Help working homeless with rent

More than a third of homeless adults surveyed for a new study reported working to earn income, a finding that bolsters social advocates’ calls to subsidize monthly rent for employed homeless people who don’t earn enough to cover rent in Honolulu’s stratospheric market.

There should be a public policy preference for work over welfare, as a 2013 report by the Cato Institute emphasized. That report, "The Work Versus Welfare Tradeoff 2013: An Analysis of the Total Level Benefits by State," found that Hawaii offered the most generous annual welfare package of any state, when assistance from seven major federal anti-poverty programs was counted.

Although the libertarian think tank acknowledged that the figure of $49,175 may have been distorted by Hawaii’s high cost of living, it still put the state atop the list of 13 states where welfare paid more than $15 an hour — financially superior to holding a minimum-wage job. A person in Hawaii would have to earn $29.13 an hour to clear the same amount in potential welfare benefits, it said, claiming a clear disincentive to work.

The report warned of risks for long-term welfare recipients as dire as for the larger community shouldering the economic burden. Regular, steady employment, beginning in entry-level jobs, builds the skills, expectations and ethos that American life depends on for a civil society. The prospect of an unemployed class of people who through lack of education, training, opportunity and practice end up virtually unemployable is a discouraging one.

NOW, a new survey, conducted among Oahu’s homeless population, offers an important counterpoint to the CATO report, which has lodged in the public consciousness and contributes to an unfortunate resistance to funding assistance that in the long run could save more money than it costs.

A project conducted by two University of Hawaii graduate students in urban and regional planning surveyed 70 homeless heads of households living in tents in Kakaako, along the Kapalama Canal and in Aala Park, a small segment of the estimated 1,939 unsheltered homeless in Honolulu County, but a meaningful sample nonetheless.

The students’ resulting report, "The Effects of City Sweeps and Sit-Lie Policies on Honolulu’s Houseless," stands mainly as a critique of the city’s "compassionate disruption" strategy, but it also serves to highlight the individuality of homeless people who have been dehumanized, and gives voice to those whose insight into their own lives should help guide policymakers.

FOR ONE THING, that 37 percent of the Oahu homeless people interviewed held jobs but did not earn enough to pay for housing belies the notion of sloth and supports the idea that increasing housing subsidies for the working poor would help a significant number of families quickly get off and stay off the streets.

Homeless families whose fathers, mothers or both are already working seem the prime prospects for successful transition out of the tent towns sprouting around Oahu. It would cost less than $1 million a year to provide 200 homeless households $350 a month each extra to pay rent, according to advocates. Reserved only for homeless people who are employed and stay employed, trying this pragmatic approach would be a worthy expenditure of taxpayers’ dollars, especially weighed against the current cost of enforcing sweeps and citations.

Of course, there would need to be a stringent selection process, with households proving continued employment, and a finite subsidy period.

Solving the core problem for this one segment of the homeless population would conserve social-service resources for those homeless whose myriad problems contribute to their homeless state, and prevent homeless families whose main challenge is poverty from developing the entrenched dysfunction associated with prolonged homelessness.