So the state plans to renovate a warehouse in Kakaako for $750,000, then operate a homeless shelter for 15 families at a time at a cost of $900,000 annually for two years.

By my accounting, that is about $2.5 million over two years, or roughly $6,000 per month per family. Mind you, these are families that already have resisted going to an existing shelter. I cannot help thinking we could find decent rentals for these families and provide needed services for a lot less.

Then, the Hawaii Community Development Authority could use this prime location for something the growing community (including homeless families) really needs, like a preschool — ironically, something the new HCDA board rejected as not the highest or best use for the site.

If I were a state legislator, I would be justifiably skeptical of funding this plan to address homelessness in Kakaako.

Travis Idol

Downtown Honolulu

Put Hannemann on rail board

Regarding Richard Borreca’s recent column (“Rail critics offer ideas on how they would do it better,” Star-Advertiser, On Politics, April 12), I have a suggestion: Let’s get Mufi Hannemann back as the new board chairman for the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation. After all, our former mayor championed the rail cause and launched this train wreck. He sold the rail system to the public with lowball cost estimates and high revenue projections.

It is only fitting that Hannemann be given this opportunity to show the city how to stop the massive cost overruns and how to pay for a rail system we simply cannot afford. Some people might call this accountability.

Stan Krasniewski

Kailua

Learn to teach advanced math

Congratulations to the students of Washington Middle School on their MathCounts win, and to their teacher and coach Sung Park (“School adds to math meet streak,” Star-Advertiser, April 11). Their achievements are impressive.

I have heard a lot recently about how hard algebra is. I took a lot of math in high school in the 1960s. Geometry was hard for me, calculus even harder (we didn’t have calculators back then) but algebra was probably the easiest. So what has changed?

I can’t help but think it has to be the teaching methods. I bet Park learned math the old way. It might be interesting to see if the teaching method is what is making advanced math so hard for most of our public school students.

Mary Macmillan

Mililani

Nation losing sense of history

I was moved by George Will’s column on the loss of the Battle of Princeton site (“Joining the battle to save a historic battlefield in N.J.,” Star-Advertiser, April 10).

It seems to me that the nation is rapidly losing its identity and its soul. Once an historic site is gone, it cannot be replaced. Once our founding principles lose honor among our emerging generations they can, essentially, never regain that honor; and we become a different people from what we have been for 240 years and from what, I think, the founders hoped we would always be: a light of freedom, humanity, hope and honor to a tired world.

In respect for this hope, we still lose brave young lives in foreign lands, but that burden is borne unequally. Those who do not bear it agitate against free speech and for financial gain without personal responsibility.

It is time to think, not of political fetishes, but of what of our national persona we are losing.

Peter S. Glick

Waialae Nui Ridge

Housing First helps homeless

The Housing First program has worked well in many cities to house homeless people by giving them support toward self-sufficiency.

It is a cheaper alternative to scattered homelessness by reducing emergency-room visits, ambulance, police services and city “sweeps.” Similarly, staffed temporary tent sites and hygiene centers would be effective in reducing scattered homeless camps, making it easier to share social, food, sanitation and educational services directed toward Housing First.

Mayor Frank Fasi established a tent city in Waianae, and the current Chinatown Mental Health Kokua hygiene center serves the homeless and helps place them in housing. To be homeless is to be destabilized: It is remarkable that some homeless regularly work and their children attend school.

May the city resolve its divisive political bickering and may communities show compassion for common sense, cost-effective programs to help our struggling homeless population.

John Nakao

Ala Moana