Eight months into their visitor industry-supported Waikiki homeless outreach, the Institute for Human Services has helped 61 percent of its homeless clients in the district return to their original home states or move into shelter or housing.
From November through June 12, IHS has served 226 homeless residents in Waikiki by moving 62 of them into shelters and 28 into housing, said Kimo Carvalho, director of community services for the program, which runs the state’s largest homeless shelter.
Carvalho said IHS’ expanded Waikiki Outreach also has helped 47 homeless Waikiki residents move out of state through a relocation program that pays half of the cost of an airline ticket for homeless people who have better resources outside of Hawaii.
IHS also is using its shuttle pickup program and its Moiliili drop-in center to bring remaining clients closer to being housed, he said.
"We are very pleased with the results that we’ve been able to achieve in Waikiki," Carvalho said. "We’re ahead of our initial goals, which were to serve 300 of the district’s homeless people by the end of the year."
Carvalho partially attributes the nonprofit’s success in Waikiki to support from the visitor industry and the city, which has funded housing and compassionate disruption policies like the sit-lie law.
"We support these policies in Waikiki as a way to motivate clients to seek better options," Carvalho said.
Ricko Henry, who used to work in Waikiki and lived at the Kapalama Canal, said he and his family became homeless when public housing discovered they were not on his mother-in-law’s lease. Sweeps inspired him to move into IHS in April with his wife and young child.
"It was rough. We had our things taken. When I’m sleeping, I’m not really getting any rest because of the time when they are coming to sweep the area," Henry said. "The rules motivate people. We are doing better now at the shelter, and I’m doing my best to tell others about it. We would have come here sooner, but we didn’t know about them."
IHS resident Anthony Scimone said he supports IHS’ outreach efforts, although he’s opposed to sit-lie and other so-called "compassionate disruption" policies.
"I would eventually have come to IHS with or without sit-lie," said Scimone, who was cited by Honolulu police last week for sleeping at Kuhio Beach. "I don’t know why they have laws like these. They don’t work."
Scimone said that he’d like to relocate to his home state of New York but can’t leave until his sit-lie case is resolved in court.
"I came to Hawaii from Seattle to take advantage of the construction boom in 2003," he said. "If I had known that I’d be out of work and that I’d have to change careers, I probably wouldn’t have come here."
A recent study by graduate students at the University of Hawaii’s Department of Urban and Regional Planning, which interviewed homeless residents in Kakaako and near the Aala and Kapalama canals, concluded that the sit-lie ban and other "compassionate disruption" practices such as the stored property ordinance, sidewalk nuisance and park closure laws were ineffective, stigmatizing and criminalizing homelessness.
"Real effective solutions to houselessness depend upon increasing and continuing funding for Housing First and expanding the Housing First model to apply to those who do not fall into the chronically homeless category, to allow these people to be rapidly rehoused after falling upon hard times," said Kathryn Xian, executive director of the Pacific Alliance to Stop Slavery, who assisted in connecting interviewers with homeless residents for the study.
Xian said city sweeps to enforce the compassionate disruption laws do not move homeless people into shelters. She said as many as 21 percent of the homeless residents surveyed in the Kakaako, Aala and Kapalama encampments reported that they were less likely to move into a shelter due to sweeps, and 68 percent reported that sweeps had no effect on whether they sought emergency shelter.
Still, IHS efforts and the city’s laws have been broadly supported in Waikiki, where tourists, residents and business owners observe that they have made a difference.
Russell Peterson, a visitor from California who has been coming to Hawaii annually for 40 years, said the number of homeless and the negative behavior by some was off-putting before IHS and city initiatives were implemented.
"We’d noticed that homelessness was growing over the last five years, but it was ridiculously out of control last year. The streets, parks and pavilions smelled like pee, and there were people sleeping at the bus steps and in other areas where they shouldn’t be," Peterson said. "But we’ve noticed an enormous improvement this year."
Mark Howard, a Waikiki resident and real estate broker, said efforts by the city and IHS need to continue.
"Why didn’t they do the survey in Waikiki, where IHS has done a tremendous job? If they weren’t there the only effort would be religious groups coming out to feed the homeless pizza or give them haircuts and shave," Howard said. "We need to keep IHS on the ground offering real solutions."
IHS allocated $825,000 to expand its Waikiki outreach program at the end of last year. Carvalho said this year’s program was sustained by a $100,000 donation from the Hawaii Lodging and Tourism Association’s visitor industry charity walk and a $400,000 donation from the visitor industry-supported Hawaii for Hawaii concert, which was held at Hilton Hawaiian Village Waikiki Beach Resort in May. Additionally, the visitor industry has provided hundreds of thousands of in-kind furniture and bedding donations to make housing move-in ready.
A $2 million Housing First contract from the city also has allowed IHS to house more chronically homeless people and better leverage other housing subsidies. IHS Executive Director Connie Mitchell said the agency is more than halfway to its initial goal of serving 300 homeless people from Waikiki, where the agency believes more than 400 homeless residents live.
"People may look at the numbers and think that it doesn’t seem like a lot, but helping just one homeless person requires establishing enough of a relationship for them to allow us to begin assessing their situation and determining what kind of housing programs that are available to them," Mitchell said. "Once we get them into the system, getting them housed also takes a lot of coordination between caseworkers, housing specialists and potential landlords."
Mitchell said consistent efforts are needed for continued success. While HLTA has pledged another $100,000 from this year’s charity walk for IHS’ 2016 Waikiki outreach budget, the agency will need to come up with another $400,000 in funding to continue the program next year.
"While we have had great initial success in Waikiki, this is a very transient population. We aren’t working with a static number, so it’s going to take consistent effort to help Waikiki’s homeless and newly homeless population," Mitchell said.
Jerry Gibson, area vice president for Hilton Hawaii, said the visitor industry supports the work that IHS has done in Waikiki and is supportive of its continued effort.
"We are exciting about the success that IHS’ Waikiki outreach program has had since its inception last year," Gibson said. "IHS makes a tremendous impact in helping the homeless move into housing, and future private-public partnerships will help continue the momentum that has been started."
Julie Arigo, general manager of the Waikiki Parc Hotel, said she hopes other private-sector businesses will join with the visitor industry to support IHS’ efforts in Waikiki.
"Waikiki is the economic engine for our state. What happens here affects everyone," Arigo said. "We know homelessness is a real problem when our visitors are mentioning it. Also, I recently read that 40 percent of the homeless are working, so it should be a concern for employers everywhere."
