Don’t play games with Housing First

Let’s be blunt. Honolulu is not the city it once was. Neighborhoods throughout the urban core are dotted with homeless encampments, from Waikiki to Kakaako, Moiliili to Iwilei. In some places there are one or two or three individuals, their meager belongings crammed into shopping carts. In other places there are whole rows of tents, belonging to street people who are hunkered down with campstoves, makeshift bathing buckets and other belongings crowding public parks or sidewalks.

It’s no way to live, on that point everyone seems to agree. And yet, there are thousands of people on Oahu living that way. This despite the availability of space in various homeless shelters and the regular enforcement of city ordinances that clear the homeless people’s belongings from public parks and sidewalks.

The overarching need is for more affordable rental housing — decent apartments for the working poor. Various state and city initiatives rightly seek to boost such developments. However, for the most persistent cadre of homeless individuals, people who are mentally ill or dependent on drugs or alcohol and have been on the streets for a year a more, intensive outreach is needed. These people, barely tethered to the rest of humanity, desperately need Housing First.

Housing First is the philosophy, identified by the federal government as the best solution to chronic homelessness, that gets individuals into personal apartments or group homes regardless of their personal habits, then provides the counseling, treatment and other social services that can help them solve the underlying problems that prevent them from functioning normally in the world.

It’s not cheap, but the alternative is ultimately far more costly: The loss of community standards and of caring for the least fortunate. How Honolulu is perceived by the rest of the world is no shallow consideration for an economy that depends on fulfilling tourists’ fantastical visions of paradise. Honolulu may not be paradise anymore, but all is not lost. Feasible solutions are on the horizon, foremost among them Housing First.

So the message to the City Council is to stop playing politics with funding for this program.

The Council’s Budget Committee cut more than $5 million from Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s $22 million budget proposal for Housing First, and threatened to take even more unless the mayor provides exact details now about where the future housing units will be located. Community Services Director Pam Witty-Oakland pleaded with the committee members to reconsider, noting that every $25,000 cut from the budget proposal will keep one homeless individual or family from getting permanent housing.

The Caldwell administration has the order right on this contentious issue, which has moved along in fits and starts so many times before: Nail down the funding, do the community outreach to build support for Housing First units throughout the city, then finalize the lease agreements on specific properties.

In tandem, we as a community need to galvanize a commitment to enforcement that will firmly prod the chronically homeless into such housing by making the streets much less of an option.

But to even begin, in order for Housing First to live up to its promise, the Council and the mayor must join in a long-term commitment to this philosophy, which is aimed at the most recalcitrant segment of a difficult population. Anything less than a unified front seems doomed to fail.

Caldwell’s Housing First funding proposals are contained in the operating and capital improvement budgets, which the full Council will take up at a public hearing before returning the measures to the budget committee for further refinements.

We hope the Council will recognize the urgency of restoring full funding to Caldwell’s modest Housing First plan. No less than the future of Honolulu is at stake.