Honolulu Clears Homeless from Stadium Park — But Not For Long
UPDATED 11/30/11 6:31 p.m.
Honolulu police and city workers arrived on schedule Tuesday night to usher more than a dozen homeless from their sidewalk encampment between King Street and Stadium Park.
As eight police officers urged homeless to move their remaining things, about 15 city workers threw away what the homeless had left behind. They also cleared away trash from nearby Moiliili Park.
The city sweep — one of a handful over the past few weeks — came in response to complaints from neighbors, said Westley Chun, director of Honolulu’s Department of Facility Maintenance. The cleanup is also meant to encourage homeless to abandon outdoor life, state homeless coordinator Marc Alexander told Civil Beat last week.
But the homeless didn’t have to go far. With police approval, most carted their tents, baby carriages, blankets and other things to the opposite side of the street.
From there, the homeless looked on as city workers and volunteers pushed their remaining things into the street, hauled them into a dump truck with a backhoe and power washed the sidewalk.
In the past, the city has removed homeless from sidewalks in daylight. But the city planned this sweep for 8 p.m. so that homeless couldn’t seek refuge on park grounds, which close at 10 p.m., Chun said.
The late timing meant that Honolulu paid workers overtime for loading bicycle parts and old tarps into a dump truck — and sucking garbage from storm drains with a vacuum truck, Chun said. The city planned to be finished cleaning the sidewalk and park by midnight.
But there’s nothing to stop the homeless from returning to Stadium Park after the cleanup, city spokeswoman Louise Kim McCoy told reporters at the scene.
“After the work is done here, it’s a public sidewalk,” she said, and thus the city couldn’t prevent homeless from setting up their tents again.
One man, Gayle Yee, told Civil Beat he planned to head right back to his old spot on the sidewalk after the cleanup.
But others had different plans. Jared Castro, 43, said he was considering heading toward the mountains.
And three homeless had already taken a shuttle to Institute for Human Services shelters, IHS civic engagement coordinator November Morris said. Morris and about 10 volunteers from IHS helped city crews clean garbage from the sidewalk.
Several of the tents that had been set up in the park Monday were gone by Tuesday afternoon. The homeless who remained at the park packed up their things throughout the day in preparation for the sweep. One woman covered her things in a large plastic APEC banner. Some waited until the last minute, frantically tossing tents and other belongings into the park as police arrived.
Yee said he hoped a friend would show up in a pickup truck to help him store his things. When no friend arrived, other homeless helped Yee pack his things into a cart and roll them across King Street.
While many resented the sweep, none tried to resist the city’s plans once police cruisers pulled up to the sidewalk.
Taking stock of his things earlier in the day, Castro said he knew the encampment had become an eyesore to some. Yet he still said the homeless had every right to camp on the sidewalks. And why pay workers overtime to clean up the sidewalk, he said, when that money could be put toward affordable housing?
“It’s not like we’re destroying anything,” he said. “We’re just people trying to get by.”
UPDATE Watch video from the Nov. 29 sweep.
