Editorial: City needs urgency on homelessness

Mayor Rick Blangiardi’s “Roadmap to Recovery,” a rough outline for his first 90 days in office amid pandemic challenges, calls for elimination of the city’s use of “compassionate disruption” strategy for tackling its thorny homelessness problem.

Speaking last week on the Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s “Spotlight Hawaii” webcast, Anton Krucky, the new head of the city’s Office of Housing, echoed that sentiment, asserting that the previous mayor’s approach to sweeps of homeless encampments in parks and along streets “pits us against them. It also doesn’t work. So why should we continue to do something that doesn’t work?”

The massive challenge, though, is devising and articulating a workable replacement strategy to frustrated Oahu residents, many who’ve seen more homelessness clusters in their neighborhoods.

Krucky is now taking inventory of various initiatives to help the homeless and piecing together new city policy that envisions partnerships with homeless communities and working closely with the state in order to avoid duplicative efforts. Still, in the absence of a working comprehensive plan, Honolulu Hale should hold off on altogether scrapping “enforcement actions,” or sweeps, which, in some respects, do work.

The sweeps are useful in fending off potential public health and safety threats in parks, business districts and other areas. They involve city crews removing trash — sometimes by the ton — and storing possessions, such as tents, clothes and bicycles, that can later be retrieved cost-free from the city within a 45-day period. They also involve outreach offers aimed at helping campers relocate to homeless shelters and secure social services assistance.

Blangiardi and others have rightly pointed out that compassionate disruption, in many cases, has merely moved homeless individuals from “park to park and street to street.” But for those who elect to leave the streets, the compassionate component can include access to promising initiatives such as the Punawai Rest Stop in Iwilei. Its permanent residents live in “Housing First” apartments, which come with social service case management.

Also, promising but fallen by the wayside: the city’s Homeless Outreach and Navigation for Unsheltered Persons (HONU) project, which involves erecting temporary inflatable tents to provide cots and shelter, while smaller stations provide social-service staff who work with homeless persons to transition into more-permanent shelter and other help.

Launched as a pop-up operation, HONU saw early success in a test run that wrapped up in March 2020. Since then the project has been continued as the Provisional Outdoor Screening and Triage (POST) program — focused on mitigating the spread of COVID-19 among the homeless population. As vaccine and other tactics diminish COVID-19 threats, the city should reactivate HONU in areas seeing significant homelessness concerns.

While the Honolulu Police Department was tasked with running both programs, Krucky is now framing a new program in which police serve as backup to a first-responder team of social workers and medical and mental health personnel dispatched to address nonviolent problems such as trespassing, indecent exposure and welfare checks. He hopes to see the proposed “Crisis Outreach Response and Engagement” — or CORE — approach operating 24/7 starting this summer.

With proper resources, CORE could serve as an effective first-contact for homeless individuals, as it shifts the initial focus away from cracking down on illegal behavior. What’s more, it’s encouraging that other cities trying such outreach are seeing cost savings in diverting select 911 calls from police to social workers.

Last month, Blangiardi described the city’s long-standing homelessness challenges as a “scalable problem,” and it could be. But unless the problem is chipped away at with a clear sense of urgency, it will continue to loom large — as it has for nearly a decade.