Efforts to help Honolulu’s homeless population move in fits and starts, and to some extent, that’s the unavoidable course toward a lasting solution to such a multilayered problem. It’s important to acknowledge the progress, however, as well as bemoan the persistent hurdles.
Starting with the good news: The ongoing work in the 100,000 Homes Oahu project is starting to deliver some hope to the most troubled in the homeless population, identified through a community-wide survey volunteer crews conducted in Oahu’s encampments. This was Hawaii’s participation in the national 100,000 Homes campaign.
Star-Advertiser writer Allison Schaefers visited recently with Christie Higuchi, whose fragile health condition made her life on the streets particularly perilous.
In its mission to help the most vulnerable, and funded with a Housing First grant from the Waikiki Health Center and U.S. VETS, 100,000 Homes Oahu secured a safe and clean studio apartment where Higuchi has lived for three months.
This basic improvement in her living conditions has restored a sense of dignity, the loss of which sends many of the homeless into a downward spiral. It has restored hope, which is a commodity in short supply on the streets.
That’s the rationale behind Housing First, the notion that people need that personal space before they can receive the services they need and begin to chart their course toward self-sufficiency.
Now for the distressing news.
Homelessness encampments continue to proliferate around town. Some of this is due to the chronic difficulty persuading some people to submit to the less than optimal conditions and the communal rules in the established shelter facilities.
Most of these people have tried to find havens hidden away from the public eye, which can end up causing safety hazards and other problems for themselves and others. The recent fire beneath the Nimitz viaduct produced burns for one homeless man and an Internet service outage.
But there’s more damage than that. Increasingly, the tourists visiting Oahu see the encampments in visible locations — sites near the Hawaii Convention Center and facing Honolulu Museum of Art spring to mind. There have been visitors who have been ending their stays with a poor impression of the city. In an economy this dependent on tourism, that’s a problem that can’t be ignored.
It’s perhaps the location near the museum, especially on the Beretania Street side of Thomas Square, that is the most dispiriting example, one combining varying degrees of shelter for the homeless with protest by people who are making a statement.
The encampment was established more than a year ago by Deoccupy Honolulu, part of the global Occupy protest movement. One of the tents featured in a video posted on the Deoccupy site is inscribed with the statement: "I am a tent. Often I am used for camping, sleepovers, or housing. Today I am the face of the houseless and a movement fighting for social and economic justice. I am a sign. I am art. I am a message."
A whole row of them on a major Honolulu thoroughfare is also a horrid sight, a persistent thumb in the eye of city officials who have recently resumed their sweep to cite the gear as property being illegally stored on public property, confiscating tagged property 24 hours later. The campers have found ways to replace the tagged items to defeat the effort.
The new Caldwell administration must be unrelenting in its prosecution of the law, at the park and wherever public property is being overtaken by stored items. People have a right to make their political statements, but the rest of the community has a right to use its public spaces in an equitable manner, too.
One of the Deoccupy members told city officials during the sweep that "if the public wants these tents gone because they are an eyesore, come up with an opportunity and give an option for people."
Giving up these pointless encampments shouldn’t be contingent on a government-provided "opportunity." Even if it was, a public-private partnership has yielded the 100,000 Homes project, which already has accomplished far more than an ugly, intrusive row of tents ever could.
