A governor who acted on homelessness? See Lingle

Now we are building fences. The latest step in the help-the-homeless campaign comes from City Hall in the form of Mayor Kirk Caldwell teaming up with the City Council to spend $240,000 for a 1-mile, chain link fence along Kapalama Canal to block the homeless from rebuilding a shanty town there.

If the way to firmly address the homeless issue is to shoo them away, then Honolulu is doing a great job. The city’s hibiscus planters outlining the boundaries of Thomas Square have proven an impressive detriment to squatters moving onto the park’s sidewalks.

And the Sand Island container village first announced by Caldwell on Aug. 27 of last year is just about fixing to get underway.

If the human catastrophe of homelessness had just dropped upon the islands, then it would be understandable that public officials were caught unaware. If suddenly Hawaii housing prices had soared 200 percent in a year, or a tidal wave of migrants washed over the state, then the elected ones could say, “Whoa, where did this come from?”

But Hawaii’s high cost of housing, lack of jobs and flood of poor migrants from Micronesia have been festering for decades.

On July 15, 2004, then-Gov. Linda Lingle gave one of her better speeches to the Chamber of Commerce of Hawaii setting out a detailed plan regarding both housing and homelessness.

“Chronically homeless means constantly homeless; it means repeatedly homeless. It means the people you see sleeping at Ala Moana Beach Park and people you pass by sleeping in the streets.

“Many of them are disabled, suffer from serious mental illness and substance abuse.

“We as a state have let this problem go on for too long. If we don’t address it head on, and seriously and collectively, it will have a profound negative impact on all of us,” Lingle said.

More shelters will not answer the problem, she said. We need more low-cost housing.

“We are not even supplying 20 percent of the needed units,” Lingle said.

“We have to quit kidding yourself about this problem. Those of us in government have to stop tinkering around with this issue and get serious,” she said.

Lingle put together a task force with developers, landowners, the construction industry and nonprofit organizations dealing with the homeless to look for solutions.

“The government, quite frankly, is inept at getting large number of affordable units on the market and we need the help of the private sector,” Lingle said.

She soon had the chance to deliver on her rhetoric when the city moved hundreds of homeless out of Ala Moana Park, for a three-day cleaning project in 2006.

Lingle declared a state of emergency to cut through the red tape and in six days set up what was dubbed the Next Step Shelter in Kakaako.

Russ Saito, Lingle’s accounting and general services director, recounted how Lingle used emergency proclamations to develop eight shelters along the Leeward Coast and on Kauai.

“It was an initial reaction to the problem; we hoped they would be replaced with more permanent facilities,” Saito said in an interview this week.

In his final report on housing for the homeless, Saito urged government to drop the shelters program and instead move to the Housing First approach. In other words, put those without a home in a domicile. If not houses, then rent subsidies for those stable enough and without the mental health and drug abuse problems.

Homelessness is a crisis that we can build our way out of if government, starting with Gov. David Ige, realizes it is an emergency and dedicates the money to the problem.

Task forces, weekly meetings among politicians and fences might look like action. Bricks and mortar, safe and secure places to live are action.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.