Honolulu is poised to begin coming to grips — at last — with its homelessness crisis, and not a minute too soon. This year’s annual "point-in-time" survey of the state’s homeless population, released last week, shows a significant uptick in the count of people living in the streets, at a time when the problem is ebbing elsewhere in the country.
This dismal new information signals the need to focus on the imminent deployment of the long-awaited Housing First program in Honolulu, the city’s first truly coordinated program that puts the emphasis on getting people off the streets and the social services they need so desperately.
Darryl Vincent of U.S. VETS, the agency that concentrates on service to homeless veterans, said that even with the progress already being made in placing the homeless, "there is something still feeding it."
Here are the numbers: The census, taken statewide on a single night in January, tallied 6,918 people, up from 5,834 four years earlier. Elsewhere, counts have averaged a drop by more than 9 percent since 2010.
Almost in perfect counterpoint to those depressing statistics, the city last week announced some hopeful news: implementation of its $2 million Housing First contract starts Monday, to place 115 chronically homeless households in Waikiki, downtown Honolulu and Leeward Oahu.
In tandem with its contract, service provider the Institute for Human Services has received a $100,000 grant from the Hawaii Lodging & Tourism Association to start a full-time outreach program in Waikiki, delivering stabilizing health and social services to the homeless as they are placed in permanent housing.
In some cases, the money can help IHS teams reconnect the homeless person with families on the mainland, then provide the means to return them to their care.
In addition to the detailed point-in-time count, social service agencies have improved data from a new assessment that they used in a coordinated survey of their own. It chronicles the specific problems faced by the homeless individuals — everything from substance abuse and mental illness to sudden job loss and family emergencies. All of this drains household resources in Hawaii’s unforgiving economy, and the family lands on the street.
This underscores what experts have affirmed: The homeless population is diverse, a reality that demands a full range of solutions.
Among these is the need to slash away at the deficit of housing units affordable for Hawaii’s poorest residents. The government must maximize opportunities to encourage projects similar to the Villages of Moa‘e Ku, the Ewa Villages rentals aimed at tenants earning 30-60 percent of the area median income.
This low end of the income scale is where the housing need is most acute — families for whom homelessness is the next step. Executives with the nonprofit developers of the project, EAH Housing, were in town for the Moa‘e Ku grand opening and told the Star-Advertiser editorial board that bureaucratic hurdles prevent many more partnerships from being forged.
"Within the city and county there’s multiple different permitting entities that govern the whole process that make things slow and complicated," said Mary Murtagh, president and CEO. That needs to change. And at the state and federal level, too, the applications process to gain the financing for the projects needs to be coordinated and streamlined, she said.
The lodging and tourism association is soliciting more support for its private-sector contribution toward combatting homelessness, and the visitor industry must respond to that call in a sustained fashion. The homelessness problem is multilayered and complex, and will take an ongoing effort to bring it under control.
The entire community — not the least of which is the tourism industry — owns a piece of this problem. The homeless need to find a home and be accepted among Hawaii’s residents, all of whom have a part to play in resolving a disgraceful situation.
