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As one of the world’s leading tourist destinations, Hawaii gets its fair share of glowing international coverage highlighting our fabulous beaches, hotels, restaurants and more, coverage that helps draw millions of visitors to our islands each year.

But even for a beautifully singular place with such consistently glowing press, Friday’s lengthy feature in The New York Times dealt a blow that may leave a mark for some time to come.

“” by Adam Nagourney, the Times’ Los Angeles bureau chief, explores the actions Honolulu has taken over the past couple of years, less to address the moral and ethical challenges of homelessness, than simply to push the problem out of sight of tourists.

Speaking on the City and County of Honolulu’s controversial bans against sitting or lying on area sidewalks, Mayor Kirk Caldwell bluntly spelled it out for Nagourney. “Sit-lie is not about homelessness. Sit-lie is about commerce,” said Caldwell. “It’s about keeping the sidewalks open for people to do business.”

The mayor shared the comments while personally providing Nagourney a city tour, “pointing out the new high-priced condominiums rising over boulevards where tents and homeless outposts once lined the street.”

Caldwell’s all-about-business sentiments were given enthusiastic support by the visitor industry, in the form of Hawaii Tourism Authority head George Szigeti, who said, “I would tell you emphatically that it’s working really, really well. The No. 1 reason that people were saying they wouldn’t come back to Hawaii was because of homelessness.”

That Honolulu has needed to do something about homelessness in recent years is undeniable. But city leaders’ abiding commitment has been to make the homeless less visible, not to solve the tragedy of thousands of actual human beings wasting away on our streets, impoverished, many of them mentally ill, addicted or both.

That, arguably, was the big takeaway from Nagourney’s feature — one that will be endlessly shared both here and elsewhere in the coming days, months and years.

“Sit-lie is not about homelessness. Sit-lie is about commerce.” — Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell.

Just to be clear about the scope of the potential impact: The Times has a , and its website and associated apps attract more than 54 million unique visitors monthly, making it one of the most widely read and influential media outlets in the English-speaking world. There’s a very good reason that it’s commonly referred to as America’s “national newspaper of record.”

The article is part of the “Homeless in America” series being reported by the Times this year, which has examined the dynamics in cities “facing a crisis of poverty as gentrification and rising housing costs force people to live on the street.” The Honolulu story will be promoted in subsequent installments in the series, as previous pieces on New York and Seattle were with this one.

To be sure, there is balance in the feature. It describes the city sending “teams of social workers out to help the homeless move into shelters. And the tourist industry put(ting) up money to cover airfare for homeless people who had come from the mainland and who said they were ready to go home.”

It also notes a Hawaii Tourism and Lodging Association donation of $500,000 to the homelessness assistance organization, Institute for Human Services. But it makes just as pointedly clear the money was given on the promise that IHS cut the Waikiki population by half.

“This is our economic engine. We absolutely had to do this,” said Szigeti, who was head of the association at the time.

Woven throughout the narrative are vignettes of individuals behind the homelessness statistics. A woman lighting a cigarette in front of a Chinatown liquor store who has lived on Honolulu’s streets for “most of her 55 years.” A 36-year-old man who has been homeless since the age of 15. A heartbreaking photo of a wheelchair-bound man, 64, being treated for facial injuries sustained in a fall the previous night, his eyes welling with tears.

Is it more important that tourists not see these people? Or that we see them and treat them as people? Is there not some middle ground more balanced than where we now find ourselves? Nagourney recognizes the tensions between those ideas, for a place “whose allure is built in no small part on marketing itself to the world as the Aloha State, with a welcoming atmosphere.”

Responsibilities To Visitors And To Neighbors

Droves of readers commenting on the article — well over 500 by Sunday morning — included many sympathetic to Honolulu’s dilemma. One Washington, D.C., resident described herself as one of the tourists who refused to return to Hawaii “due to the homeless problem.” “It was not a matter of people not wanting to look at the homeless, it was the aggressive panhandling and (for me) homeless people attempting to enter my car more than once.”

A Santa Monica resident who “lived and worked in Honolulu for many, many years,” commented, “If there’s one place that shows the massive divide between the poor and rich, it’s Hawaii. The state reminds me of a cheap piece of furniture with a beautiful veneer and particle board underneath.”

Federal statistics cited in the article recognized a homeless population of 7,620 in Hawaii last year. That number was up from 6,918 the previous year. And up 30 percent from 2010 to 2015.

We don’t deny for a moment that visitors who work and save, sometimes for years, to make their pilgrimage to paradise deserve a pleasant experience. The more than 8 million who arrive in our airports and on our shores each year provide ample proof that, by and large, they get exactly that, enjoying pristine beaches, lush greenery and weather that is the envy of the world.

But our responsibilities as a society extend not only to those visitors whom we euphemistically call our “guests,” and the discretionary expenditures they represent. Our responsibilities extend to our actual neighbors, who live not in houses or apartments, but in the bushes, on the beaches and even more challenging circumstances, in dire, obvious need.

Have we met them? Department of Housing and Urban Development statistics cited in the article recognized a homeless population of 7,620 in Hawaii last year. What it doesn’t say: That number was up from 6,918 the previous year. And the population grew by 30 percent from 2010 to 2015.

The state Legislature made modest progress in its most recent annual budget, which makes significant investments in affordable housing and homelessness programs. But thanks to insufficient past attention to affordable housing and to a seeming inability to address Hawaii’s spiraling costs of living in any serious way, it’s going to take a commitment far beyond anything the City and County of Honolulu have mustered thus far to reduce, rather than hide, the numbers of homeless people on our streets.

Gov. David Ige, who declared a statewide state of emergency last October on homelessness, makes only a brief appearance in the Times article; but it is one that quietly acknowledges the criticism of a Honolulu strategy that comes across in the piece as more Potemkin village than a comprehensive program of adequate humanitarian relief.

“If you are just enforcing and moving people from location to location you are not really reducing or solving the problem,” said Ige, making clear the sit-lie crackdowns are not the answer to Honolulu’s homelessness dilemma. “It’s just making it someone else’s problems.”