As the city prepares its final push to clear out the last of the Kakaako homeless encampment today and Friday, Mayor Kirk Caldwell said some homeless people have simply moved next door and set up an illegal camp on state land at Kewalo Basin.

Using one of the terms he prefers over homeless “sweeps,” Caldwell said, “I do believe that ‘compassionate disruption’ does work.”

“But we don’t want to have Kakaako reconfigured somewhere else,” he told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in an exclusive interview.

The sudden influx of new tents and homeless people to Kewalo Basin Park has expanded that encampment to about 20 structures and 25 or so people, and is angering longtime homeless Kewalo residents.

James Amantiad, 40, woke up Wednesday morning to find a state official attaching a notice to his tent structure. The notice warned Amantiad that he had 24 hours to remove his belongings or they would be taken away this morning.

Amantiad had lived in the Kakaako encampment until November, when he left for Kewalo where he found more room and far less pressure from police and sheriff’s deputies.

At Kewalo Basin, Amantiad said, “They never used to bother us. Now these new people are ruining it for those of us who have been residing here for a while.”

Sam Keliiheleua has been homeless in Kewalo for 10 years and also worries about the new attention.

“Before it was so small,” Keliiheleua said. “Now they’re all coming over here.”

The expanding encampment in Kewalo underscores the argument that sweeps may clear out one area but create a bigger problem in a nearby neighborhood.

Starting at 7:30 a.m. today and again Friday, a special city cleanup crew will begin clearing out the densest and last remaining section of the Kakaako encampment. At one point in August, 293 people were counted living in wood-reinforced structures that wound around the University of Hawaii’s medical school and the Hawaii Children’s Discovery Center.

This week, 100 people were estimated to be left in the encampment.

Caldwell has no intention of pulling back on the city’s ongoing efforts to enforce the three laws that have cleaned up Waikiki, Chinatown, downtown and now Kakaako: the “sit-lie ban” and stored property and sidewalk nuisance ordinances.

But Caldwell and his administration are also working on several other fronts that are designed to get people off city streets and into temporary — and even permanent — housing.

The most ambitious plans are tied to ongoing negotiations to buy four buildings — in Makiki, Iwilei, Mapunapuna and the Kapiolani Boulevard/McCully/Date streets area — that would represent the city’s first large-scale effort to find permanent housing for homeless people instead of trying to get them in temporary homeless shelters, which continue to have vacancies.

Because of the negotiations, Caldwell declined to offer specifics. But he said each building could “house up to 80 people, even more in some of them. These are walk-ups, two-, three-, four-story.”

The results of the Hawaii Poll conducted in July found that 62 percent of Oahu residents would support a temporary shelter in their own neighborhood. Caldwell hopes the same sentiment applies to permanent housing for homeless people.

“We’re going to find out,” Caldwell said. “I think the community will be accepting once we present” the plan.

Details are still being worked out, but Gary Nakata, director of the city’s Department of Community Services, said the buildings are unlikely to be devoted solely to the concept of “Housing First,” which allows formerly homeless tenants to drink and use drugs while being surrounded by social service case workers.

The Housing First concept has been embraced in several mainland cities and replaces an old model that required homeless people to first kick alcohol and drug habits before getting a home — a requirement that’s widely considered a failure.

Instead, studies have shown that it’s much cheaper and effective to put homeless people into homes before addressing their issues.

More likely, Nakata said, the four buildings in the heart of Honolulu’s urban core would house a combination of low-income tenants and formerly homeless people. But the formerly homeless tenants would likely receive some form of social services, along with job training and other life skills.

“We want to stabilize the conditions that got these people into homelessness,” Nakata said.

The city is also getting ready to unveil its Hale Mauliola project on Sand Island, which aims to offer two to three months of temporary shelter for 80 to 90 homeless adults and couples in retrofitted shipping containers.

The project would include social services and security. And, for the first time, homeless people would be allowed to bring in their pets, which are not allowed in shelters and represent one of the many reasons that homeless people refuse to leave the streets for homeless shelters.

At the same time, the city is trying to overcome community opposition along the Leeward Coast to erect 16 to 20 “modular units” that could accommodate 75 to 90 people near Waianae High School. The 480-square-foot units would feature two bedrooms, one bathroom and a kitchen.

While the Sand Island project is intended to be temporary, short-term housing, Caldwell insisted that the city has embraced the Housing First philosophy, which has been proven to work with even the chronically homeless who often have drug, alcohol and mental health issues.

“We’re committed 100 percent to Housing First,” Caldwell said. “Government tackles the most difficult problems. If we don’t focus on the toughest (homeless problems), who is? We’re not going to back away from that.”

This morning the city will begin what it hopes will be the final sweep of the Kakaako encampment, which became a health and safety issue after state Rep. Tom Brower (D, Wai­kiki-Ala Moana-Kakaako) was attacked while photographing the encampment June 29.

The dismantling of the encampment began Sept. 8 when a special crew from the city’s Department of Facility Maintenance began the first of a series of sweeps starting with Ala Moana Boulevard and Ilalo, Cooke and Ohe streets, which border Kakaako Makai Gateway Park.

For the final two days of the cleanup around Ohe and Olomehani streets, the Department of Facility Maintenance was prepared to bring in a second dump truck to accommodate all of the tons of wood, tarps and debris expected to be left behind.