Find room in the inn for homeless

They’re homeless, but they’re residents of Oahu. And they have a place within residential areas, in various communities around the island.

Recent weeks have included both encouraging and disheartening developments along these lines.

On the plus side, there is potential for great community outreach from the churches, which are ideally located around the island to help with the homeless wherever they are seeking refuge. There are barriers to overcome but there is a basic willingness to help.

Mayor Kirk Caldwell, who has expressed frustration that more is not happening more quickly, should take this as a hopeful sign and redouble his efforts at outreach to them.

Where there is cause for frustration, however, is in the reaction to one of Caldwell’s stop-gap relief efforts: the proposal to place a modular housing project for homeless families in Waianae.

A presentation made last week before the Waianae Coast Neighborhood Board drew criticism from residents who worried about the project’s impact on the community. Where those concerns involve basic security and sanitation provisions, they’re reasonable and deserve attention by the city administrators planning the project.

However, the objections to the complex — comprising 16 to 20 units that could accommodate 75-90 people — center on a more basic issue. Waianae has put up with the landfill location on the coast, and residents have complained long and hard that the region is given short shrift by government officials.

This project, they said, would compound that effect and draw more of the homeless to the area.

Those fears seem less grounded in reality.

For one thing, they seem to ignore that this project in particular is being designed to accommodate families, especially those already living in encampments on the Waianae Coast.

The emphasis here is not on those needing intensive help with mental health or other chronic issues but on those handicapped by poverty. Some may have problems requiring social intervention, but those services will be provided.

The same message applies to communities throughout the island, all of which should play a part in the solution to homelessness. For many, their only failing is their financial misfortune; their need is for a leg up to get back out on their own.

The concern that the mere presence of the shelter, proposed on land near Waianae High School and next to Maluhia Lutheran Church, will lure more people to the area is not borne out by the patterns now in evidence: Many of the homeless tend to settle in areas that serve their needs, one way or another. Some want to be close enough to workplaces to make public transportation easier.

And some, including many families with children, hope to keep their kids going to the neighborhood school to which they’re accustomed — where they can feel a bit at home, even when they have none.

These are people already in the community, who likely lived in one of its conventional dwellings before they fell into homelessness. They still want and need to feel a part of that.

That is why community-based services are so crucial to the ongoing response to homelessness on Oahu. Faith-based congregations should be tapped for their services, and many of them already are willingly supplying them. Family Promise of Hawaii, for example, is one that leverages community resources to help the homeless, the children in particular.

Some of the churches the mayor has approached raised some legitimate concerns about the role they might play in housing the homeless. Some are bound by lease restrictions; others are worried about security.

What the city needs to do is continue pursuing ways to solve these problems — or, when they’re insoluble, to find other ways churches can help.

But officials must not give up. The best way to ease the way back to self-sufficiency for homeless families is to find room for them where they want to be — in their own communities.

They are neighbors, and they deserve to be treated as such.