Stories of many Sept. 11 victims going unheard
By Lee Cataluna
Advertiser Columnist
There are victims of the Sept. 11 attack who haven't made many headlines.
While our focus has been on retaliatory strikes and anthrax and persuading people to get back on airplanes, the poorest members of our community are slipping farther down the hole.
They were in crisis before the crisis hit.
The stories told in testimony before the Hawai'i Legislature were sad and desperate and hard to hear.
Maybe that's why our legislators didn't listen.
Hawai'i's poor and homeless are now being joined in line by some who lost their jobs in the last six weeks.
The Salvation Army Emergency Assistance Program reports the demand for food assistance has doubled since Sept 11.
Pat McManaman, who heads Na Loio Immigrant Rights and Public Interest Legal Center, says her office is just down the hall from the Salvation Army program. She told lawmakers, "Daily I see people queued up outside their door for one paltry bag of food. They have traveled miles just to see the sign that says, 'Sorry, we're out of food today,' and they have to return home to their families empty-handed."
And it's going to get worse. On Dec. 1, approximately 800 Hawai'i families, nearly 3,200 people, will be cut off from welfare assistance. These are people who were unemployed or underemployed before the unemployment crisis.
Homeless shelters around the state are full. There are wait-lists for families to get in. At the Institute for Human Services in Iwilei, families waiting for their turn live in cars outside the shelter. At the same time, homelessness is a growing threat to the newly unemployed who can pay some rent, but not all of it.
Cathy Hasegawa from the Affordable Housing and Homeless Alliance predicted, "There will be no room at the inn come Christmastime."
So what are Hawai'i lawmakers doing to remedy this emergency? They're funding a multimillion-dollar tourism advertising campaign and proposing huge tax breaks for hotel renovations while offering a measly $1 million for emergency shelter and $250,000 for food. That amount later
got bumped up to a total of $2 million, which is still far from being enough. Three times that amount would be closer to the mark.
"Trickle-down economics aren't going to help my clients," McManaman said, "Nor are they going to help the clients of Salvation Army who line up for one bag of food."
Speaker after speaker warned that more was needed for rent subsidies to keep people in their homes during this state of economic emergency. Lawmakers were told that it's much less expensive to keep families in their houses than to let them slip into homelessness and then try to bring them back.
There was a brief glimmer of hope when Rep. Michael Kahikina, D-43rd, (Kalaeloa,Wai'anae, Ma'ili), offered up the following observation: "The safety net that we've proposed I guess has a lot of pukas in it."
Yes, it does. Pukas big enough for whole families to fall through. Pukas too big for hotel construction to fill.
Lee Cataluna's column runs on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.
