Robert Wade’s wife told him to get out of her life for good and bought him a one-way ticket from Tampa, Fla., to Honolulu, where Wade landed on Sept. 30 with no job, no home, no friends, no family and no plan.

After four increasingly desperate calls for help to 911 and five nights sleeping on the grounds of the state Capitol, state library and in a hospital bed at the Queen’s Medical Center, Wade on Oct. 5 found his way to Hawaii’s largest homeless shelter, the Institute for Human Services in Iwilei.

Since July 1, IHS has housed 104 mainland homeless people just like Wade.

The number is on pace to far surpass the 216 newly arrived mainland homeless people IHS took in for all of fiscal 2015, which ended June 30.

Wade, 58, has some advice for other people struggling on the mainland who wonder whether they’d be better off being homeless in Hawaii:

“If you think this is paradise, it’s not,” Wade said. “Paradise is having a nice home and a family. Don’t go anywhere if you’re homeless and don’t have a plan.”

As the administrations of Gov. David Ige and Mayor Kirk Caldwell continue to search for new ways to address the estimated 4,900 people who are homeless on Oahu, IHS continues to receive emails, phone calls, tweets and Facebook messages from homeless people on the mainland who are considering coming to Hawaii with no housing and no idea how much it actually costs to live here.

“We do our best to discourage them,” said IHS spokesman Kimo Carvalho.

But when they do end up at IHS, the two most common reasons newly arrived homeless people cite on their paperwork for coming to Hawaii are “change of scenery” and “I thought I could make it,” Carvalho said.

Contrary to “urban myth,” Carvalho said, there is no evidence that states or municipalities are clearing their streets by sending their homeless to Hawaii.

“No client has ever stated their home state sent them to Hawaii,” he said.

But the influx of newly arriving homeless people from the mainland is undeniable.

Just before Wade checked into IHS’ men’s shelter, a couple from Canada dipped into their savings to buy one-way tickets to Honolulu and showed up at IHS’ family shelter with their two children.

“They were not homeless in Canada but had the rent on their apartment run out and just hopped on a plane to Hawaii and came straight to our homeless shelter in a cab and said: ‘We need shelter. We have no place to go tonight,’” Carvalho said. “They said they felt unsafe in Canada and had heard such great things about Hawaii. But they didn’t really think things through. What is the point of sheltering them when there are local families who have been living in Kakaako for six, seven years? This is for locals who need shelter. But we do not discriminate.”

Right after the Canadians arrived at IHS’ family shelter, another man who had been homeless in Seattle for 30 years appeared at IHS’ men’s shelter.

“He said Hawaii had been on his bucket list, so he said, ‘I’m going to Hawaii,’” Carvalho said. “He had been running around for three days, getting high, and said he’s sober now and wants a free ticket back to Seattle. We said, ‘We just don’t ship homeless people around the country.’ He needs a confirmed plan to end his homelessness before we would send him back.”

The Hawai‘i Lodging and Tourism Association has funded a $30,000 project that since November 2014 has flown 115 Waikiki homeless people back to the mainland, as long as they can show they have a plan to get out of homelessness.

But the program is only intended to help clear Waikiki of homeless people. It does not apply to recent transplants such as Wade, the Canadians and the chronically homeless man from Seattle who don’t have someone back home to help them, Carvalho said.

State Rep. John Mizuno (D, Kamehameha Heights- Kalihi Valley) has twice proposed that the state contribute $100,000 to fly homeless people back to the mainland, but Mizuno’s proposals have always died in the Legislature. Mizuno continues to raise money, spend his own cash and use his personal frequent-flier miles to return homeless people to their families back home.

Last year the Watumull Foundation gave IHS a $10,000 grant to relocate homeless people back to the mainland, and IHS just received a $15,000 grant from the Pettus Foundation for the same purpose.

But IHS insists that someone on the mainland — even if it’s just social service case workers — has to be willing to help a homeless client before it puts that person on a plane.

To further discourage mainland homeless people, IHS charges them four times the amount that single adults from Hawaii pay to stay at IHS.

