Mayor Daniel Sazonov of Helsinki, Finland shares his top leadership traits.

City of Helsinki

American cities face soaring costs, overwhelmed public services, partisan gridlock, and eroding citizen trust in government. Finland’s capital Helsinki offers a different perspective on urban leadership. Mayor Daniel Sazonov, elected in June, oversees the largest city in a country that tops world happiness rankings.

“When happiness is measured, it’s about people’s satisfaction with their lives, and that connects strongly to the work that cities do,” Sazonov told me in an exclusive interview.

In Finland, the city government of Helsinki must address many of the same urban challenges facing American cities—from childcare costs to crime prevention to education funding. As one of the youngest mayors in Helsinki’s history, Sazonov has a unique approach to ensuring that Finland’s capital maintains it’s position as one of the world’s happiest cities. According to the World Happiness Report 2025, Finland was deemed the world’s happiest country for the eighth year in a row.

How Helsinki’s Approach To Governance Offers Practical Solutions for America’s Urban Challenges

The first and most important lesson is that happiness, for citizens, is about a balance of multiple factors. Years of investing in the city’s infrastructure, trains and roads has paid off, as Politico reported that, as of August, Helsinki just went a full year without a single traffic death.

“It’s about city services, but also private services. For a citizen of Helsinki, it is important to have well-functioning schools and healthcare services nearby, but also good grocery stores and sports clubs and NGOs,” Sazonov said. “We emphasize that feeling of belonging to your own neighborhood and being an active part of it, not just a citizen living in a multi-story housing block.”

That is, in part, accomplished with the help of thousands for grants that support nonprofit activities throughout the city and tax breaks for city dwellers that ride bikes, the latter of which were removed when the city met its goals.

Affordable Childcare Boosts The Economy

While Americans often view childcare as a private responsibility that benefits individual families, Finnish leaders see investing public resources in subsidizing childcare as a type of economic infrastructure that improves the prevalence of talent in the labor market while also reducing the costs associated with public education.

Studies done by the Finnish National Institute for Economic Research show the quality of childcare services “is connected with the employment of mothers—not just in the short term but also long-term income,” Sazonov said, adding the studies also show "early childhood education has a strong effect on later performance in education.”

Swedish and Finnish are both official languages in Finland, so multilingual childcare options have helped the children of immigrants from diverse backgrounds learn to speak either Finnish or Swedish fluently while their language skills are still developing.

“Our policy is to get those children who come from families that don’t speak Finnish or Swedish at home into early childhood education as young as possible to make them fully integrated into society,” Sazonov said. "The earlier we start integration measures, the better the results."

Much like American cities, there are sometimes conflicts or inconsistencies between federal and regional policies. Both the U.S. and Finland face a potentially catastrophic labor shortage in the childcare sector. But at least in Helsinki the issue is on the horizon, while in American cities the situation is already dire. Bloomberg reported in January that U.S. childcare costs have increased by 50% and even caused millions of parents to contemplate self-harm. One of the lessons that American leaders could learn from Finland is that treating childcare as a communal responsibility, rather than an individual one, has a variety of economic benefits.

Why Finnish Leaders Seek Issue-Based Coalitions

Sazonov is considered conservative by Helsinki standards, working with a left-green council majority. In contrast to many cities in the U.S. that struggle with partisan conflicts, which slow progress on basic services and infrastructure, in Helsinki many politicians prefer to focus on issue-based initiatives that don’t conflict with party goals.

“On our city council—whether right-wing or left-wing—the majority share basic values and the idea of an international and liberal Helsinki,” Sazonov said. “The Finnish municipal governance model is not about government and opposition. Council majorities actually vary from question to question. As the National Coalition Party, we can find ourselves cooperating with the Green Party on some questions, with Social Democrats on others, with right-wing parties on others.”

While it might be assumed that U.S. leaders share common values, that appears to be less common than in Finland. For example, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani attracted widespread support with his press statements that “we need a better quality of life” in the Big Apple, but few Republicans, or even Democratic rivals, have found common ground to discuss the specifics of related solutions. To be fair, Helsinki has less than a million residents, compared to 8.5 million in New York City. However, Finnish leaders also had their own divisions to contest with in elevating Helsinki to become one of the happiest cities in the world.

“After our Civil War in 1917-18, rebuilding started from the cities. Just months after the Civil War ended, the Red side [Finnish Socialist Workers’ Republic] and the White [anti-communist] side came together and started solving these everyday matters,” Sazonov said. “That tradition still lasts in city politics. When we discuss practical issues, it’s about 90-95% finding the best solution to solve concrete questions—not about trying to find things that divide us. It’s hard work finding common ground.”

Investing In Teachers Benefits The Entire City

According to the European Union, roughly 75% of children in Finland’s early childhood education programs are enrolled in public schools. Teaching at a public school is one of the most widely respected jobs a worker can have in Helsinki.

