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Question: They are putting big homeless tents in Old Stadium Park. Do the people on King Street have to go there? What about the coronavirus?
Answer: The HONU program (Homeless Outreach and Navigation for Unsheltered Persons) began operating in Old Stadium Park on Monday, as the city had announced it would (808ne.ws/honu228). Its move there from Waipahu was planned months in advance and has nothing to do with COVID-19 containment or mitigation, said Brandi Higa, a spokeswoman for the city.
As your question indicates, there has been an unsheltered homeless population in McCully-Moiliili for years, including in or around the park, which is along South King Street at Isenberg Street.
To answer your second question, homeless people who have set up tents on public areas, such as the sidewalks on the makai or mauka sides of South King Street, won’t be forced into the HONU program, but neither should they expect to stay put. The arrival of the HONU project in any Oahu neighborhood signals stepped-up police enforcement of laws and rules regarding the use of public property within a 2- to 5-mile radius, for the duration of the project and a month after it departs.
The city hopes that homeless people in the area willingly engage the services offered, which include cots for sleeping (inside the large inflatable tents), a hygiene center where they can shower, laundry facilities, food and 24-hour staffing. The “triage” services are designed to get homeless individuals in the pipeline for more permanent housing.
HONU will be open at Old Stadium Park for no longer than 90 days, said Higa.
While you worried the project was a punitive one — it’s not — other readers wondered whether the setup was safe in urban Honolulu amid the global outbreak of COVID-19, a new type of flu-like illness that Hawaii health officials are striving to keep in check.
Higa said HONU adheres to hygiene standards that include providing soap and water for hand-washing and having hand-sanitizer dispensers on the premises, as well as providing toilet, shower and laundry facilities, all of which contribute to sanitary conditions overall. The setup is no different from at Waipahu Cultural Garden Park, where HONU successfully originated in December, she said.
The Waipahu site closed Monday, in keeping with HONU’s short-term, “triage” approach. The city said 258 unsheltered homeless clients were served there, including 156 who moved into shelters and one who moved into permanent housing. Another 90 “self-exited” that HONU site to stay with family, enter a medical facility or go to an unknown destination.
HONU is run jointly by the Honolulu Police Department and the city Department of Community Services.
Across Oahu last year there were about 2,400 homeless people living on the streets or in other unsheltered places not fit for human habitation, according to the Oahu 2019 Point-in-Time Count, 808ne.ws/oahupit2019, the most recent report available. Another 2,052 people on Oahu were counted as homeless but living in shelters, that report said.
The annual count of unsheltered and sheltered homeless people was most recently conducted in January, but the 2020 reports have not yet been released.
Mahalo
I wanted to thank the person who found my cellphone in the Target parking lot by Radford High School. I hadn’t even realized that I had dropped it. When I got home, I discovered it was lost and figured I had misplaced it in the store. I called Target, and they said someone had found a phone in the parking lot and brought it back into the store. Thank you very much to the person who turned it in! — A.H.
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