On Nov. 1, IHS’ fee for single adults goes up to $100 from $90 a month and the fee for a family rises to $130 from $120 a month.

The $400 monthly rate for mainland homeless people stays the same. The mainland rate was last raised five years ago from $350.

Last week Wade ran out of the $80 that his estranged wife gave him just before he boarded his flight to Hawaii at Tampa Airport.

Wade has bad eyesight and hearing problems and is a Type 2 diabetic. Last week he spent his last $1 on a bag of M&M’s at IHS to get his blood sugar up.

For people like him who can’t afford the $400 shelter fee, IHS will waive Wade’s expenses if he works 10 hours a week at the shelter, just as IHS will do for anyone who can’t pay the shelter fees.

“If you’re here less than a year in Hawaii, we’re going to charge you a mainland fee because you came here without resources,” Carvalho said. “But they’re scared just like any client. Part of the challenge is trying to figure out what to do with people like this who just show up.”

Before he landed in Honolulu, Wade had never been homeless.

He grew up in Huntington Beach, Calif., and bounced around the country doing a variety of jobs. He said he quit his last job as a certified nursing assistant seven months ago in North Carolina when “a deranged patient” attacked him.

But Wade’s life really started falling apart a year ago when his mother died, leaving him with an estranged 16-year-old daughter and wife as his only remaining family.

So Wade moved from North Carolina to Port Charlotte, Fla., to try reconciling.

But his wife eventually gave him an ultimatum: “She said she’d buy me a ticket to anywhere I wanted, but it had to be one-way.”

Wade landed at Honolulu Airport with two cans of trail mix, a backpack full of clothes, a cellphone low on battery power and no way to charge it, and a laptop computer that got broken on the trip.

He quickly got dehydrated and disoriented, wandering strange streets with names he could not pronounce, and ended up at the state library on Punchbowl Street.

Like so-called “chronically homeless” people who use a disproportionate amount of police, ambulance and hospital resources, Wade started calling 911 looking for help.

He ended up at Queen’s two or three times, including a brief stay in the psychiatric ward.

“They said, ‘This is Hawaii. There already is an army of homeless people and we cannot take you in unless you are a danger to other people,’” Wade recalled. “This was emphasized.”

He then took another approach to find shelter and food. While standing on the steps of the library, Wade called 911 yet again to report a fictitious crime he hoped would send him to jail and get him off the street.

“I said, ‘I have spray-painted cars all up and down Punchbowl Avenue. I’ve had an attack of consciousness and I want to be arrested,’” Wade said. “I lied with pride because I felt my life was in danger and I needed help. If I went to prison, I’d have had food, water, a bunk and medical care, which I presently do not have.”

Police did not arrest him and Wade used $7 of his dwindling $80 to take a cab to IHS.

Before IHS took him in, Wade said his first days being homeless in Honolulu were “scary.”

“My mental status has been flapping in the breeze the whole time,” he said. “I was lost. I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, don’t smoke. I’m not crazy, but I am a little eccentric, I guess.”

At IHS, Wade sleeps on a mat by a pillar in the dining hall. He tucks his shoes under the mat to prop up his head like a pillow. He has no blanket or sheets.

A team of University of Hawaii medical students gave him medicine to stabilize his diabetes and has offered to supply him with expensive batteries for his cochlear implant that allows him to hear out of his right ear.

But after two weeks in Hawaii, Wade now wants to go back to his childhood home in Huntington Beach.

“I want out,” he said.

But Wade has neither money for airfare nor “a family to welcome me.”

IHS social workers will try to find a group of social workers in Orange County who will watch out for Wade, to get him qualified for a plane ticket back to the mainland.

Until then, IHS’ Carvalho called Wade’s experience “typical” for newly arrived homeless people from the mainland.

Since the deaths of his parents and the breakup of his family in Florida, Carvalho said, Wade is clearly “experiencing trauma, grief and loss.”

While IHS continues to discourage homeless people like Wade from arriving in Hawaii and tapping into public resources, Carvalho said everyone is entitled to help.

“These are real people who are showing up,” he said.