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Three weeks after the opening of Ho‘okahi Leo in Kalihi, residents of Hawaii’s third state-funded homeless village gathered to discuss the challenges of community life. 

Over plates of Sam’s Club rotisserie chicken and rice, more than a dozen formerly homeless neighbors talked about bathroom cleaning schedules, how to better share the temporary laundry facilities and what to do about visitors who break curfew.

It was a seemingly mundane conversation that masked the importance of the event: Building a sense of community and self-responsibility among Ho‘okahi residents is critically important to both the future of the housing project — and the state’s broader efforts to address homelessness. 

Kauhale — tiny home communities that are meant to be deeply affordable and have a heavy focus on community building — have emerged as in the state. 

Green’s office had previously set a target of building 12 kauhale in three years. The goal is now to build 12 this year alone. 

Doing so will not be cheap. The main inspiration for the kahaule model comes from two scrappy communities that operate without state assistance  — a self-governed homeless village in Waianae that formed a nonprofit to purchase its own land and a tiny home community in Waimanalo operated by a private landowner. 

Neither of those communities have paid security guards or staff members.

For a state-operated kauhale that provides 24/7 security and wraparound social services, the daily cost of housing people could run up to $120 a day, the governor’s homelessness coordinator said in an interview last month.

Similar community-focused homeless villages on the mainland have shown a high retention rate and more success at keeping people off the streets than traditional homeless shelters or even Housing First programs that place homeless people in apartments and then try to provide the support they need to stay there. 

But spending between $25,000 and $47,000 a year to house someone in a single room without indoor plumbing could be a hard sell for taxpayers. The costs also raise serious questions about the ability to scale the kauhale model in a way that would have a real impact on the number of people living on the streets. 

Which is why the weekly meetings at Ho‘okahi are so important. 

If residents at the kauhale can begin to take on leadership roles and help with the upkeep and care of the facility — perhaps even providing their own security in a few years — it will make the community sustainable in the long run and help prove that the model works.

“The hope is that within three years they will be able to really manage their own community, just like any other neighborhood would,” said Heather Lusk, director of the Hawaii Health and Harm Reduction Center, the organization chosen to run

Connection Is ‘Where The Magic Happens’

Kauhale are often championed as a uniquely Hawaii solution to homelessness, but community-focused tiny home villages are gaining popularity across multiple states as a model for addressing the pressing social issue.

One of the largest is the Community First Village in Austin, Texas. The 51-acre community provides permanent low-cost housing to more than 350 “formerly homeless neighbors” and is in the midst of a major expansion to 2,000 homes across three locations. The current village is made up of a mishmash of neatly arranged tiny homes and trailers, along with communal cooking and bathing facilities and an impressive array of amenities, including a movie theater, grocery store, entrepreneur hub, dog park and health resource center.

Having porches on each tiny home and communal facilities were deliberate design choices meant to help foster a sense of community. The village is also home to a number of “missional” residents — people who have not experienced homelessness themselves but have “a calling” to help the homeless and want to be a part of the community.

Duke Paulson, executive director of the Tacoma Rescue Mission in Washington state, said he was skeptical of the Community First program before visiting the village several years ago. Building tiny homes for the homeless became a trendy concept on the West Coast about a decade ago, Paulson said, but putting a bed in a 90-square-foot shed and saying “Now you’re housed, the problem is solved” didn’t seem like a viable solution to him.

“I’m not a fan of that because there’s not really a long-term engagement,” Paulson said. “And there’s not any community building or any support for the people living there.”

On his first visit to Community First Paulson met a resident who came out to complain about a neighbor, but quickly pivoted to inviting Paulson and his tour group to come by his tiny home to have a cup of iced tea and talk. It was the first time Paulson had been to a homeless housing project where people displayed a clear sense of pride and ownership of the place where they were living.

“I want to bring that here,” said Paulson, who is now leading an effort to build a Community First-style village in Washington. “I want to have people feel like this is our place, we are cared for … we take care of it. We actually welcome people in to hear our stories.”

The sense of community at the village was a big selling point for Paulson — and is a key part of the kauhale model — in part because of a growing awareness of the role community plays in helping people permanently exit homelessness.

Transitioning from life on the streets to an apartment can be difficult, in part because of the loss of community and companionship that people have with fellow homeless. 

The Austin community has a retention rate of 88%, according to a presentation by the Tacoma Rescue Mission. By comparison, a 2021 Harvard study found that only 36% of chronically homeless placed in traditional permanent housing were still housed five years later.

“Connection is where healing happens. It’s how you address trauma,” Lusk said. “To me, connection is where the magic happens.”

At , a community for homeless families also in Kalihi that opened in Honolulu in 2018 and was arguably the first kauhale built with state assistance in Hawaii, the focus is on building community as a way to help break the intergenerational cycle of homelessness. People who were homeless as children are far more likely to fall back into homelessness as an adult, said Connie Mitchell, head of the Institute for Human Services, which runs the Kahauiki site.

“I love the community. I love my neighbors. I love the people in the office,” said Camie Sandridge, who lives in Kahauiki Village with her husband and their two young children.

