Pathways needed to help homeless

Hawaii — urban Honolulu in particular — continues to struggle to gain a foothold in overcoming a mounting homelessness problem. There have been assorted efforts to broaden the range of emergency and traditional housing options, but not all the challenges arise from the number of rooms available.

One aspect, which the stalled project known as Pathways was designed to remedy, lies in persuading some of the most troubled members of the population — including those with substance-abuse and mental-illness problems — that they can and should come in and get back on the path to more independent living.

This means uniting health and social services with a stable living arrangement. Homelessness dehumanizes people by stripping away all measures of certainty. We can sleep here tonight, they might think, but tomorrow? Who knows?

This is why it’s imperative that city officials and their partners in state and nonprofit agencies, as well as businesses, find a way to resurrect Pathways as part of a broad-based campaign to give people longer-term shelter and hope for a restoration of normal life.

The principal impediment was revealed recently when Sheila Beckham, chief executive officer of the Waikiki Health Center, said the clinic had to withdraw its offer to operate Pathways. The problem, she said, was that the 18-month subsidy offered by the city would have covered construction but not operations of the facility. And the center administrators are right to feel concerned that the expense of running the programs would strain the agency’s finances and threaten its principal mission as a federally certified health center.

The importance of the Pathways initiative cannot be exaggerated. The Waikiki district, where street encampments have sounded alarms for those intent on protecting Hawaii’s tourism brand, needs some means of outreach to this community. There are needs all over Oahu, but it’s reasonable to choose Waikiki as the first to receive this kind of facility.

Further, this model needs to be developed without needless delay and, if it’s as successful as it’s been in other cities, replicated elsewhere on Oahu.

Beckham has said she’d be open to hearing proposals for startup funding from various sources — and it would be a worthwhile cooperative venture for the state’s tourism leaders and for visitor-industry companies, which could pool resources.

The good news is that city and state lawmakers, as well as the state’s homelessness coordinator and various service providers from the nonprofit sector, have ramped up discussions about how to fund this project as well as finding other community resources that could be brought to bear on the problem.

The problem may reach the point where a stopgap solution, such as creating a sanctioned campsite for people who won’t go to shelters, may have to be considered. But most of the experts in the field believe that this amounts to sweeping the problem under the rug and that homelessness won’t be solved until the community at large works at steering unsheltered families and individuals toward the help they need.

Carol Fukunaga, newly elected to the City Council, is working with her former Senate colleague, Suzanne Chun Oakland, and other officials to find what funds may be available and what existing properties could be used in an ongoing program for the chronically homeless.

Honolulu residents have grown increasingly frustrated with the persistence of the homelessness problem and its effect on their own neighborhoods. They need to speak up at hearings to back such efforts and otherwise express the urgent need for pathways out of this crisis.