For the past three weeks, Pflugerville, Texas, resident Lee Rocha has endured a fear grown eerily familiar to residents of the Texas Hill Country – a three-week bombing spree that seemed, he says, “to be happening everywhere, to everybody,” making “you afraid to go anywhere.”

After weeks of hypervigilance, Mr. Rocha and others breathed easier Wednesday as authorities closed in on a suspected bombmaker, who blew himself up rather than be captured.

But the relief was only partial. For one, the bomber, whom police identified as Mark Anthony Conditt, lived just a block from Rocha’s house. “I’ve seen him so many times,” says Rocha, who has been a resident of Pflugerville for 28 years.

Confounded at first by the quickly growing string of sophisticated bomb work, police officials say an “army” of investigators ranging from the FBI to local police worked at a frantic pace to gather forensic evidence, build profiles, scour surveillance video, and engage and inform the public – all of which appears to have earned them key breaks that enabled them to triangulate the suspect on Tuesday to a motel parking lot in Round Rock.

“There’s got to be an absolute sense of relief as well as gratitude for this army of law enforcement officials, [for what they] have done,” Austin Mayor Steve Adler told “Fox & Friends.”

So far, Conditt’s motives are not known, though investigators say they have found a “treasure trove” of materials related to the spree.

But even as it became clear that a bombmaker had exploited modern fondness for online shopping to invoke terror, US law enforcement, too, used emerging social dynamics, including Americans’ growing comfort with surveillance cameras, to protect the public.

“This case shows the depths to which law enforcement has to go to meet the challenges of the time,” says former FBI assistant director Joe Lewis, in a phone interview from his North Carolina home. “That they identified the individual as quickly as they did and maintained a low loss of life, that is truly good police work. It shows everybody bringing their best to the table, realizing the potential of extreme harm.”

While the ordeal seemed to unravel in slow motion, authorities closed the case in the same time frame as the D.C. sniper was caught in 2002. The Unabomber case went on for well over a decade until Ted Kaczynski’s brother alerted the FBI. Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph evaded the FBI for five years before a rookie cop arrested him behind a grocery store dumpster in a North Carolina mountain town.

The first bombs in Austin went off in early March, killing two black men, leading to early concerns that the attacks were of a racial nature, in the vein of Jim Crow-era terror bombings. But then a different bomb equipped with a trip wire – this one in a different part of town – blew up, injuring two white men.

Early clues, experts say, would only have raised the alarm for the investigative team. For one, the use of FedEx played on changing dynamics where 8 out of 10 Americans now shop online, compared with 2 out of 10 in 2000. And the bomber seemed to be growing more confident. 

The bomber, much like the Las Vegas mass killer, had little social media presence. Clues came slow. But behind the scenes, the investigation likely bordered on frantic, former FBI agents say.

“The first thing the FBI and local police were looking at was the motive: Was this an against-the-establishment type, was he targeting institutions that he disliked?” says former FBI agent Chris Quick, who worked on the apprehension of white supremacist Dylann Roof, who killed parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015. “Number 2, every bombmaker has a … fingerprint – there is a DNA of the bomb. The DNA of the bomb gives you investigative leads.”

As police worked the case, they struggled to contain panic while being candid about the threat.

A Pflugerville resident named Debbie said she left a package on her porch for four hours before picking it up, but hadn’t wanted to call the police.

Debbie, who declined to give her last name, was shocked to learn the bomber lived in her neighborhood. “I am in disbelief,” she said Wednesday after Conditt’s death. “He lived with his mom, in the garage.”

As the bombings kept coming, law enforcement buckled down, says Mr. Lewis, in hopes of a break.

“You’re looking at personality, you’re looking at race, you’re looking at everything under the sun to come up with a potential number of people that are suspects,” he says. “But you ultimately won’t know that until you get that one break, like here with the batteries.”

Authorities were able to recover the battery from one of the bombs, which first narrowed their search: It was one of only a few that had come into the country from overseas. And on Monday, a FedEx employee was treated for ringing ears after a box blew up on the line. Mr. Quick says the contained area may have been instrumental, since it guaranteed that all parts could be gathered.

