City Council falls short on homeless issue

Honolulu’s City Council is patting itself on the back for a record increase in funding to combat homelessness on Oahu, but so much of the money is tied to general obligation bonds that it could be years before the city can build or acquire enough affordable rentals to get people off the street.

Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s administration must work swiftly to find suitable properties within the two-year window available to designate this spending, and the Council must be prepared to replace it with less cumbersome financing should officials return next year with word that no feasible sites could be found.

The Council should have met Caldwell’s request for more flexible funding from the outset, which would have gotten more chronically homeless people into apartments right away, and eased partnerships with nonprofits and real-estate developers to build, acquire and manage affordable rentals in the future.

The mayor had sought a total of $22.9 million: $18.9 million in CIP money from the city’s affordable housing fund, plus $1 million from the operating budget to administer that spending and $3 million from the operating budget for rental assistance and support services for the chronically homeless, who are rightly the focus of the city’s Housing First initiative.

Instead, the Council cut the affordable housing fund allocation to $12.2 million and the operating fund amount to a total of $3 million, and added $32 million in general-obligation bonds from the CIP budget.

The bond money is less flexible than the other CIP funding and plunges the city back into the housing-development business — an industry for which it is ill- staffed and had long exited.

Money from the sale of general-obligation bonds can be used to build, acquire or renovate housing units, but not maintain or manage the facilities. Plus, paying off the general obligation bonds will cost taxpayers about another $20 million in debt service.

Still, the Council is to be applauded for recognizing that homelessness must be a top budget priority for the city. The Council’s total $47.2 million appropriation allows the city to move forward on Housing First initiatives in Waikiki and elsewhere on Oahu, following the model the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has identified as a national "best practice" for getting and keeping mentally ill, drug- and alcohol-addicted and other chron- ically homeless people off the streets.

The program combines rental assistance for individual apartments with medical and psychiatric treatment and drug- and alcohol-rehabilitation. The $3 million in operating funds is expected to serve more than 100 people once the money is available with the new fiscal year. Utilizing the general-obligation bonds will be trickier, city officials acknowledge, but they are looking for urban properties and altruistic developers to partner within the funding constraints.

Honolulu is part of the "25 Cities" initiative, a coalition of U.S. cities with high concentrations of chronically homeless that is working to implement Housing First and leverage federal funding, including grants, Medicaid and Social Security disability payments, to help lower the burden on state taxpayers.

The need is acute on Oahu. The island’s homeless population has risen 30 percent since 2009, to a total of 4,712 individuals, according to the city’s 2014 census. Of those, 1,633 were "unsheltered," meaning they did not reside in emergency shelters or transitional housing. The increase in the number of severely mentally ill homeless people is especially alarming; 924 such individuals were counted on Oahu this past January, including 521 men and women who were unsheltered.

These are people who, 50 years ago, might have been institutionalized against their will, before U.S. courts, and society overall, recognized that such confinements were unjust and unconstitutional. The promise then was that community-based group homes and other supportive housing would replace inhumane institutions and provide a decent existence for disabled people who cannot fend for themselves. That did not happen.

Today it strains the very notion of aloha to see an old man, slumped in a wheelchair, cowering in a King Street doorway in the middle of the night, or an elderly woman, wearing only a hospital gown, screaming into traffic as she aims her walker toward Ala Moana Boulevard.

Sadly, these are not uncommon scenes in urban Honolulu. With this budget, the city comes closer to fulfilling the promise of Housing First for the mentally ill. It’s only a start, and a flawed one at that.

Still, we applaud this important effort.