The Address Comes First

Isometric voxel-art diorama of a snowy block-built harbor town at dusk, small houses with warm lit windows, one house open like a dollhouse showing a bed and a lamp, a cargo ship at the pier and green aurora over a lilac sky
Isometric voxel-art diorama of a snowy block-built harbor town at dusk, small houses with warm lit windows, one house open like a dollhouse showing a bed and a lamp, a cargo ship at the pier and green aurora over a lilac sky
Original illustration for WeSee Journal, made for this post.

Earn it first. For a long time, that was the rule for a person with no home.

Show you can keep appointments. Stay sober. Complete the program. Move up a step, and then, if all goes well, to the next one. At the top of the stairs, the reward was a place of your own. Finland’s Y-Foundation calls this the staircase model, and its description of the problem is blunt: moving from one step to the next often fails, so people get stuck in temporary arrangements.

I keep thinking about that rule, because it looks so sensible from the outside. Of course a person should get ready before they get keys. And yet a staircase assumes you have the strength to climb it while you are also trying to find a place to sleep tonight.

Flipping the order in New York

In New York, a program called Pathways to Housing tried the opposite. Its apartments came first, offered without treatment or sobriety conditions, with a support team alongside. As the program is described in the research literature, a resident could accept the housing and refuse clinical services altogether without any consequence for the housing.

A 2004 paper by Sam Tsemberis, Leyla Gulcur and Maria Nakae reported what happened when it was put to a test. The authors worked at Pathways itself, which is worth knowing. Two hundred twenty-five people were randomly assigned either to housing contingent on treatment and sobriety, or to immediate housing with no prerequisites. They were interviewed every six months for two years. The immediate-housing group got housing earlier, stayed housed, and reported higher perceived choice. The group on the staircase used more substance-abuse treatment services. And on substance use and psychiatric symptoms, the two groups did not differ.

I want to be careful with that last line. It does not say an apartment heals anyone. It says that giving the apartment first did not make things worse on those measures, which is what the old rule had assumed it would.

Finland, on purpose

Finland took the idea and made it a national habit. According to the Y-Foundation, which was set up in 1985, the 1990s brought a major reform of mental health services, with care moved out of institutions and into everyday surroundings. Since 2008 homelessness policy has been built on Housing First, and the foundation credits a report called “Name on the Door” with recognizing long-term homelessness as a structural problem rather than an individual failure. Its own summary of the idea is one of the best sentences I have read this month: “Housing is not a reward but a foundation.”

The numbers moved. A Centre for Public Impact review reports long-term homelessness falling from about 3,600 people in 2008 to about 2,400 in 2015, with 1,519 housing units delivered against a target of 1,250. Finland’s housing agency, in its 2024 report, put the drop in long-term homelessness at about 70 percent from 2008 to 2024, with 1,010 people counted that autumn. The Y-Foundation says Finland has long been the only EU member state where homelessness was consistently reduced over several years.

Notice what the program needed in order to work, though. The Y-Foundation points to roughly 400,000 state-subsidized rental apartments, housing counselling to catch problems early, and a social security system underneath it all. Housing First is not only a philosophy. It is also a building program.

What the evidence will and won’t say

This is where the story gets more honest, and more interesting.

In 2019, Andrew Baxter and colleagues pooled the randomized trials of Housing First. They found four, all rated at high risk of bias. People in the programs spent far more days housed and were about two and a half times as likely to be housed at 18 to 24 months. They also had fewer emergency department visits and fewer hospital admissions. But on mental health, quality of life and substance use, the review found no clear difference, and it said the effects on long-term health still needed investigation.

The big Canadian trial tells a similar story. In At Home/Chez Soi, 950 people with serious mental illness were randomly assigned in five cities. Over two years, those in Housing First spent about 71 percent of their time stably housed, against about 29 percent for the comparison group, and those who did get housed reached it in 73 days, against 220. They also reported higher quality of life. But the authors noted that the early gains in quality of life and community functioning had faded to smaller differences by the end of the second year. And in a longer follow-up at the Toronto site, the housing advantage narrowed. By year six, people with high support needs in Housing First were stably housed on about 86 percent of days, against about 60 percent for the comparison group; for people with moderate needs, it was about 88 against 78. Still ahead, but not by as much as in year one.

So the fair summary is narrower than the slogans on either side. Housing First is very good at the thing it sets out to do, which is housing people. Whether it also changes the rest of a life is a harder question, and the studies so far leave it open.

When the system leans back

Finland has its own reminder. The housing agency’s 2025 survey counted 4,579 people living alone without a home, 773 more than the year before, and the second yearly rise after more than ten years of decline. Long-term homelessness rose 29 percent, to 1,306. Municipalities pointed to changes in social security, rising living costs, rents that outran the housing allowance, and higher unemployment.

Two cautions belong here. Most of those counted, 64 percent, were staying temporarily with friends or relatives, which reflects how broadly Finland defines homelessness and makes tidy comparisons with other countries risky. And the agency itself says long-term figures should be taken “with a grain of salt.” Even so, the Y-Foundation draws the plain conclusion: the progress “is not permanent.”

I find that more reassuring than a clean victory would have been. A foundation needs maintenance, like anything else that holds weight.

An address as a starting line

Here is my own reading, and I offer it as a reading, not a finding. Much of what I have been circling this month is the difference between a life with too little and a life with no room to plan. An address is a small, solid piece of that room. It is where mail arrives, where a job application can be answered, where tomorrow has somewhere to be.

Minecraft’s own guide for new players says that when you first appear in the world, “it’s a race against time to gather resources before night falls and the hostile mobs come looking for you.” The help pages tell you to find or build shelter before the sun goes down. And in that same game, the blocks for a roof are free: another Minecraft article says the game “has an infinite source” of dirt and cobblestone, so there is no need to worry about finding materials.

Real roofs need land, lumber, labor and years. That difference is exactly the point of Finland’s building program. Where the materials are scarce, we have to decide who waits for them.

A ship does not treat a bunk as a prize for good conduct. The bunk is part of what makes the job possible. I wonder how many of the things we hold out as rewards are really equipment.

None of this is medical or clinical advice. I am reading what researchers and housing agencies have reported, and where they disagree I have tried to say so.

In your town, who decides when a person has proven enough to be given a home, and what would change if nobody had to?

Sources

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