The discovery of a second, unexploded package led to the identification of Conditt – and security video of the bomber, in a blond wig, dropping off packages for delivery.

That footage, combined with cell phone records, proved instrumental in this investigation. This kind of digital forensics has become an increasingly valuable tool for law enforcement in recent years as investigators have become more familiar with tracking technology and the sheer availability of data has increased, says Don Vilfer, the former head of the White Collar Crime and Computer Crime Unit of the FBI in Sacramento, Calif.

Law enforcement has leveraged cell phone data to track individuals for more than 20 years. But in decades past, the process was somewhat cumbersome, involving an initial triangulation from cell phone towers followed by further localization with specialized equipment. Today, 95 percent of Americans carry a cell phone capable of transmitting its precise location within a matter of feet. And that’s just one trail of digital data that people leave behind.

“We leave digital trails as we travel throughout the day with so much that we do,” says Mr. Vilfer, who frequently testifies as an expert witness on digital forensics. “In the county that I live in they let you volunteer to add your address to a database of available cameras and, in the event there is crime in the area, they can come.”

The number of surveillance cameras in the US doubled from 33 million in 2012 to nearly 62 million by the end of 2016. Privacy concerns have not gone away, but have been muted as digital footage has proven invaluable in solving terrorist attacks on civilians.

“After the Boston bombing [in 2013], communities and government agencies, cities, [overcame privacy concerns] and realized that it is OK to have more surveillance cameras around town so they can readily track people,” says Vilfer.

All of this digital data represents a trove of vital information for law enforcement. But actually finding the relevant tidbits of information in a seemingly endless stream of data presents officers with a new challenge. Computers can assist with the process to a certain extent, but it takes careful and painstaking work on the part of investigators to find useful leads.

In Pflugerville, Ron Simon says the ordeal has been “surreal.” But, he says, he was “pretty impressed" with the investigation. “It seems they were on his trail the last 24 hours. So I take my hat off to them.”

Science and technology editor Noelle Swan contributed to this report from Boston.

In 2014, when Thom Tillis was a North Carolina legislator seeking election to the US Senate, some of his campaign ads were customized using what was then an unconventional technique.

Drawing on information volunteered by Facebook users who took online psychological quizzes, campaign consultants formed personality profiles of individual voters, and designed ads accordingly.

For people who scored high on being “agreeable,” an ad featured Mr. Tillis himself, smiling, with the message “restore common sense in Washington.” For personalities deemed “conscientious,” ads sent online and by mail featured people at a job site, including one in a hard hat, and said the Republican candidate had “the experience to get the economy working.” A third showed what appeared to be a soldier’s camouflage-smeared face, and said of Tillis: “Your safety is his top priority.”

That last one was aimed at those who score high on “neuroticism,” or negative emotions.

Tillis’s successful effort to sway voters, reported by the MIT Technology Review in April 2016, helped set the stage for more ambitious work by the data-crunching firm in the 2016 presidential race.

Now that firm, Cambridge Analytica, is the focus of controversy for its role in the 2016 Trump campaign, notably the way it relied on unauthorized access to personal Facebook data on some 50 million Americans. Cambridge Analytica has suspended its CEO, while Facebook, which has cut ties with the firm,  now faces heightened scrutiny.

But beyond the legal questions surrounding the Facebook data is a deeper story: These efforts to mobilize some voters and dissuade others offer a glimpse of how the marketing of political candidates is growing ever more psychologically targeted. And where Cambridge Analytica’s CEO has touted the change as an inevitable computer-driven enhancement of communication, some experts say it carries risks for the health of democracy.

“We've never had a system of mass micro persuasion” until fairly recently, let alone deployed it to influence the political process, says Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington. “Politics and life of our democracy is not the same as selling soap and fast foods.” Companies like Facebook, he says, “have clearly lost their moral compass in pursuit of astronomical revenues.”

It’s a debate that appears sure to grow, fueled in part by political parties’ long history of attempting to use data on individual voters to sway elections.

What’s new is the rising sophistication of the efforts – as the volume of data on individuals soars alongside the ability of software to sift and make use of that data. That doesn’t mean these data-crunching techniques were necessarily pivotal in either the Tillis race or the 2016 presidential election.

