Editorial: City must sharpen plan for homeless

Nearly a year ago, then-mayoral candidate Rick Blangiardi unveiled a 13-page, “90 Day Roadmap to Recovery,” which outlined an aim to tackle Honolulu’s current and future problems with greater efficiency and accountability. In addressing homelessness, which he ranked as a top priority, he called for eliminating the city’s encampment sweeps, arguing: “This approach merely moves homeless individuals from park to park and street to street.”

Now, nine months in office, the rookie mayor has made little or no progress toward installing a replacement that improves things. Also, while the Roadmap rightly stressed a need to prepare for an expected increase in homelessness as the flow of federal COVID-19 funding runs dry and safety nets, such as the ban on residential evictions, are removed, Blangiardi has responded with a less-than-robust follow-through.

In Blangiardi’s first State of the City address in mid-March, homelessness and affordable housing concerns were highlighted — and that continuum of need was underscored with a renaming of the Office of Housing as the Office of Housing and Homelessness. However, at that time, citing the cash-strapped constraints of a proposed $2.9 billion operating budget for fiscal year 2022, city dollars for those needs were said to be in short supply.

The Crisis Outreach Response and Engagement program, or CORE, heralded as the administration’s first big effort at launching a new homelessness initiative, is being paid for with just $1.5 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funding. And its reach has been reduced from an initial vision of diverting nonviolent homeless-related 911 calls away from Honolulu police officers — and sending social workers in their place.

Under the current plan, dispatchers will continue to send police to these calls, and police will then call the CORE team, if warranted. Because CORE will be housed in the city Emergency Medical Services, there’s an option of sending CORE in lieu of an ambulance, a more appropriate response. But it’s disappointing that the program, which had been slated to roll earlier in the summer, then this month, still has no definitive start date. The likely upshot: Instead of getting in front of homelessness-related challenges, the city will be chasing them.

There was some cause to criticize the previous administration’s sweeps, or “enforcement actions,” conducted to comply with city “sit-lie” and “stored property” laws. It’s true that scenes of scattering and relocation can make it harder for outreach workers to serve people. But sweeps conducted in a humane manner are useful in fending off potential public health and safety threats in parks, business districts and other areas — and to prevent entrenched encampments.

Now, instead of sweeps, “sanitation efforts” focus on “cleaning up the streets and are not targeted at people,” according to the Office of Housing and Homelessness. Still, given similarities between the two types of city-crew tasks — and with citations tallies not changing dramatically — the city’s “new” approach just adds up to a basic rebranding. Or, as Josh Wisch, director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii, has suggested, a “game of semantics.”

Honolulu is in need of leadership that prioritizes far-reaching fixes for our complex homelessness problem. Former Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s approach endeavored, with mixed results, to make strides by combining sweep disruption with compassionate initiatives, such as the Kahauiki Village partnership with the state and business leaders, and Punawai Rest Stop in Iwilei, which provides various levels of help for the wide-ranging needs of the homeless.

The Blangiardi administration needs to more fully shape, publicly articulate and fund a homelessness and affordable-housing continuum plan that keeps Honolulu moving forward toward effective solutions.