In Hawaii’s high-demand, expensive housing market, landlords generally can avoid the risk of renting to those who need their units the most — the poor and the homeless. There are enough renters with well-paying jobs who can afford market rates.
But homeless people are filling our streets, and government and non-profit agencies can’t create enough low-cost housing to keep up. So landlords need to be part of the solution.
In 2015, Gov. David Ige and Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell convened a summit to encourage landlords to accept low-income and homeless tenants. Some were open to the idea; others, like one landlord who suffered with rent-skipping, property destroying, drug-addicted tenants, were more skeptical.
Enter U.S. VETS, which wants other nonprofits to follow its promising model, called a master lease. Under this concept, the organization would lease units for its clients. It would pay the rent and assume responsibility for damages. It would also fill vacancies in the units it leases; the landlord would get the rent money, whether the unit is occupied or not.
In other words, it could make renting to the homeless a more attractive proposition. U.S. VETS adopted this model in 2006 on Oahu and has spread it to Kauai and Hawaii island.
Smaller nonprofits might be hard-pressed to come up with the money needed to start and maintain such a program. But it could merit more support from government agencies that have tried just about everything else, from ignoring homeless encampments to investing millions in tiny-home communities.
The return of vagrancy laws
The growing‚ and very visible, problem of homelessness is so complex that myriad approaches must be deployed. See item above for one promising strategy. Of course, building more truly affordable rentals would go a long way to help those of sound mind and body off the streets —but it’s been a painfully slow process.
Meanwhile, aberrant behavior by those who are not of sound or body has ratcheted frustrations. And while many residents have compassion for the homeless plight, that compassion dips with each additional public sidewalk or promenade being overrun by squatters and tarped mounds.
That’s why it’s understandable that Mayor Kirk Caldwell, in his State of the City speech Tuesday, finally broached the “v” word — as in vagrancy law. The idea behind the vagrancy proposal, seen as an aid to enforcement efforts, would prohibit public sidewalks and malls from being used for anything other than for walking and standing that doesn’t block passage. Reclaiming public sidewalks for safe, smooth passage would seem simple enough.
But no. Caldwell is a lawyer, so he surely knows the legal difficulties of enacting, and upholding, vagrancy laws. The U.S. Supreme Court has found variations of such laws to be unconstitutional and overly broad: in the 1972 Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, for example, the court struck down Florida’s vagrancy law for being unconstitutionally vague and bestowing police with too much power to interfere with innocent behavior.
It’ll be interesting to see if 40-plus years of mounting homelessness nationwide have changed any legal minds.
UFC investment sours, for now
There’s no denying that mixed martial arts is huge here, especially now, with Waianae native Max Holloway as the reigning Ultimate Fighting Championship featherweight title holder. And with the Hawaii Tourism Authority out to mine new niche markets, the potential was there for a Hawaii-sited match made in MMA heaven.
Unfortunately, it was not to be.
Star-Advertiser sports columnist Ferd Lewis got it exactly right when he called the UFC’s tactics an attempted “shakedown” at Hawaii’s expense. The UFC had wanted HTA to pay it $6 million — that’s public funds, remember — for the privilege of staging a fight card in the islands. That amount even exceeded the $5.2 million paid in 2016 to host the Pro Bowl — and that event was a proven annual draw, with considerable community good will and givebacks behind it. The HTA, now under funding scrutiny by the Legislature, countered with $1 million, which would’ve been its biggest payout for a single sports event in 2018.
Not only did the UFC reject the counteroffer, its honcho Dana White implied that HTA was to blame for the non-deal. “Hawaii was happening this year, and it got shut down by the tourism board there,” he blared.
Another big disappointment for team Holloway and MMA fans came Friday, with cancellation of tonight’s UFC lightweight title fight between Holloway and Khabib Nurmagomedov. Holloway was unable to make weight — not too surprising, given that he had less than a week to get into fighting form in a different weight class, after interim lightweight champ Tony Ferguson withdrew due to injury.