Calls for transparency 

But to some analysts, including Mr. Chester, the increasing use of personalized data is troubling as it grows more advanced in seeking to influence voters – and does so in ways that voters may not understand. He suggests that America needs a federal law to protect online privacy, in effect seeking to level a playing field that’s now stacked toward corporate data-gathering. (Europe has such a law, which will go into effect in May.) And he suggests that companies need to do more to be transparent about their data handling and ramp up their own policies regarding its ethical use.

In a December report, co-written with Kathryn Montgomery of American University, Chester writes that some of the techniques “raise serious concerns – over privacy, discrimination, manipulation, and lack of transparency.”

In the case of Cambridge Analytica, the firm has claimed that its trove of data – such as Facebook users’ “likes” on particular websites or online posts – allows it to help campaigns target messages to individual voters.

The firm got hold of the Facebook data in a roundabout way, acquiring it from an academic researcher who, in turn, had gotten access to the data alongside responses to a personality-modeling questionnaire. In effect, when 270,000 people took the test, the process also opened up access to data on their millions of Facebook friends.

Facebook learned in 2015 of the unauthorized access by Cambridge Analytica, a spinoff of Strategic Communication Laboratories, or SCL. Facebook asked that the firm promise to delete the data, but it did not ensure that this occurred. Nor did Facebook notify the public of the breach of its policies. Although Facebook took some steps in 2014 to restrict access to its data via software apps, its business model continues to rely on revenue from firms (and others like political campaigns) that target ads using consumer data.

The exception or the rule?

In short, although Cambridge Analytica is catching fire for how it got Facebook data, many other firms get the same or similar data in ways that are perfectly legal.

Consider LiveRamp, a subsidiary of the data broker Acxiom, which promises clients: “Tie all of your marketing data back to real people, resolving identity across first-, second-, or third-party digital and offline data silos.”

In the marketing industry, many say this is simply the new normal of the digital era. Consumers know they’re trading in much of their privacy in return for getting to use websites like Facebook or other largely free digital tools, says Michael Priem, founder and CEO of ModernImpact, an advertising firm in Minneapolis. And they largely accept that consumer ads are being targeted at them based on that data, just as they accept that when they walk into a retail store, there’s a surveillance camera watching them.

“That's not scary,” he says. “What's scary is when consumers don't know: ‘Am I being watched?’ ”

Companies have self-interested reasons to develop standards that are acceptable to consumers, Mr. Priem says. But some consumer advocates say the industry needs more regulation alongside such self-developed standards.

Privacy groups have asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether, due to the Cambridge Analytica data use, Facebook violated an FTC consent order regarding data privacy on the social network. There are calls for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress. The company is denying reports its chief of data security is resigning. On Wednesday Mr. Zuckerberg said the company is taking steps to audit for suspicious activity apps that access its data. And he said developers of software (like the personality-quiz app) would see their data access restricted further.

Possible sea change

The flurry of concerns suggests this has the potential to become a turning point in public thought on a long-simmering issue.

It’s not new, after all, for political campaigns to blend social-media savvy into their strategies.

“In 2012, both the Romney and Obama  campaigns used Facebook apps to pull data about people,” notes Shannon McGregor, a communications professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City who studies social media and politics. In 2016, her research showed that virtually every presidential campaign used social media to gain insights into voters.

Also, the latest revelations come alongside a year’s worth of evidence that Russia has used digital tactics to meddle in US and other recent elections.

Nor is it clear that the new data methods are actually very effective at swaying voters.

While Cambridge Analytica has touted its successes – such as in helping Sen. Ted Cruz (R) of Texas gain traction in the Iowa caucuses as a challenger to Trump before the firm was engaged by the Trump campaign – “we have really good reason to be skeptical that anything that Cambridge Analytica engaged in was necessarily more effective than other standard forms of voter targeting and strategic appeals,” says Daniel Kreiss, a communications expert at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Still, he says there’s a “stunning” lack of transparency and accountability at companies including Facebook and Google over how their data are being used in politics.

