Let’s start with the numbers, because it’s the part that sounds made up.
Finland’s latest national survey counted 4,579 homeless people living alone and 99 homeless families in 2025. Against a population of 5.65 million, the single-person figure alone is about 0.08 per cent.
The United States counted 771,480 people on a single night in January 2024, or 0.23 per cent. On those headline figures Finland’s rate is roughly a third of the American one, although the countries use different definitions and survey methods.
What I find interesting isn’t simply that a Nordic country spends money on welfare. It’s that Finland treated homelessness as a problem with a solution, not a permanent feature of city life.
The method has a name: Housing First, or flat first.
What “flat first” actually reverses
The older staircase model asked people to prove they were ready for permanent housing by moving through shelters and treatment: get sober, become stable, and eventually earn a place of your own. Housing sat at the top of the ladder.
Housing First flips that. A permanent flat and normal tenancy come first, without sobriety or treatment preconditions; tailored support is offered alongside it. Juha Kaakinen, who helped design Finland’s national programme and later ran the Y-Foundation, put it plainly in a 2020 CBC interview: “You give a homeless person a home, a flat, or a rental flat with a contract, without preconditions.”
The logic is practical. It is very hard to beat an addiction, stick with treatment, or find work when you have nowhere secure to sleep. Housing First gives people the stable position first and lets the rest follow.
Who built it, and how
The idea came out of a 2007 report called “Name on the Door” (Nimi ovessa), written by a working group appointed by then housing minister Jan Vapaavuori. Finland made Housing First national policy in 2008.
Then came the unglamorous work. Large shelters and hostels were converted into permanent rental homes with support attached, while the state, cities and non-profits built, bought and renovated more housing. Government spending on the programme reached more than €270 million between 2008 and 2019. Giving people flats only works if the flats exist.
The long-run change was dramatic. By 2022, long-term homelessness had fallen 68 per cent from its 2008 level. The figures are estimates assembled from municipalities rather than a literal census, but the direction is hard to miss.
The cost argument, and how far to trust it
The moral case is simple. The financial case needs more care.
A Finnish evaluation found that housing and supporting formerly homeless people produced savings of about €15,000 per person a year through lower use of emergency healthcare, shelters and other crisis services. That is evidence from a particular programme, not a universal promise that every Housing First scheme pays for itself.
Kaakinen has also stressed the importance of political consensus. That is difficult to measure, but it matters: a housing programme that must survive several governments needs parties willing to keep funding it after the headlines fade.
The recent wobble
Here is the complication. The decline has stopped. After more than a decade of falling numbers, homelessness among people living alone rose by 377 in 2024 and then by another 773 in 2025, reaching 4,579.
Municipalities cited changes to social security, rising living and housing costs, unemployment, rent arrears, and increasing substance-use and mental-health problems. Teija Ojankoski of the Y-Foundation called for the same determination that built the original programme: “We now need similar determination.”
My read is that the reversal undermines the “problem solved forever” story without disproving the method. A model that drove homelessness down for decades is not discredited because a housing squeeze and benefit cuts pushed the number back up. It is a reminder that Housing First is not a one-time fix. Housing supply, prevention and support have to keep pace, or the gains leak away.
Does the model travel?
The flat-first logic is probably portable; the machinery behind it is harder to export.
What made Finland’s version work at national scale was the less glamorous part: affordable homes, sustained public spending, converted shelters, coordinated services and political support across election cycles.
Finland didn’t discover magic. It decided the street was not an acceptable place for a person to live, backed that judgment with flats and money long enough to move the number, and is now finding out that the number moves back when the backing slips. The idea is cheap to admire. The commitment is what costs.