Larry Geller, a longtime community activist for various organizations but testifying before the City Council as an individual, said he "bristled" upon hearing Mayor Kirk Caldwell describing Honolulu as on the "vanguard" for Housing First, the premiere initiative in national efforts to counter homelessness.
"This is 2014, folks," Geller told the Council, which on Thursday took up controversial bills for restrictions on encampments on sidewalks, in Waikiki or even islandwide. "Housing First has been around since 2004 or 2005."
He had a good point. Many other U.S. cities are leaps and bounds ahead of Honolulu in implementing the program — which actually originated in the late 1980s. Housing First puts top priority on providing stable, permanent shelter for the most vulnerable among the homeless population, and then immerses them in the health and social services aimed at improving their circumstances.
But even as the public spotlight has been trained on the fight over the proposed "sit-lie" bills, there is now some progress on Housing First in Honolulu.
Some at the hearing suggested that it’s really the permanent housing that Housing First would provide, not the emergency shelter vacancies, that is required to accommodate even the limited numbers living on Waikiki streets.
Scott Morishige is executive director of PHOCUSED, a coalition of organizations and individuals providing health and human service programs and services. Those who could be cited for occupying the sidewalks in Waikiki are typically looking for a housing option other than shelters, which do have openings for individuals, he said.
"Even if these laws are implemented, and while these bed spaces are available, I don’t think it would necessarily follow that those individuals would move into those bed spaces," Morishige said.
Among the criticisms of the sit-lie bills, which last week advanced out of Council committee for final votes next month, is the assertion that such enforcement strategies should wait until there are alternative accommodations. For the short term, the Council may be looking at creating a temporary area at Sand Island.
For the most chronically homeless people, though, advocates see Housing First as the preferred solution. The Caldwell administration has pushed back the start of housing placements to October.
One key task in the lead-up to the launch date is largely complete: drawing up the list of people most in need of the housing assist. Over several months the city has been working with service providers to assess the homeless community, a data-collection effort coordinated by PHOCUSED.
Various service providers that do outreach in the streets have agreed on a single "vulnerability index" questionnaire, Morishige said, adding that teams have collected answers from roughly 830 people around Oahu.
Of that number, roughly one-third has qualified under federal guidelines for Housing First, he said, which is a program designed for the chronically homeless.
Those guidelines include criteria that clients will have been homeless for more than a year, or will have had at least four major episodes of homelessness in three years, said Jun Yang, executive director of the city’s Office of Housing.
Various pots of money have been set up to address the homelessness problem. The state budget includes $20.8 million for various homelessness programs, including a Housing First project. And the Council authorized $32 million in bond authorization and $12.2 million in its capital budget for new construction or renovation projects to create Housing First units.
More immediately, the city is planning to help 110 people off the homelessness priority list in this first, one-year phase, largely with the $3 million appropriated by the Council, said Pam Witty-Oakland, the city’s director of the Department of Community Services. However, the first 10 matches of clients with apartments will be through a partnership with the state Department of Health and its contractor, Helping Hands Hawaii, which has a federal grant for $120,000.
"We’re estimating it’s going to take us $25,000 a year per person, $12,000 of that is going to be for rental assistance, roughly $1,000 a month in rent, and $13,000 a year in the wraparound services — the case management, the substance abuse treatment, the mental health treatment," Witty-Oakland said.
Clients are primarily individuals, she added, but there are some families in the mix as well.
"We’re going to go with those who have the highest scores first, those who were at the greatest risk," she said.
Yang said the assessment process started in early June with a training that involved all the social service agencies that do outreach to the homeless, the organizations setting the collective goal of completing 1,000 surveys in a three-month period.
"We need to be able to figure out what that need is, and then match the resources correctly," he said.
"The providers agreed to unite and use a common tool and start identifying the most vulnerable people to be housed," Witty-Oakland added. "And that’s never been done before. They used to all use their own yardstick, and it was apples to oranges."
The city has already taken the next step: advertising the request for proposals for a contract to run the program of placing the residents and providing the services. The contractor could turn out to be a single agency or possibly a partnership of multiple agencies or providers, Witty-Oakland said.