Few guidelines

Among the ethical gray areas: As political communication becomes more customized, does that amplify the polarization of the electorate?

Professor Kreiss says Facebook’s business model “makes it really easy to speak to people who are aligned with your camp” on any particular issue. And the prevalent clickbait model online communication encourages “content that engages people in emotional ways.”

Regulators haven’t kept pace with the innovations around political use of social media, whether regarding access to the data or the kind of messaging carried by it. “There is very little regulation around this type of advertising, which accounts for billions and billions of dollars of advertising,” Professor McGregor says.

What’s needed is a change in mindset, says McGregor. “For these companies, it’s clear that they can make a lot of money from accepting political ads and being able to target in this case voters in specific ways.” But, she says, “the implications are much more far-reaching in terms of the integrity of our elections.”

Pavel Golovkin/AP

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks at a rally near the Kremlin in Moscow on March 18. Mr. Putin handily won a fourth term as Russia's president, adding six more years in the Kremlin for the man who has led the world's largest country for all of the 21st century.

When NBC journalist Megyn Kelly interviewed Vladimir Putin this month, she asked about Russian protectorate Syria’s continuing use of chemical weapons.

His response was as provocative and disdainful as the over-all stance the Russian leader has increasingly taken toward the United States and the West in recent years.

“One wants to say, ‘Boring,’ ” Mr. Putin sighed.

That answer, as shocking as it was, echoed the schoolyard taunting that Putin has employed with Western leaders at least since he seized the Crimean Peninsula in early 2014.

Now coming off a reelection Sunday that assures him another six years in power, the Russian president can be expected to pursue – and perhaps even accelerate – such “what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it” provocations.

His actions, and his utterances, have tied the West in knots but have elevated him at home while spotlighting his autocratic style of rule for admiring despots around the world, experts in Russia-West relations say.

For some, Putin’s consolidation of power and other recent events – including, allegedly, the poisoning with a banned Soviet-era nerve agent of a former Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury, England – portend a new cold war, to the extent that the first cold war was a battle between two worldview ideologies.

Yet for others, the years ahead promise to look more like an inversion of the post-cold war years, when democracy and the Western-built and West-led international order triumphed and expanded. This time around, it’s Putin’s Russia that is on a roll, and, with his help, authoritarian governance and strongman international tactics that are on the march.

“Yes, democracy and the liberal world order seemed to triumph after the cold war, but then we in the West took that victory for granted and got lethargic,” says Henri Barkey, a professor of international relations at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa.

In his view, the United States and the West failed to defend the high ground with a coordinated effort to sustain democracy’s gains and expanding adherence to the rule of law. Moreover, the Iraq War, the global financial crisis, a botched response to the Arab Spring, and other missteps soured much of the world on the Western example and cleared the way for an alternative.

“All that created a vacuum,” Dr. Barkey says, “and when you create a vacuum the bad guys are going to act to fill it. What Putin and [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan and the rest are reminding us now,” he adds, “is that if you don’t push back, they will take advantage of you.”

More pushback unlikely

In the wake of the Salisbury poisoning and with Putin’s reelection victory, many Russia experts are singing a similar tune – that it is going to take substantially more pushback to alter Putin’s behavior. But if the recent past is prologue, they add, the Russian leader has little reason to fear any meaningful steps to curb his actions.

“Nothing about Putin’s behavior is going to change, so in fact relations [between the West and Russia] may very well get worse,” says Nikolas Gvosdev, a professor of national security affairs and Russia expert at the US Naval War College in Newport, R.I. “His aim has been to divide and weaken Western allies and to enhance what he sees as Russia’s rightful place in the world, and he’s going to keep doing that until he runs into costs he’s not willing to pay.”

But the Western response so far to the Salisbury poisoning – the first use of a military-grade nerve agent on European soil since World War II, European officials underscore – has been relatively tame, analysts say.

British Prime Minister Theresa May last week ordered the expulsion of 23 Russian diplomats while suspending high-level government-to-government contacts, and Western allies including the US issued a condemnatory statement. But experts say there is much more both Britain and its allies could do – largely on the order of meaningful financial punishments and oil and gas import restrictions – if they really wanted to get tough.

