Now that the campaign promises have dissipated into the etherlike puffs of overscented air freshener and the election-night leis have dried into a musty pile on the faux mantel or a dusty tangle hanging from the rearview mirror of Kirk Caldwell’s car, perhaps we can focus on what really and truly, seriously and urgently, needs to be fixed.
Rail, for all its promises, disappointments and staggering cost, will mostly help people who spend close to two hours sitting in their cars in traffic every day. The workday lives of west-side commuters are ground down by that misery.
More urgent than that, though, is saving the people who are living on the street every single day. Their lives are outside the bounds of dignity, and no community should allow humans to live in boxes under bridges and poop in buckets or on the sidewalk.
Homelessness is a problem more frustrating and intractable than any other Oahu has ever faced, mostly because so many chronically homeless actively, vehemently, choose to stay homeless. It’s hard for those of us with jobs, savings accounts, kids and a permanent address to want to give any of our money to people who refuse to get off the street and play by a few rules.
But consider this:
In Los Angeles, voters overwhelmingly approved a $1.2 billion bond measure to build housing for the chronically homeless.
The bond will be repaid through a new property tax over the next 29 years set at $10 for each $100,000 in assessed valuation. So the owner of a million-dollar property would pay about $96 every year.
Because it was a new tax, the measure needed 66 percent of voters to pass. They got 76 percent.
Is Hawaii ready to make that kind of commitment?
According to the Los Angeles Times, the forces that led to such a powerful voter mandate include frustration over the failed efforts to stop homeless encampments and to reduce the huge scale of LA’s skid row, which has the biggest concentration of homeless people in the nation.
This utter frustration was met with something else in Los Angeles, something perhaps surprising in the city of glamour and spray tans and spirulina sundaes: compassion.
Or at least that’s what some who supported the measure told the Times.
“This is coming from a humanitarian point of view,” City Councilman Jose Huizar said. “It’s people wanting to help others.”
Polling showed the voters were anxious not just to get rid of the unsightly encampments but to relieve the suffering of those who live that way. Political leaders patted each other on the back and said that their city truly was a City of Angels.
Is our state truly the Land of Aloha? Too often, that means taking “live and let live” to the extreme and looking the other way at those who, through personal choice or unfortunate circumstance, end up living a marginal existence while we complain about the cost of organic soy milk at Whole Foods.
Clearly, sweeps and park closures just move the problem around, and on an island, that becomes futile very quickly. Various housing solutions put forth by the city and state may have had some success, but Gene Ward is still having to chase people out of the bushes in Hawaii Kai and downtown Honolulu looks like the set of “The Walking Dead” at night.
In Los Angeles, political leaders realize that with such a bold financial commitment by taxpayers, the expectation will be high to see significant improvements very soon.
So let’s see how it goes in LA. If $100 a year can get people off the streets for good, that’s a deal our political leaders here should pitch. If they have the nerve.
Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
