Advocates for the homeless rallied in front of Honolulu Hale on Tuesday to urge government officials to do more to get people into housing, scrap homeless camp sweeps and halt expansion of the city’s “sit-lie” ban.

As drivers honked in support, 30 or so people lined King Street waving signs that read “Homelessness Is Not a Crime,” “Where’s Aloha for the Homeless?” and “Repeal Sit-Lie Now.”

Catherine Graham, co-chairwoman of the housing task force for Faith Action for Community Equity, helped organize Tuesday’s rally so people will “keep calling the mayor and the governor and say, ‘No more sweeps until we have a place for people to live.’ It makes no sense whatsoever.”

Graham, whose 24-year-old son is homeless somewhere on the mainland, said people in Hawaii need to realize that everyone needs to help solve homelessness in the islands.

While she and others want state and city officials to do more, Graham said it also “hinders the government for everybody to say, ‘Not in my backyard.’”

Groups representing social service agencies, churches and others came together under the Housing Now Coalition and hand-delivered letters to Gov. David Ige, Mayor Kirk Caldwell, legislators and City Council members Tuesday, urging them to make affordable housing their top priority.

The coalition’s letter asks for a halt on expanding the city’s “sit-lie” ban that helped clean up places such as Waikiki but also fueled the expansion of the Kakaako homeless encampment and a much smaller one on Harding Avenue across from the Market City Shopping Center that was cleaned out Monday.

The coalition’s letter asks for a halt of homeless sweeps until their effects can be studied.

“Since their implementation, the number of houseless has increased, not decreased, and a recent study from the University of Hawaii Department of Urban and Regional planning begs the question if these city sweeps of the poor do more harm than good,” according to the letter. “Why waste precious time and money with policies that only increase the hardship of unsheltered people while failing to solve the underlying problem?”

Councilwoman Kymberly Pine, a “sit-lie” critic, thanked the crowd for “fighting for residents that are crying out for our help.”

She told them that the “sit-lie” law, which prohibits sitting or lying on sidewalks in specified areas, “is not us.”

“It has been proven to not solve the problem,” Pine said. “In fact it makes the problem worse.”

Out on King Street, Dave Cannell, 62, explained how he and his wife and son went from a “middle-class family in Kailua” to homelessness 10 years ago after Cannell developed Type 2 diabetes, lost his job, got behind on the rent, bounced around the island staying with friends, then finally ended up homeless in an electric wheelchair.

Before, when he would see homeless people in Kailua, Cannell said “my attitude was, ‘Why don’t they get a job?’ Then I had a rude awakening. You can spiral down fast.”

The city and state continue to look for a solution to the growing homeless encampment in Kakaako that last week was estimated by Managing Director Roy Amemiya to contain 300 people.

At a press conference Monday, Ige and Caldwell said they still don’t have a place for all of them to go. The first people who could be cleared out this month would likely end up at the nearby Next Step Shelter, Ige said.

But Cannell said shelters don’t work for many people like him, who stayed at Next Step in 2010 and again in 2012 even after his wife and son refused.

“If you want to get your stuff stolen, go to a homeless shelter,” Cannell said. “If you want to get constantly bit by bedbugs, go to a homeless shelter. There wasn’t a night when there weren’t fights while you’re trying to get a good night’s sleep. You’re mixed in with people with mental problems and alcoholics who just pull down their pants and pee right in the open-air shelter that’s really a warehouse. The cops were constantly there. But there’s really no security.”

Kauai County Councilman Gary Hooser later told Cannell and the rest of the crowd that someone had told him Tuesday morning that “sit-lie” laws are necessary “to make the homeless uncomfortable so they’ll go into shelters.”

“I was appalled,” Hooser said.

Instead, Hooser said, politicians need to be made “uncomfortable because by any stretch of the imagination, they’re not doing enough. … When they tell you there’s no money, it means it’s not a priority. … You have to make noise if you want things done around here.”