Moreover, some Western officials and US congressional leaders expressed dismay Tuesday when President Trump broke the deafening silence of Western leaders and placed a congratulatory phone call to Putin on his election victory.

“An American president does not lead the Free World by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections,” Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona said in a statement Tuesday. “By doing so with Vladimir Putin,” he said, “President Trump insulted every Russian citizen who was denied the right to vote in a free and fair election [and] the countless Russian patriots who have risked so much to protest and resist Putin’s regime.”

In congratulating Putin – and boasting about it to White House reporters even though his national security advisers had warned him (in capital letters) not to laud the Russian leader’s electoral triumph – Mr. Trump joined a list including leaders from Belarus, Azerbaijan, Cuba, and Venezuela, but pointedly missing those from any of America’s European allies.

Indeed many analysts, including both Dr. Gvosdev and Barkey, were already discounting the likelihood that Trump would take the helm of a coordinated Western counter-offensive against Putin, given the US president’s stated admiration for the Russian leader.

Obama's role

Still, many analysts emphasize that Western appeasement of Putin did not start with Trump.

Barkey, a former State Department Middle East policy planning official, says it was really former President Barack Obama who encouraged Putin’s adventurism by demonstrating to the Russian leader that he was not going to face much pushback from a US-led West.

“Obama came in with the potential to restore a weakened [Western] model and lead it in opposition to a rising autocratic tide, but he basically walked away from that role,” Barkey says. “Putin seized the opportunity” in Syria and eastern Europe, “and now sees there is little standing in his way.”

And in fact there are meaningful things the West could do to get Putin’s attention, analysts say, from levying meaningful sanctions on Russia over its interference in US and European elections and standing up forcefully to Putin in Syria, to turning to other providers for oil and gas. The West’s sanctions for the incursion into Ukraine also could be toughened.

But so far pushing back against Putin has remained largely on a rhetorical level – the Western leaders’ joint statement after the Salisbury poisoning the most recent example – and largely devoid of coordination, analysts say.

US officials talk of punishing Putin over his provocations, but the talk so far has had little follow-through.

A senior administration official discussing this week’s White House visit by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman insisted the US-Saudi conversation would include ways to “make Russia pay a price for supporting [Syrian President Bashar al-] Assad and Iran’s malign activities in the region.”

Trump could, for example, push the Saudis to ditch an agreement with Putin to reduce oil sales to keep oil above $60 a barrel, some experts note. But both Trump and the Saudis seem to be more interested in working to counter Iran’s rise than to bother Russia, those experts add.

“I think the Russians can be forgiven for thinking that the US and the rest of the West will only go so far [with pushback] because they see that no one wants to do anything that will entail costs for them as well as for Russia,” says Gvosdev.

The Salisbury poisoning is only the most recent case in point. Russian officials including Putin have denied any role in the act, saying it would make no sense for the Russian government to do such a thing on the eve of a presidential election and with Russia’s hosting of the World Cup coming up.

But on the contrary, some Russia analysts say, the in-your-face action has Putin’s signature all over it: It says “I can do this on your soil because I’m strong and you are weak, especially vulnerable going through a divorce from the European Union as you are,” they say.

A need to deliver at home

Prime Minister May could order measures targeting Russian money in the London financial market, for example, but is she willing to take such a costly step at such a delicate moment? Putin seems to be daring her to.

Yet while the short term may pose few roadblocks for Putin’s forward march, some analysts say the Russian leader faces a different long-term horizon – one the West should be able to exploit to its own ends.

Gvosdev says that a realistic Putin may soon see the need to draw Russia’s intervention in Syria to a close and to remove the irritants – Ukraine being one – threatening Russian oil and gas sales in Europe.

Others say that with six more years in the Kremlin, Putin is going to be increasingly constrained by the need to deliver at home. “It will be difficult for Putin to continue the way he is, living off this image of the restorer of Russia to its place as a power to be reckoned with,” says Barkey. “People want to live better, and how are you going to do that with foreign interventions and when all you have to sell is oil and arms?”

