Finland shows that homelessness is NOT inevitable

When I was young, Melbourne did have some rough sleepers, but they were few. Now, homeless people seem to be everywhere.

Is this an inevitable part of living in a big city?

No. It’s only inevitable if the responsibility for housing rests solely with ‘the market’. Why? Because ‘the market’ is only interested in profit, and there is no profit to be made from homeless people.

Homelessness is one of the inevitable results of neo-liberalism, the profit-driven, economic and political system that has been driving Western civilization since the ’80’s.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. The video below shows how Finland has taken the ‘inevitable’ out of homelessness:

The first step was to realise that you need a home before you can improve your life. It seems so obvious: how can a person sleeping rough apply for a job when they:

can’t have a shower?can’t brush their teeth?can’t wash their clothes?can’t feed themselves?

How can they do anything positive when they have no hope?

If rough sleeping is rock bottom, then having a home is the way to stop falling.

But the ‘market’ doesn’t give a shit about people so it will never give people a home just because they need one. Neo-liberals would say that that is the job of government. But welfare has become a dirty word because we’ve been conditioned [by ‘the market’] into believing that those who need welfare deserve to be poor and hopeless.

There are now an awful lot of women aged 60 and up who have become homeless through no fault of their own. Many of them are from a generation that stayed at home to look after the kids. They have no super, some have no profitable job skills, and after the divorce, they have no homes either.

No, that’s not me. I may not have super, but I’ve always had a roof over my head and some pretty good IT skills. But caring duties kept me out of paid employment, so at 60 I found myself on welfare. I earned every penny of that welfare by being a volunteer teacher for five years, but as far as the market was concerned, I had no value.

How many women out there are in a similar boat? Left behind by the changing times, of no marketable value to anyone?

I personally know of a woman who ended up living in a boarding house because she had nowhere else to go. And she is still better off than those women forced to live on the streets.

So, the question is: whose fault is it?

When I was young, there were heaps of council flats, built and run by the government to provide affordable housing to those who needed it. Now, affordable housing is almost impossible to get because no one is building that kind of housing.

When ‘the market’ is left to its own devices, it prioritises profit over all else, most especially people. The ‘market’ cannot fix this problem because it is part of the reason the problem exists in the first place.

To fix the problem of homelessness, we have to start by acknowledging that in a modern, affluent society, a home is a necessity, not a nice-to-have. And if ‘the market’ won’t supply that necessity, then government must. Because no one deserves to die of neglect.

This may be my last rant for 2023, but I’ll keep calling out injustice wherever I see it.

Happy New Year,
Meeks