What Became of the Champions?

I. The Display Cabinet

Many clubhouses have a display cabinet full of trophies. District champions 1987, promotion 1994, cup winners 2003. The trophies shine as long as someone dusts them. About today’s team they say nothing. They show who once won, not who still wins.

Lists of role models are such cabinets. They are called “best practices”, and they are useful because they show that something is possible. But a role model is not a monument. It is a living thing that must be tended, or it decays. Whoever keeps a list of role models must therefore keep checking what has become of them.

II. The List

In “The Unheard and Forgotten Voices in the Wilderness” we introduced Hubertus Hoffmann, who in 2021 published a book with two hundred reform proposals. His platform “Mission Future” carries the idea further. In twelve manuals, from housing and green cities to democracy, it presents “Golden Global Champions”, role models from around the world that others should adopt. The site promises that they are “checked and updated daily”.

We did what the site promises. We picked out about two dozen of these champions that can be checked because they are concrete projects, not merely praised countries or persons. Then we looked at how they are doing today. The result is not a verdict on Hoffmann. His selection is mostly wise. It is a lesson in how role models age.

III. What Holds

Vienna is the role model that has held best. More than sixty percent of Viennese live in municipal housing or in subsidised flats of limited-profit builders. The city began in the 1920s and has never stopped. Singapore, where three quarters of citizens live in flats of the state housing board, mostly as owners, also stands as described. The board was founded in 1960.

Estonia has even expanded its digital administration since it was described. A tax return takes a few minutes because the state has already filled in the forms. The more than three hundred bus stops with green roofs in Utrecht exist, and the green bunker in Hamburg-St. Pauli was completed in 2024, with a mountain path up to the roof.

And then there is Brno. In 2015 the city council expressed its regret for the death march onto which some twenty thousand Germans were driven from the city in May 1945. The declaration grew into an annual pilgrimage in the opposite direction and a festival. In 2026 the Sudeten Germans held their annual gathering in Brno for the first time, although the Czech Chamber of Deputies had demanded its cancellation. Thousands walked the pilgrimage. A gesture that has taken root.

What these cases share: none of them rests on a campaign. Each rests on an institution that works over decades, or on a community that repeats a gesture every year.

IV. What Tips Over

Finland was considered the country that had almost defeated homelessness. The principle of “Housing First” is simple: first a person gets a home, then everything else is dealt with, instead of the other way round. Over three decades the number of homeless people fell by about three quarters. Then, from 2023, the government cut housing allowance and social assistance and almost entirely abolished the grants for building such flats. In 2025 homelessness rose more sharply than ever since records began. The model did not fail. People stopped paying for it.

Uganda was praised for not locking refugees in camps but giving them land and letting them work. Today some two million refugees live there, and international aid has shrunk to a fraction. The plots have become smaller, food aid has been more than halved, and since late 2025 new arrivals from some countries no longer receive refugee status. Canada, which Hoffmann calls the “global benchmark”, suspended private refugee sponsorship, its best instrument, for new groups in 2024 and cut immigration overall, because housing is short and the public mood has turned.

These three cases show the same thing. A role model is not a state but an achievement that must be renewed every year. Whoever stops paying loses within a few years what was built over decades. In “The Market Will Sort It Out” we described this with the example of the fire brigade: in the years when nothing burns, it seems superfluous.

V. What Was Embellished

Around 2015 Salt Lake City reported that chronic homelessness had fallen by 91 percent. The figure went round the world, and the city became a place of pilgrimage for social policy makers. A year later an economist showed that what had mainly changed in those years was the counting method. The authorities admitted this. In 2025 Utah counted more homeless people than ever before, and the governor is now turning away from the model.

That is the danger of every success story: it is more readily told than checked. For Taiwan, Hoffmann’s site says that half of the citizens use the government’s participation platform. Far fewer are documented, and the well-known discussion platform vTaiwan never had more than a few thousand active participants. For Reykjavík the site says half of the inhabitants take part. In the annual votes on neighbourhood projects, about one in eight participates. For citizen participation that is a good figure. It is just not half.

Milan wanted to plant three million trees by 2030. By early 2024 the city was at about six hundred thousand, and the drought of 2022 had killed a quarter of the young trees. The famous “vertical forest”, two tower blocks with trees on the balconies, is praised as easy to copy. It needs its own team of arborists who climb down the facade on ropes.

VI. What Was Abandoned

Barcelona planned 503 “superblocks”, neighbourhoods from which through traffic is banned. Where they were built, air pollution fell measurably. Few were built. A court ordered one of the new green axes to be dismantled, and in 2024 the new city government declared it would not repeat the model, because per block it cost many times as much as an ordinary street.

The United Arab Emirates, which Hoffmann celebrates as pioneers of a politics of happiness, abolished their happiness ministry as early as 2020 and transferred its tasks to another ministry. The Netherlands, named as a model for social housing, is in a severe housing shortage. In Amsterdam people wait about twelve years for a social flat.

VII. The Garden

On his site Hoffmann writes that a good politics of happiness must be planned, laid out and maintained “like a good garden”. That is the most apt image on the entire site, and it applies to his list as well. A garden that is photographed once and never visited again is, after five years, no longer the garden in the photograph.

Three lessons can be drawn from our review. First: role models that last are almost always institutions with staying power, not campaigns. Vienna’s municipal housing has lasted a century because it never depended on a single government. Second: successes are reversible, and faster than they arose. Whoever saves where things happen to be going well saves on success itself. Third: a success figure is only worth something once one knows how it was counted.

In “The Voices in the Wilderness” we proposed detaching the warning from the person and turning it into a rule. The same applies to role models. A role model is only useful as long as someone regularly checks whether it still is one.

VIII. How This Essay Could Be Refuted

The obvious objection: every list is a snapshot, and it is cheap to check it years later with today’s knowledge. That is true. We do not reproach Hoffmann for the fact that his role models have changed. All role models do. We merely note that a list which promises daily updates should keep pace with reality.

The second objection: a role model that later tips over was still a role model. That is true as well. Helsinki still has far fewer homeless people today than thirty years ago. The setback does not prove that “Housing First” was wrong, but that it only works as long as it is kept running. That is precisely the lesson a list of role models ought to include.

The essay would be refuted if it could be shown that role models praised unchanged over years hold up, on average, as well as on the first day.

IX. The River

Heraclitus said that one cannot step into the same river twice, because new water is always flowing in. A role model is such a river. Whoever travels today to Helsinki, Barcelona or Salt Lake City to learn will no longer find what was described five years ago. Sometimes he finds something better, often something worse, always something different.

Who tends the role models once the enthusiasm is over and the photographers have left?