Having a place like Kahauiki could have made a big difference for her mother, Sandridge said, who struggled with substance abuse and homelessness when Sandridge was a child.

“I think it would have impacted my mother to have an affordable living place and people to talk to and places to go where she could even get help if she wanted to,” Sandridge said. “Places like this do have a huge impact.”

A Dozen This Year

State Homelessness Coordinator John Mizuno is fully on board with Green’s vision of spreading the kauhale model across the state.

And his office is picking up momentum. Mizuno said he had been working with local officials and has identified two possible kauhale sites on the Big Island, one on Maui and another on Kauai. There are also plans in the works to open kauhales in Kalihi, Iwilei and West Oahu between now and July.

There are, however, numerous obstacles standing in the way of building a dozen kauhale this year.

To begin with, the state is still working to more clearly define what a kahaule is. The term is often lumped in with Ohana Zones or safe zones for homeless campers, but in Mizuno’s view a collection of tents or tiny homes does not a kauhale make.

At its bare bones, Mizuno said, a kauhale is a community for housing the homeless that the state is involved in building or operating, that has a focus on community rather than just a collection of individual housing units, and where residents contribute in some way to the facility’s operation.

“There is no free ride,” he said.

There’s also a challenge with finding suitable sites. Aside from — which faced considerable neighborhood opposition — the communities that have been erected so far are in remote and difficult to access locations.

Ho’okahi Leo is located on a feeder road that leads to a refuse and recycling transfer station. There are no sidewalks. Few trees on the site. An elevated section of the H-1 freeway runs parallel to the road, creating a constant buzz of noise. Kahauiki Village, a community for homeless families that fits Mizuno’s definition of a kauhale in all but the state support, is located directly on the other side of the highway from Ho‘okahi.

Making the kauhale more self-sufficient will be another challenge. The Windward kauhale is costing $47,000 a year per housing unit, Mizuno said, but the expectation is that program costs will vary significantly.

If case workers can get residents signed up for federal assistance programs or help people find employment, the state could charge people an affordable amount of rent. It’s also less expensive to keep people housed and provide services to them on site than it is to pay for frequent hospital visits or 911 calls, he pointed out.

Future kauhale focused on specific groups like senior citizens, for example, could need less security or fewer intensive social services, Mizuno said. He also hopes that by partnering with community and faith-based organizations some of the work of running kauhale programs could eventually be transferred out of state hands.

“We want kauhale to become self-sufficient at some time,” Mizuno said.

Building Community

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing the kauhale movement is building community and shared responsibility.

A sense of kuleana and connection is an organic part of the self-organized communities that inspired Hawaii’s kauhale push. Creating that among strangers living together in a housing program started by the state is inherently more difficult.

Ho‘okahi Leo has an advantage in that most of the residents selected to move into the housing development in February came from a homeless community on Sand Island and already have connections with each other.

The goal is to do intentional community building, Lusk said, using the Waianae and Waimanalo communities as inspiration.

One idea they’ve lifted directly from existing communities is to have a set of agreements that everyone has to adhere to. 

Lusk’s team gathered a list of agreements from the Austin village and from Waianae and Waimanalo and then took those to the people living on Sand Island to get their input.

The final list of rules for residents were selected, in part, by people who would live there. Pets are OK. Children are not. No visitors after 10 p.m. during the week — at least for now. Anyone gone for more than 48 hours without checking in is at risk of losing their space.

A community council of five residents will help vet applications for future openings, decide what to do if someone breaks house rules and weigh in on the sort of things that a homeowners association might.

Residents are required to attend a community meeting every Friday unless they are at school or work. More than half the people living at Ho‘okahi are now working.

The idea is to create a framework for the community to function and then slowly step away as residents themselves become more involved, Lusk said.

At the third resident meeting in March, staff members played upbeat music and led people in a short icebreaker before diving into discussions about cleanliness of the shared facilities.

Sitting in a semi-circle on folding plastic chairs and picnic benches, the residents seemed shy and a little restless as the meeting began. When the conversation was directed to what they would like to see in their community, the mood quickly shifted.

Kasey Nobrigga-Pacheco, a soft-spoken 28-year-old with long dark hair who spent 11 years cycling in and out of homelessness, clutched her right arm and massaged it anxiously as she addressed her new neighbors, telling them that she was in recovery and was attending meetings to help with her sobriety.

“I’m looking into seeing if maybe we can get a meeting started here,” Nobrigga-Pacheco said, pausing to apologize for her anxiety in addressing the group. “This is really hard for me.”

After residents leaned forward to cheer her on and voice support for the idea, everyone became more animated and relaxed. Another woman said she had a friend who taught ukulele and might want to come give lessons. Others chimed in with suggestions for how to divvy up chores and hold neighbors accountable in a kind way.

The goal is for the kauhale to be a stepping stone for some residents and a permanent home for others. Nobrigga-Pacheco envisions her stay as temporary, but she sees a big difference already between the kauhale and the other homeless shelters she’s cycled through — a difference that bodes well for the staff’s community building efforts.

“This place is willing to just love you until you learn to love yourself,” she said.

Civil Beat’s community health coverage is supported by , Swayne Family Fund of Hawaii Community Foundation, the Cooke Foundation and .