When the Waikiki "sit-lie" bill was under consideration, Mayor Kirk Caldwell and the Waikiki business community were in lock-step to get the bill passed expeditiously. The City Council did ultimately pass the bill with the understanding that the Waikiki homeless would move into shelters or to a transitional center on Sand Island.
Now, the Sand Island project may never happen, and many homeless remain unsheltered. By the administration’s own data, about 40 people have found shelter since the Waikiki sit-lie ban went into effect. Most of the homeless have instead migrated to other areas of the city, causing the Council to expand the sit-lie provisions to Chinatown, Kakaako and other business districts. The forced migration to urban areas has reached crisis proportions in areas such as the Kapalama Canal, Aala Park, Makiki-McCully and airport viaduct areas.
The influx has visibly affected businesses and residents in the urban core and the Council passed Bill 6 in response — but now the mayor appears reluctant to sign the bill. From the Council’s perspective, the sit-lie protections enacted to assist Waikiki’s businesses should apply to all Oahu businesses and public walkways.
The Council acknowledges that the sit-lie bill is not the answer to homelessness, and will continue to press for the creation of shelter and permanent housing in order to make these sit-lie measures truly effective. For fiscal year 2015-16, the Council appropriated nearly $50 million to give the administration options to develop affordable housing and launch the Housing First initiative.
The Council is looking to bolster those amounts by another $32 million for fiscal 2016-17, but funding is not the only obstacle we need to overcome. There is an apparent lack of urgency from the city administration to commit to building sufficient new shelter space and providing the case management and other support services our homeless need.
Meanwhile, the homeless population on Oahu continues to grow — up 35 percent since 2009 with the greatest increase among the chronically homeless, up 60 percent.
The Council has consistently provided the city administration with numerous viable options and is understandably frustrated by the lack of any effective actions. Additionally, the mayor is requesting $616,000 for a Strategic Development Office to oversee the city’s efforts to develop housing for the homeless and manage the city’s affordable housing portfolio. Do we really need another layer of bureaucrats to address the issue? The $616,000 per year in salaries being proposed to pay for seven positions — which breaks down to $88,000 per year for each position — would be better spent to produce more immediate results.
For example, the Council has been working on acquiring property on Nimitz Highway that could provide transitional housing for as many as 800 people, along with intensive case management services. If we are to make any significant progress on providing housing for Oahu’s homeless population, it will be through these types of projects rather than expending funds that tend to grow government rather than provide solutions.
