It’s good to see Mayor Kirk Caldwell and the City Council moving to take real responsibility for Oahu’s increasingly vexing homelessness problem.
Two members of Caldwell’s Cabinet told the Council last week that they’ll have a rough draft of an action plan to address homelessness on Oahu byMay 1.
Some think the deadline is too ambitious and worry that there is no money in the administration’s budget for new homeless initiatives, but Community Services Director Pamela Witty-Oakland said the preliminary plan will "start the dialogue" and that there’s time to adjust the budget.
The action plan was requested by Council members, who have taken a leadership role in getting the city, state and private agencies on the same page in tackling homelessness.
It’s a welcome change from 2006, when former Mayor Mufi Hannemann threw the homeless out of city parks in the middle of torrential rain and declared homelessness to be the state’s problem, even though some 80 percent of Hawaii’s homeless live on Oahu — 4,400 at last count.
The Caldwelladministration’s planning focuses on placing homeless people in traditional housing rather than shelters, then dealing withmental and physical health, substance abuse, education and employment.
But City Councilman Stanley Chang is pushing less traditional approaches to address "a five-alarm fire right now in Waikiki" that threatens tourism with unsightly homeless camps such as the one across fromthe $350 million Hawai‘i Convention Center.
Chang wants to spend $77 million from the sale of city affordable housing projects to finance places of refuge — tent cities with round-the-clock security for Oahu homeless who don’t fit into traditional shelters.
He says we need a "game-changer," arguing that years of standard approaches haven’t worked and that if we keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll keep getting what we’re getting.
There’s a similar divide on the state level, with the Abercrombie administration and Senate Human Services Chairwoman Suzanne Chun Oakland focusing on providing more affordable housing, similar to the housing-first approach of the city administration.
Chun Oakland’s House counterpart, Rep. Rida Cabanilla, prefers "creative" solutions such as overnight parking lots for homeless living in their cars, safe-haven campsites and helping out-of-state homeless return to the mainland.
Like Chang, she argues that the housing-first model is a poor fit for many of Hawaii’s homeless.
While the proposed solutions differ, the encouraging thing is that all parties are jockeying to be part of the fix instead of running from the problem as in years past.
If their differences produce a diverse basket of solution options instead of a stalemate, we might finally make progress toward getting control of this blight on our community.
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Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com or blog.volcanicash.net.