Gordon F. Sander

Two of the residents at Rukkila, a supported housing unit on the outskirts of Helsinki, take a break with Emmi Vuorela, the resident coordinator. The unit, located on the outskirts of Helsinki, is part of the Housing First network with which Finland has resolved its homelessness problem.

As anyone who has visited Europe recently can attest, the scourge of homelessness has reached epidemic proportions.

The only exception to the trend is Finland, according to FEANTSA, the European Federation of National Organizations Working with the Homeless. There, homelessness is, remarkably, on the decline.

Per the latest statistics, the number of homeless people in Finland has declined from a high of 18,000 30 years ago, to approximately 7,000: the latter figure includes some 5,000 persons who are temporarily lodging with friends or relatives. In short, the problem has basically been solved.

At the core of this was a move away from the so-called “staircase model,” whereby a homeless person moved from one social rehabilitation level to another, with an apartment waiting for him or her at the highest step. Instead, Finland opted to give housing to the homeless from the start, nationwide, so as to allow them a stable environment to stabilize their lives.

“Basically, we decided that we wanted to end homelessness, rather than manage it,” says Juha Kaakinen, CEO of the Y-Foundation, which helps provide 16,500 low-cost apartments for the homeless.

‘Housing is a prerequisite’

To be sure, one of the reasons why Finland has made such strides in resolving its homelessness problem is because successive Finnish governments have made it a national priority. The elimination of homelessness first appeared in the Helsinki government’s program in 1987. Since then virtually every government has devoted significant resources toward this end.

Around 10 years ago, however, observers noticed that although homelessness in general was declining, long-term homelessness was not. A new approach to the problem was called for, along with a new philosophy.

The optimal solution, a group of four experts appointed by the Ministry of the Environment found, was Housing First. “Solving social and health problems is not a prerequisite for arranging housing,” they observed. “Instead, housing is a prerequisite that will also enable solving a homeless person’s other problems.”

The concept behind the new approach was not original; it was already in selective use in the US as part of the Pathways Model pioneered by Dr. Sam Tsemberis in the 1990s to help former psychiatric patients. What was different, and historic, about the Finnish Housing First model was a willingness to enact the model on a nationwide basis.

“We understood, firstly, that if we wanted to eradicate homelessness we had to work in a completely different way,” says Mr. Kaakinen, who acted as secretary for the Finnish experts. “At the same time right from the beginning there was a national consensus that the problem had reached a crisis point. ... We decided as a nation to do something about this.”

Changing course

As a result, in 2008 the Finnish National Program to reduce long-term homelessness was drafted and put into place. Helsinki and nine other Finnish cities committed to the program, with the Ministry of the Environment coordinating its implementation, and local governments and nongovernmental organizations, including the Y-Foundation, joining the team.

One of those goals was to cut the number of long-term homeless in half by producing 1,250 new homes, including supported housing units for tenants with their own leases, and around-the-clock presence of trained caring staff for residents who needed help.

At the same time, the extant network of homeless shelters was phased out. This also involved phasing out the “old way” of thinking about homelessness. “There was some work to be done on attitudes,” concedes Kaakinen. “Some of the people in the NGOs found the idea of unconditional housing hard to accept.” Also some staff had difficulty with not forcing tenants with alcohol or drug problems to go cold turkey before they were given housing.

However the effectiveness of the new model spoke for itself. Across Finland, long-term homelessness fell by 1,345 people, or 35 percent between 2008 and 2015. In some cities it was halved.

“For a long time we dealt with homelessness in the traditional way,” says Sanna Vesikansa, the deputy mayor of Helsinki. “But it’s difficult for people to work on their problems if always in the morning they have to go out in the streets and then come back at night.”

‘A roof over my head no matter what’

The success of the Finnish approach is evident on a visit to Rukkila, a supported housing unit on the outskirts of Helsinki that was taken over by the Y-Foundation in 2011.

Currently 20 people live at Rukkila. Each resident has his own fully equipped, modern apartment. There is also a large communal area where residents can cook meals, watch TV, or just hang out. “One of the things we offer here, besides personal support, is the opportunity to form a community. I think that’s important,” says Emmi Vuorela, who works as project coordinator at Rukkila.

