Oahu residents are demanding that something be done now to address homelessness. 

Hale Mauliola isn’t just something: it’s an innovative, well-thought-out approach that implements community feedback and national best practices to immediately help people in great need. 

Oahu is experiencing an affordable housing crisis. The island is short 25,000 housing units to meet the needs of our population, 20,000 of which should be rentals affordable to households making 80 percent of the area median income (AMI) or below ($76,650 for a family of four). This housing squeeze has led to young people leaving their families for better opportunities on the mainland and Hawaii having the highest density of multigenerational households in the nation. 

Homelessness is the most acute and visible symptom of Oahu’s affordable housing shortage.

The most recent Point-in-Time Count, an annual effort to gauge homelessness nationally, identified 4,903 homeless people on Oahu on Jan. 25 — 1,939 of whom were unsheltered. On any given night, there are about 150 vacant beds in emergency shelters and 400 empty beds in transitional shelters across Oahu. Many homeless individuals and families say they don’t want to go into shelter for various reasons. They can’t bring pets, they have addictions and mental illness, or they claim they don’t feel safe. Hale Mauliola gives them another, more flexible option. 

The only solution to homelessness is permanent housing, with supportive services for those who need help with mental health or substance-abuse issues. 

Under existing city affordable housing rules, 30 percent of a new development must be affordable to households earning up to 140 percent of AMI ($134,120 for a family of four) and remain "affordable" for just 10 years. This is simply not creating units that match our needs and we’re confronted with the results daily, from Kakaako to Kapalama to Waianae. 

While the city works on long-term projects to create more affordable housing that Oahu needs, we’re also working hard to provide immediate housing for our unsheltered population as quickly as possible. 

A temporary transitional Housing First site on Sand Island was proposed last year and faced opposition. We listened to critics, worked with the community, service providers and homeless advocates, and looked for models from around the nation. 

The state Department of Health stepped up to help and conducted soil testing at no cost to the city. This necessary delay confirmed that the site is safe and ended up being a valuable opportunity to make substantive improvements to a proposal that has earned the support of even the most vocal critics. 

Hale Mauliola, a temporary modular housing and service center at Sand Island, will accommodate 75-100 homeless individuals this fall — and it will echo elements of some of the most progressive approaches to bringing immediate relief to people experiencing chronic homelessness. 

The target demographic is individuals because they are the ones most likely to be suffering from mental illness, substance abuse or physical problems, and are generally the most difficult to place into shelters —