By Monday morning, they were back.
Of course they were back. Nobody was under the illusion that they wouldn’t be, but still, perhaps there was hope that they’d wait a little longer.
After days of work by city crews hauling five tons of homeless-generated garbage up Kuilei Cliffs from the pretty beach just east of the Diamond Head Lighthouse and rousting the hard-core homeless who had created a warren of tents and tarps connected by dirt trails along the cliffside, followed by a weekend of volunteer work, the beach was clear for maybe a matter of hours. Maybe not even that.
The intransigent homeless came right back and resumed their unsanitary, lawless lifestyle choice.
Those homeless beach encampments are chronic. They are an ugly rash that never heals despite all the effort and money and gentle encouragement for them to clean up and move into a shelter.
I went to take a look at Kuilei Cliffs Monday morning, kind of hoping there would be nothing to see but soft sand and happy surfers, thinking there might be nothing to report but a successful cleanup effort. Writing a story about what the beach looked like when a sweep worked would actually be a nice change of pace.
Along the new walking path that the city just completed this summer, there were a few pieces of trash here and there — an almost-empty roll of toilet paper in the scrub grass, a still-yellow banana peel, remnants of a plate lunch at the bottom of the trail — but otherwise, the before-and-after was dramatic, like one of those HGTV shows. Even the poop smell had gone away. A surfer followed me down the trail, put his board down on the sand and sat quietly as though in meditation. When I had been there before, it seemed as though the surfers ran across the sand to launch into the ocean in order to spend as little time as possible on the tainted beach.
But then I kept walking along the shore toward the lighthouse and Waikiki, and sure enough, there was something up on the hillside. A tarp. A tent. A multicolored dwelling. Four men sat together and watched the beach like they owned the place, like anyone on the sand was trespassing.
I turned and walked back up the hill. The surfer grabbed his board, got in the water and paddled out, away from the homeless on the hill. A mongoose that had been picking through a discarded take-out container did a 180-degree turn and disappeared into the bushes.
Mayor Kirk Caldwell can arrest 28 peaceful protesters in Waimanalo trying to save their shoreline from unnecessary development, but he can do nothing about intransigent squatters pooping along a Waikiki shoreline, creating their very own garbage dump and taking over part of the most expensive real estate in Hawaii. We’ve tried social services. We’ve tried sweeps. We’ve tried laws that say you can’t pee in public or sleep on a bus stop bench. What we haven’t tried is political will. If the mayor turned his attention to truly ending homelessness instead of building more parks for homeless to potentially ruin, maybe the fact that these jokers came right back to Kuilei Cliffs wouldn’t be so predictable and unsurprising.
Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