“Some of them have substance abuse problems, or personal issues, and we try to help them with that,” says Ms. Vuorela, who has been working at Rukkila for three years. “Above all, homeless people need stability and content in their lives.”

Residents are allowed to have guests during the day. However, they need to get permission for an overnight guest. “Of course we do hope that residents will think about the guests they are bringing into the community,” adds Vuorela, “especially if they are intoxicated, but ultimately we trust them to decide what is best for them and the community themselves.”

Other than that, there are few if any rules. If residents have drinking or other substance abuse issues, they are encouraged – but not forced – to deal with them. Hopefully, with the aid of the staff, they will rehabilitate themselves.

One such resident, Fernando, who has lived at Rukkila for three years, is in the process of doing just that. “I am dealing with my problems here,” he said. “In the meantime, it’s nice to know that whatever happens I have a roof over my head no matter what.” Eventually Fernando plans on moving out and getting a job, as some of his former neighbors have done.

“There’s nothing better than helping someone move forward with their lives,” says Vuorela. “Here at Rukkila we try to provide a supportive environment in which they can do just that.”

“However we do not push them.” In the meantime, the army of homeless who used to fill Helsinki’s homeless shelters has been disbanded.

Paying for itself?

As far as the not inconsiderable cost of producing the 3,500 units created between 2008 and 2015 – estimated at just under $382 million – Ms. Vesikansa declares that “the program pays for itself.” As evidence, she points to a case study undertaken by the Tampere University of Technology in 2011. It showed society saved $18,500 per homeless person per year who had received a rental apartment with support, due to the medical and emergency services no longer needed to assist and respond to them. “If anything the cost savings today is higher,” she says.

“That doesn’t cover the contribution to the economy [from] residents who moved on from supported housing and got jobs,” she adds.

“Of course the fact that the program pays for itself is important,” agrees Kaakinen, “but beyond that, from a moral point of view, as a society which cares for all of its citizens, we didn’t think we see an alternative. This, we felt, was the way to go forward. And we did.”

Finland's success has spurred other countries, particularly Britain – where the problem has also reached crisis proportions – to adopt their own plans modeled on the Finnish Housing First plan. Kaakinen feels that can work, but only where there is the kind of cross-the-board commitment to resolving the problem that Finland has shown.

“If other countries are inspired by our example, that’s all for the better. There is no quick fix to all situations however, we found. A solid base can provide the foundation upon which to improve the lot of the homeless, and ultimately resolve this issue.”

Jae C. Hong/AP/File

Homeless people sleep in the Skid Row area in downtown Los Angeles.

When outreach workers found Angela, she had been homeless and living in Los Angeles’s dangerous Skid Row for more than 25 years, suffering from drug addiction and two medical conditions – and having lost custody of her five children.

“I went to some places nobody should ever go,” says Angela, using a pseudonym because she asked to remain anonymous.

Now, with help from a groundbreaking program, she’s living in a home in South Los Angeles, drug-free, and getting treatment.

“Since I’ve been under their care, my life has changed,” she says.

Angela’s transformation is thanks to a Los Angeles County program called Housing for Health, an initiative that tackles homelessness by addressing both housing and health care, which is one of the most underappreciated issues among homeless populations.

HFH has housed and provided health care for more than 3,400 people since it launched in 2012 – all while cutting public spending, according to a recent study.

“Our findings suggest that a permanent supportive housing program that targets people who are both homeless and frequent users of health services is feasible and may save local government money overall,” says Sarah Hunter, lead author of the study and a behavioral scientist at RAND Corp. 

Supporters of permanent supportive housing programs like HFH – which provide both long-term housing and case management services – say they are successful because they understand the connection between homelessness and health.

Homeless people are more likely to have health and mental health conditions, including substance abuse problems. They also use social and health services, including ambulance runs and emergency room care, at a higher rate.