“Teachers are highly educated. They have higher university degrees. There’s a national curriculum they have to follow, but they have substantial freedom in their daily work,” Sazonov said. “When the city is growing, it's not about direct budget cuts—the budget is still growing—but reallocating our resources to invest more in education and in children and young people in Helsinki.”

He added that the city allocates resources to intentionally lower the number of children per teacher, especially in first and second grade. There are two lessons that American leaders can learn from the Finnish education system: Education impacts the entire economy and that smaller classes produce better results with a lower price tag. In contrast, many Los Angeles schools see plummeting enrollment and may be operating at half or a quarter of the intended capacity.

Sazonov said that right-sizing the educational infrastructure is key to city governance.

“We’ve been in a happy situation where the problem has been how to speed up building new schools and especially early childhood education units, because the city population has been growing. The number of young children of school age is growing rapidly,” he said. “I started in city politics at the body responsible for schools and kindergartens. Back then, we had to make those more difficult decisions. Of course there's always resistance in neighborhoods. But policymakers are pretty reasonable when you go through the facts. If the number of children is decreasing, keeping empty facilities isn’t free.”

He advises city leaders around the world to highlight the tangible outcomes, like empty buildings that cost millions to maintain or hiring 30 more teachers or building new sports facilities in areas with growth, for example.

“When people get that context, they’re more prepared to make difficult decisions,” he said.

How City Leaders Can Encourage A Holistic Approach To Crime Reduction

Helsinki has taken a distinctive approach to crime—hosting roundtables that bring together police, nonprofits, religious organizations and city services to address youth exclusion before it leads to criminal activity. Helsinki doesn’t have its own police department. Police are completely run by the central government. So, at the city level, leaders concentrate more on social services, cooperation with nonprofits and other preventative measures.

"To debate whether you should do prevention programs or law enforcement, it’s the wrong debate. It’s about both," Sazonov said. “We’re building even closer cooperation with the Helsinki Police Department. I personally will join a police patrol on Friday night.”

For young people, there are separate models for intervention that help keep minors from developing criminal habits.

“If a 15-year-old commits a crime, police involve social workers as well. With our new agreement with the Helsinki police, we have a coordinator in our education department who has direct connections with the police,” Sazonov added.

While the Council on Criminal Justice estimates that someone arrested for a crime in the U.S. has a 41-78% recidivism rate, depending on the type of crime, Finnish leaders have discovered that preventing homelessness is one of the best ways to reduce repeat offenses among adults.

Preventing Homelessness Is An Economical Way To Reduce Crime

“I’m proud that we’ve reduced long-term homelessness by 50% in the past four years,” Sazonov said. “You have to do many things at the same time. Of course, we need shelters. Then the key to Finnish success in reducing homelessness is the housing-first model, where the logic is that you’re not required to quit using alcohol or narcotics. The idea is that the first thing we do is place you in a housing unit and then start to work on the other problems you have.”

He added that returning citizens often don’t have homes they can return to when they come our of jail. So Sazonov said the solution must start while the incarcerated individuals are still in jail, including substance abuse rehabilitation, healthcare, vocational education and work placement.

“The approach is to solve as many things as possible while people are in prison. Housing, education, jobs, healthcare, finances,” he said. “Social workers go through the person’s finances and try to find the reasons why the person is in debt. There are also NGOs and foundations that help restructure individual debt, because you can have expensive short-term loans.”

How Welfare Policies Shape City Life

Sazonov, 32, himself grew up in Helsinki’s public housing and oversaw social services as deputy mayor. This shows how social welfare systems can help foster the next generation of leaders across civic institutions. On the flip side, that strong safety net also creates opportunities for aspiring entrepreneurs. The Finnish startup scene is growing, including the Helsinki-based AI company DataCrunch that just raised €54.5 million (almost $64 million).

“We often end up talking just about the city’s role in delivering the welfare state, but the city also has an important role in facilitating economic development,” Sazonov said. "I’m extremely proud about the startup ecosystem we’ve built in Helsinki. Slush [a founder-focused startup event] is known worldwide. You cannot just concentrate on services and welfare, but you also can't just concentrate on economic growth, because then you might lose social cohesion. There has to be balance."

In terms of leadership advice for finding balance, Sazonov recommends concentrating on “practical matters rather than identity politics: building coalitions, finding solutions through negotiations with those who represent different ends of the political sphere.” Leaders being able to work with people they may not agree with is the foundation of sustainable development in any city.

"It’s easier to deliver when you cooperate and work together rather than concentrate on political games. Of course, you don’t have to agree on everything—there are elections, and politics has to be present as part of democracy," he concluded. "In Finland, with eight parties in Parliament, it's crucial to cooperate. "

Disclosure: Helsinki hosted me last month as part of a Fulbright Specialist grant I received for global work in city diplomacy, although there was no direct payment from the city or any financial conflicts of interest.