Colin Kippen sees Hawaii’s homelessness problem as a dartboard, with the central issue occupying the bull’s-eye spot, encircled by an array of wedge-shaped pieces leading into it. Those pieces, said the state’s new homelessness czar, have labels such as employment, affordable housing, health, mental stability, family support  … all the things that, left unguarded, can land people out on the streets.

Kippen, 62, was appointed by the governor in June to take over as homelessness coordinator, a post that has no staff support but is teamed with a special council enacted by state law. Kippen’s responsibility is to oversee the completion of a 10-year plan to end homelessness by attacking various strands of the knotty problem. His favorite metaphor captures the challenge, too.

“You’ve got to be able to step back and see the dartboard,” he said. “And my job is to figure out how to get every piece on that dartboard to have a relationship with every other piece.”

He felt encouraged recently by the turnout of volunteers in the 100,000 Homes campaign, a survey of the homeless population to identify the most vulnerable people on the streets.

The final solution will involve the private sector, too, everyone from job trainers to landlords who must be willing to rent to people with poor credit histories, he said.

Kippen has three grown children and a 42-year marriage, one that for the moment is long-distance: His wife, a physician who has worked in homeless health care, has not yet relocated.

His own wide-ranging career, primarily in law, has encompassed being a tribal judge near Seattle and being counsel for the Indian Affairs Committee under U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye.

He is part Hawaiian and has worked on Native Hawaiian concerns for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. Most recently he was executive director of the National Indian Education Association in Washington, D.C.

QUESTION: How do you see your job in this position?

ANSWER: My job is to recruit and excite people about the possibility that we could end homelessness, and to do it in a way that all hands are on deck, and that we bring people into this conversation in ways that we have yet to achieve.

Q: Did you feel the appointment as homelessness czar was at all an uneasy fit, given that your experience has been largely with native affairs?

A: Not at all! Actually, I think it was really an easy fit. And the reason I think it was easy is that when I was a tribal judge, when I was a prosecutor, when I was a defense attorney, I was dealing with a whole host of personal issues that people who find themselves afoul of the law have — I mean, whether it be substance abuse, whether it be developmental disabilities, whether it be mental issues, all of that sort of stuff. …

Then when I came back here and worked at OHA, the mission of OHA is to better the condition of Hawaiians. We’re always faced with the data on Native Hawaiians, and that data is sobering. You see certain kinds of health and other maladies that indicate that something is very wrong, and we need to address them, through education, through health programs.

What I realized when I was doing that is that education is really one of those keys, that it’s really something that offers the greatest hope for moving out of the circumstances that they’re in, into a better life, both economically and socially.

So I was always involved in these issues of trying to change people’s lives, trying to give them the tools to change their own lives. That’s the fit. …

Q: Coming into focus on this job: What is the status of the plan developed in the early days of this office?

A: Yes, there is a plan. And the governor has created the Hawaii Interagency Council on Homelessness. That models basically the same system that was created at the federal level when Barack Obama became president. … He’s created this Cabinet-level group.
The governor did the same thing. … What the Legislature did last session, with the leadership of the governor, is they made that into a legislatively created entity. So now the Hawaii Interagency Council on Homelessness is a creature of state statute. …

Q: That was 2011?

A: 2012. We met three weeks ago (in mid-September). I called that group together, and we adopted the goals, the objectives and the strategies for a plan to end homelessness.

There are four big parts to this plan: to retool the homelessness response system; to increase access to stable and affordable housing; the third is to increase economic stability and self-sufficiency; and the fourth is to improve the health and stability of people who are homeless.

I created a series of seven task forces. The work of these task forces is now to create the action steps that will accomplish each of those big goals. Those big goals align with the United States plan to end homelessness. They have a five-year plan. We’re actually drafting behind the work that has been done at the federal level, and we’re adopting that format. …

When they do this they need to figure out, first of all, what is the step we’re going to take, who is going to be responsible for making sure that happens, how is it we’re going to measure our progress and what are the resources we will need to accomplish those objectives. …

This plan that we’re in the process of putting together is designed to do one thing: It is designed to change the things that we do to address homelessness in our community. If it doesn’t impact something on the ground — in terms of how we presently operate with one another, how we presently address issues having to do with housing, with job creation and job access, with health and mental stability, with alcohol and drug addiction, with education of children and workforce training — if it doesn’t touch something in some new way, then why are we doing it? …

Q: What can the plan accomplish?

A: What I constantly find is this: There are many different groups of homeless people. They are not just one unified group. To think that we’re going to have one unified strategy, which is a one-size-fits-all approach, is really not going to make this effective.

What you have to realize is you have a series of different groups, each of whom have a series of specific and unique problems that need to be addressed. You need to design your system in such a way that you give those particular groups exactly what they need to work their way out of homelessness, to get themselves jobs and to be stable and healthy.

What I’ve found in many of the places I’ve gone and the people that I’ve talked with, is that when you’re talking with someone about “homeless people,” they have an idea of who they think are homeless. But they don’t see the full breadth of who those people are. …

Q: Let’s bite off a piece of that. Can you compare the needs of two groups? You choose.

A: Let’s talk about a family, let’s say five or six children, father is employed, they live in rental housing. Father loses job, father can’t make rent, family is too large or doesn’t have relations with other people where they can all come into housing together. They find themselves on the streets. They’re living out of a blue tarp, under a freeway or out in Makua, or out on the beach. That’s one family; that’s one situation.

Compare that to an individual who has a serious mental illness, and is really incapacitated and unable to care for themselves … that person may be homeless.

Each of those are very different situations that require very different approaches. For the family that’s recently homeless, the planning process for that family is first of all to understand their situation and to figure out how to keep them from becoming homeless. It may be some sort of temporary subsidy to allow them to be able to find a suitable place. … It may be some sort of job training program that gives them the skills to be able to buy the housing to be able to house themselves and their family.

Q: Are you talking about intervention, an early warning system?

A: This has to do with retooling the homeless response system. What that is, is to prevent them from becoming homeless in the first place. If you want to look at it this way, the difficulty with our statistical numbers is that the front door to homelessness is wide open. So you may move some people out of homelessness into permanent supportive housing, but the front door is wide open, so people keep coming in, because the economic circumstances that cause some people to become homeless continue. Same thing with people who are suffering from mental disease. …

What about people who find themselves in hospitals, for example, yet they don’t have a place to live and they don’t have the income to support themselves when they get out of the hospital? What happens to them? What about youth in foster care? … They age out. So now all of a sudden they’re too old to be in foster care. Where do they go? And they become part of this “hidden homeless.”

I’ve recently read a statistic that this hidden homeless population in Hawaii is about 25,000. People who are living with people to whom they are not related. So it’s those who are couch surfing. … They don’t count as homeless because they have a roof over their head. … Annually there are 15,000 individuals who are homeless, statewide, and an estimated 25,000 who are hidden homeless, who are doubled up in housing and not paying rent.

Q: So, we’re talking about a total of 40,000 people who are under-housed, in some way?

A: Right. And additionally in Hawaii there are nearly 19,000 households who are low-income, who are in need of housing. … What is the availability of affordable housing? The availability does not even begin to match the need.

Presently we now construct 300-400 units of affordable housing every year. At that rate, with the number of homeless growing, what you’re seeing is that we’re never going to catch up. So we really need to be addressing the barriers to creating more affordable housing.