In fact, the top 5 percent of hospital users – overwhelmingly poor and homeless – are estimated to consume 50 percent of health-care costs, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“Research indicates that people become homeless due to health-related concerns and that homelessness creates and exacerbates health concerns,” says James Petrovich, professor of social work at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. “While housing itself can solve the issue of homelessness, it does not completely resolve the myriad of medical, mental health, and substance use concerns often experienced by [homeless people].”

Enter permanent supportive housing.

For Angela and other homeless people with health problems, this approach is a boon: It benefits participants – by providing housing and targeted medical attention – as well as local governments, by reducing the use of costly emergency health care.

“Housing is health care,” Mark Trotz, director of HFH, told Modern Healthcare, a health-care policy website. 

“It’s not rocket science...,” he said. “If you have a case manager you don’t have to call 911 four times a week because you’re out on the street.”

For every dollar invested in HFH, the county saved $1.20 in health care and other social services, according to the study. Participants’ inpatient days dropped 76 percent and emergency room visits dropped 67 percent.

Public service costs declined by nearly 60 percent, from an average of $38,146, per person, per year, before housing, to $15,358, after. Even after accounting for program costs, the county saved 20 percent. 

There are challenges. Affordable housing is scarce. And programs like these require collaboration between housing suppliers, health-care providers, government officials, investors, and nonprofits.

But Hunter insists HFH is replicable. Nationwide, 100 community health centers have links to supportive housing programs.

And the return on investment goes beyond money, says Mr. Petrovich.

“For me, these situations demonstrate the serious burden that many individuals experiencing homelessness carry, and it challenges communities to look beyond the dollars and cents ... and see access to housing and health care as a moral imperative....”

Now that her health, and life, are improving, Angela is happy to be back in touch with her two youngest children. “Now my daughter is 20 and has a baby of her own,” she says. “I wanted to make sure I had a place that they could come and visit me in.”

Reuters

Britain's Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby (middle, right) shows Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman (middle) a selection of early texts from the Christian, Muslim and Jewish faiths from the Lambeth Palace library collection during a meeting at Lambeth Palace, London, Britain, March 8.

During his long visit to the United States, one question has hung over Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman: What do you mean exactly in promising to restore “moderate Islam” to Saudi Arabia?

For a wealthy nation that exported hate-filled theology for decades and long dictated the religious expression of its people, the promise seems like an impossible revolution in thought.

What will replace the hate that has helped breed terrorists worldwide?

To many in the West, the young heir to the Saudi throne has some explaining to do.

His words seem right. Prince Mohammed, who has effectively run Saudi Arabia since 2017, wants his country to be “open to the world and tolerant of other faiths.” He seeks to “destroy” the extremist ideas of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, and the Islamic State. And he humbly admits his country overreacted to the 1979 Iranian Revolution by adopting a harsh version of Islam.

“We will not spend the next 30 years of our lives dealing with extremist ideas,” he says.

For the past year, he’s also been showing what moderation will look like in the birthplace of Islam.

The so-called religious police from the conservative clerics have been sidelined. Mosque sermons are now controlled. Movie theaters are being opened. School textbooks will be purged of “extremist ideologies,” says the Saudi education minister. Teachers who sympathize with banned groups will be let go.

Women are being liberated in many ways, such as being allowed to drive, join the military, and start their own business. Disney has been invited to inspire Saudi filmmaking. And an opera house will open soon.

In the run-up to the prince’s visit to the US, he and other officials also made some remarkable gestures.

One close ally of the prince and the head of the Muslim World League, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdul Karim Al-Issa, visited the pope in Rome and a Jewish synagogue in France. And he issued an unprecedented letter condemning any denial of the Holocaust. The genocide, he wrote, “could not be denied or underrated by any fair-minded or peace-loving person.”

Prince Mohammed also met with Coptic Christians in Egypt, inviting them to Saudi Arabia. And in a trip to Britain, he met with the head of the Anglican Church.

The prince’s reforms are being driven by a host of factors – such as the economic necessity to please restless youth and adjust to the end of high oil prices – as much as they are by an abhorrence of violent, political Islam. Religious moderation is a path to survival.

If a new Saudi Arabia starts to reflect an Islam of “coexistence, tolerance and peace,” as the Muslim World League leader calls it, then the hateful ideology of the country's past might be driven out.