finnish people I met were not basking in self-satisfaction. They were serious, quiet, direct and humble — a society shaped by a history of war with its neighbors and the poverty that followed.
Finnish society is not wealthy in the American sense. But their public transit was immaculate. Their public libraries were architecturally stunning and full of people. Their tap water was pristine. And their homelessness numbers have fallen by 77 percent over the past 30 years — from roughly 20,000 unhoused individuals to less than 4,600.
That reduction is more remarkable still because Finland uses a more expansive definition of homelessness than American cities do: It includes families doubled up and people couch-surfing.
How Finland Does It
Finland, like several U.S. cities, has adopted a “housing first” policy. But the Finnish version goes well beyond what Americans have been conditioned to understand by that term. According to the Y-Foundation, it rests on six interconnected pillars:
• Permanent housing options — not transitional beds — including supported units for people with specific needs.
• Affordable housing at scale — roughly 400,000 state-subsidized rental apartments, allocated based on housing need.
• Tailored support services built around the individual, not the program.
• Prevention and early intervention — identifying people at risk of homelessness before they lose housing.
• Work activities that meet people where they are, matched to their capacities.
• Standard rental agreements and access to the same universal social and health services every Finn uses.
The policy works because Finland invests in it. The country builds several thousand housing units every year to keep pace with demand. That consistency is the variable Americans refuse to reckon with. In U.S. cities, new shelters and affordable units open, yet the ranks of people sleeping on the street continue to grow — replaced almost as quickly as they are housed, driven by widening income inequality, a shrinking social safety net, untreated mental illness and addiction.
We have accepted, as a nation and as municipalities, the mass delusion that random and isolated housing projects will put a dent in the problem. They will not. Without a sustained national commitment to building housing and maintaining a functional safety net, every project is a bucket in a flood.
The majority of Finland’s success lies somewhere Americans rarely want to look: in consistent public investment and in cultural seriousness about the obligation to care for people. It was explained to me that Finland’s No. 1 happiness ranking has little to do with exuberant joy but reflects a sense of emotional fulfillment — a population whose basic needs are met, who trust the systems around them, who do not fear slipping through their country’s social safety net.
What America Keeps Getting Wrong
Over eight years leading a homelessness services organization, I have watched at least three electoral cycles of mayors and city councils. Each arrives determined to make a personal mark, and each distances themselves from the projects and partners associated with the previous administration. Programs that work get defunded because they carry the wrong political fingerprints. Programs that don’t work get funded because they carry the right ones. There is no holistic examination of what works and what doesn’t. No serious effort to build a seamless safety net across jurisdictions.
It is time to stop treating homelessness as a political issue. It is too big, too painful and too expensive for that. It is a public health crisis, and it should be handled like one — with a standing body of experts in policy, finance, program design and implementation convened to build a comprehensive, evidence-based system that outlasts any single administration.
Homelessness is solvable. Finland is proof. The question is not whether we can fix it. The question is whether we are willing to be as serious about our people as the Finns are about theirs. Until we are, the encampments on American sidewalks will remain what they already are: a visible, daily measure of how little this society values its own.
Lena Miller is the CEO and co-founder of Urban Alchemy, a nonprofit providing trauma-informed social services to provide clean, housed and safe communities while building career pathways for the formerly incarcerated and homeless.
Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.
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