Honolulu can look to other parts of the country to find new approaches to dealing with the homeless — from New Orleans to Houston to cities on the West Coast.

Despite Hawaii’s status as America’s only isolated, island state, many areas face similar problems addressing homelessness, so no idea is being dismissed, said Jun Yang, Honolulu’s executive director for the Office of Housing.

“I know we are unique, but the basic ideas of housing, nutrition — these are universal,” Yang said. “I don’t know what a deal breaker is, unless it’s costs that just don’t make sense for us here. So we’re going to try as best as we can. Everything’s on the table. How can? Can. If can, let’s do it.”

The city already has borrowed one idea from San Francisco for the planned Sand Island shipping container housing project by setting “low barriers to entry” to get more people into shelters.

After interviewing homeless service providers and government officials across the country, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser will spend the next two weeks in Seattle, San Francisco and Salt Lake City examining ideas that could be emulated here.

“They are good examples for different reasons,” said Katy Miller, coordinator for the Western region of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which represents Hawaii.

Like Honolulu, Seattle and San Francisco are dense urban cities with high housing costs that also draw millions of tourists every year to streets populated with the homeless.

Unlike Honolulu, Salt Lake City enjoys relatively inexpensive housing and land. But Honolulu officials are interested in how widespread support for homeless housing reform from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints helped turn Utah into a progressive model.

Lloyd Pendleton, a former LDS church official and former director of Utah’s Homeless Task Force, is considered a leading disciple of new ideas to address homelessness. He’s now in high demand as a speaker and consultant and gained celebrity status after he was featured on “The Daily Show” in January.

Utah has reduced its chronic homeless population by 72 percent since 2005 and Pendleton’s explanation to “The Daily Show” was simple: “You give them housing and you end homelessness.”

“They (Utah) do have access to units that are less expensive than ours and they don’t have a red-hot housing market,” Yang said. “But they’ve ended veteran homelessness and really helped the chronically homeless find housing.”

Yang is particularly interested in how widespread support from LDS leaders helped turn Utah into a national leader.

While Hawaii churches continue to host homeless outreach services and serve meals on Oahu, Yang said there’s much more that can be accomplished if they work together with common goals.

“The churches out here are big,” he said. “They are very important to the community. If they’re willing to partner with all of the efforts going on to find units, that would be a big step in the right direction.”

On the other side of Punchbowl Street, the state’s new homeless coordinator, Scott Morishige, is primarily focused on collecting data on homeless populations from Waianae to Wahiawa to Waimanalo. It’s the same kind of data the state collected on the people living in the troublesome homeless encampment in Kakaako to match them with appropriate services and housing to clear out the area.

Morishige, a social worker by training, also continues to work with a network of homeless service providers on Oahu who are using standardized intake assessment information about homeless people to more efficiently target services for each person’s circumstance.

“I’m still new to this position,” said Morishige, who’s been on the job since Aug. 24. “I haven’t looked at any specific models in other communities on the mainland. But Hawaii has benefited from a lot of technical assistance from national organizations, including HUD (the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development). One of the approaches we’re looking at is really focusing on the use of data, better understanding homeless populations. The concept is service providers get to know the homeless in their communities by name so they can better target resources. They then meet every two weeks to discuss what they’re seeing and go over cases. Those are practices we’ve adopted from other communities to better target the resources we already have.”

Yang is particularly interested in homeless concepts and projects from San Diego to Seattle that often involve pooling community services — and public and private money — to build or find more housing to get people off the street.

Members from previous Honolulu City Councils have looked at homeless efforts in Seattle and San Francisco in the past, according to officials from both cities.

More recently, Yang said that city staffers this year visited homeless projects in San Francisco on their own time while on vacation, including San Francisco’s new homeless Navigation Center built out of an empty school in the city’s Mission District.

Honolulu staff members came back with San Francisco’s idea of setting “low barriers to entry” at the Navigation Center to get more homeless people into shelters, Yang said.

The approach includes allowing pets to live in the Navigation Center because homeless people — including those in Honolulu — often refuse to give up their animals just to stay in a shelter.

“That opened our eyes,” Yang said.

So Honolulu is now testing the idea of allowing pets for the first time when it opens its Hale Mauliola homeless project comprising converted shipping containers on Sand Island, beginning in October.

“Yes,” Yang said. “We are learning from other places.”