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How do we talk about homelessness?

When homelessness in Hawaii comes up in our civic and personal conversations, as it often does, what’s the context? The unpleasant sight of dirty, smelly people pushing overloaded carts down our sidewalks? The messes they leave behind, sometimes near businesses that suffer from their presence? The challenges of arranging the homeless discretely beyond the eyesight of tourists, who apparently must only see beaches and the festive umbrellas in their mai tais during sun-soaked stays in the Aloha State?

Media coverage offers the occasional anecdote about an individual who fell into homelessness or a family’s struggles to exist in a tent on the beach. But in large part, our community dialogue tends to revolve around the bother that the homeless cause us, the people with actual homes. Less so the individual human tragedy behind each homeless person simply trying to survive for another day on our streets.

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that our efforts to meet the complex web of integrated challenges that comprise homelessness gravitate toward facile, cosmetic initiatives to push the homeless out of sight and just as quickly out of mind.

Hawaii is once again at a crossroads with regard to homelessness, facing deadlines we may not meet, falling behind national peers on homeless initiatives and watching precious funding go unspent.

Consider:

• A year ago, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs launched the 25 Cities Initiative to help metro areas with high concentrations of homeless veterans eliminate veteran homelessness by the end of 2015. But as Civil Beat’s Rui Kaneya reported Tuesday, while the prevalence of homeless vets has dropped by one-third nationwide, it has climbed 45 percent in Hawaii since 2010. Housing vouchers from the VA and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development have largely gone unused, due to Hawaii’s high rents and aversion by some landlords to rent to homeless vets.
• With only three months left in the fiscal year, Honolulu’s “Housing First” initiative is only about 40 percent toward its goal of finding long-term housing for 115 individuals and families. While its partner on that effort, the Institute for Human Services, claims it is on target to meet the goal, it will have to pick up the pace to do so. Meanwhile, a proposed transition center for as many as 100 homeless families on Sand Island has run into environmental and health concerns; $750,000 that had been allocated for the project will evaporate if the city doesn’t commit to the center by June 30.
• State Homeless Coordinator Colin Kippen, now nearly three years on the job and making small but significant headway in bringing the various service providers and networks into an integrated system, has only three months left in his position. Gov. David Ige temporarily kept Kippen – an appointee of former Gov. Neil Abercrombie – after winning the election last fall. But now that coordinating work may be put on hold as the governor decides who will take over as homeless coordinator and chair of the state’s Interagency Council on Homelessness.

Compare the slow pace with which each of the above challenges is being pursued to the breakneck speed of the implementation of the “sit-lie bans” in Waikiki, Chinatown and Oahu business districts over the past six months. The City Council asked Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s administration to identify a temporary place for homeless folks who might be displaced by the bans before the first of them were passed last September. But while the Sand Island transition center saga drags on, sit-lie has been a model of efficiency, pushing the homeless out of high-visibility zones — and helping to swell populations off the beaten path in Kakaako and along the Kapalama Canal.

Re-orienting Our Approach

None of this is to say that the individuals leading and staffing homeless efforts in Hawaii aren’t well intended. One can’t tour the IHS women and family shelter or spend time with Coordinator Kippen and come away feeling that they don’t care or are simply going through the motions.

Rather, we have gotten it wrong. Our collective fixation exclusively on the financial impacts of having homeless people in our midst is a telling sign that somewhere along the way, this has become an issue driven more by concerns around commerce and less by our collective values.

Simply put, what ought to concern us more? That a mainland tourist might be put off by the sight of a homeless person sleeping on a Waikiki sidewalk? Or that a human being, in our community, lacks a basic, personal necessity of life?

Re-orienting our approach to homelessness as a values-driven effort would not only change the conversation, it would change the very nature of what we’re doing. It would require that we do things differently. Like coming up with a temporary transition center before sit-lie bans are foisted on the homeless. Or ensuring that the pieces are in place to take full advantage of a federal voucher program to get homeless vets off the street.

Three years ago, when Gov. Abercrombie first appointed Kippen, the governor spoke compellingly at a Capitol news conference about his vision for solving homelessness. “No child — not in Hawaii — is going to be left alone. No child is going to be homeless,” he said. “We are all children of God, and we are all going to be together. And so we’re going to solve this together.”

Abercrombie may have erred on other issues, but on homelessness and the values test, he got it right. Until that commitment is manifest in our actions on homelessness, we can count on this being an issue that continues to plague Hawaii, with costs far greater than those simply expressed on the bottom line.