"We’ve encouraged all of them, collectively, to put together a proposal and then divide it up geographically," she said. "Because preferably we want one contract so that there is one entity accountable for the breadth of services, housing all the way through to case management and mental health."
"The providers have already been identifying the individuals," she said. "And the providers already have existing relationships with landlords — because most of them already provide some housing assistance.
"So once they get that money, it’s a matter of lining up the units and the people," she added. "We’re expecting they can do somewhere around two individuals a week, nine or 10 a month. It’s going to take them a year to get 100 people into units. It’s not going to be 100 people the day the contract takes effect. It’s going to be a process over time."
Witty-Oakland has little doubt that the accommodations can be found, though. The city manages 3,500 housing vouchers in its program to distribute federal Section 8 housing assistance, she said, with each participant getting 60 days to find a rental.
"I looked at how many of them find that unit in 60 days, or do they lose the voucher because they can’t. And 95 percent of them, they get the unit in the 60 days," she said. "We have a tight market, but there’s a turnover.
"I will tell you that the Housing First tenants are going to be a little more difficult to place because of the nature and the challenges of the person," she acknowledged. "But they come with 24/7 case management, a case-manager social worker who’s going to be accountable to the landlord, and that includes prompt payment to the landlord."
In the beginning the case-management checks will be frequent, even daily, Yang said.
"We’re not asking for huge complexes to be filled with just homeless, we’re asking to just give us a couple units," Yang said. "We’re talking across the urban Honolulu and Leeward coast, 200-300 people. With our vouchers and, together with the state resources, we should be able to address a couple hundred people."
The homelessness problem also is getting attention from the private sector, including Waikiki hotels and businesses that are discussing ways to help service providers, such as helping to fund transportation to shelters and other supports.
It’s a particularly knotty problem, causing a lot of community conflict, but city officials say Housing First has potential to break the stalemate. To those residents who argue that some of the homeless choose that option, Yang acknowledged that service providers sometimes do run into resistance persuading even the chronically homeless to come into shelters.
But he’s sure Housing First will be different. Telling them there is a place of their own they can move into will bring a different response.
"When we go out and talk with them," he said, "I haven’t heard a ‘no’ yet."
Getting in line for Housing First
Here are the questions asked of more than 800 people in Oahu’s homeless population to rank them on a priority list for Housing First accommodation:
1. What is the total length of time you have lived on the streets or in shelters?
2. In the past three years, how many times have you been housed and then homeless again?
3. In the past six months, how many times have you been to the emergency department/room?
4. In the past six months, how many times have you had an interaction with the police?
5. In the past six months, how many times have you been taken to the hospital in an ambulance?
6. In the past six months, how many times have you used a crisis service, including distress centers or suicide prevention hotlines?
7. In the past six months, how many times have you been hospitalized as an in-patient, including hospitalizations in a mental health hospital?
8. Have you been attacked or beaten up since becoming homeless?
9. Threatened to or tried to harm yourself or anyone else in the last year?
10. Do you have any legal stuff going on right now that may result in you being locked up or having to pay fines?
11. Does anybody force or trick you to do things that you do not want to do?
12. Ever do things that may be considered to be risky like exchange sex for money, run drugs for someone, have unprotected sex with someone you don’t really know, share a needle, or anything like that?
13. I am going to read types of places people sleep. Please tell me which one that you sleep at most often. (Categories: Shelter; street; sidewalk or doorway; car, van or RV; bus or subway; beach, riverbed or park; other)
14. Is there anybody that thinks you owe them money?
15. Do you have any money coming in on a regular basis, like a job or government benefit or even working under the table, binning or bottle collecting, sex work, odd jobs, day labor, or anything like that?
16. Do you have enough money to meet all of your expenses on a monthly basis?
17. Do you have planned activities each day other than just surviving that bring you happiness and fulfillment?
18. Do you have any friends, family or other people in your life out of convenience or necessity, but you do not like their company?
19. Do any friends, family or other people in your life ever take your money, borrow cigarettes, use your drugs, drink your alcohol, or get you to do things you really don’t want to do?
20. Surveyor, do you detect signs of poor hygiene or daily living skills?
