Posted on: Monday, August 26, 2002

Our homeless policy heartless, shortsighted

We understand the city's point of view in all of the places where it has ousted "squatters." Referring to the latest target, Waimanalo Beach Park, Waimanalo Neighborhood Board chairman Wilson Ho expressed it perfectly:

"We don't want to close it forever," he said. "We just want to clean it up, get our park back, kick out the riffraff."

That's what has happened at other beach parks, as well as 'A'ala Park and Fort Street Mall downtown.

'A'ala Park was overrun, not only with homeless people and vagrants, but drug dealers and prostitutes. Certainly something had to be done. The park was unsafe and unsuitable for use by ordinary citizens. The "riffraff" had taken it over.

So the city closed it down, fenced it off, and spent a year renovating it. By the time it reopened, its scruffy denizens were long gone. Some of them apparently moved to Fort Street Mall, so the city removed the benches. Never mind that legitimate habitues of the mall, including customers of mall businesses and residents of nearby housing for the elderly, also used them.he benches will be replaced eventually, once the scruffy denizens are gone.

The same thing will happen at Waimanalo Beach Park. It will be closed for months, and it will be much improved when it reopens. That won't be until the scruffy denizens are gone.

Ala Moana Beach Park might be next for this treatment. A letter to the editor the other day from a Mainland tourist complained that the park was being taken over by homeless people, and that he and his wife wouldn't be back.

But who are these people who insist on living in our parks? Many of them are more like the rest of us than we'd care to admit. A large proportion of Hawai'i residents are but a single paycheck away from homelessness. That means some of these folks are just one paycheck different.

Sure, some of them are criminals, drug addicts, mentally ill and, to be sure, riffraff. But when they close the beach park, they will all have to go somewhere else.

As a society, we seem not to care where they will go, nor that many of them will lose what little connection with social services they now have. The city's battle against these people amounts to dealing with a symptom rather than the disease. The problem, obviously, will recur wherever they move.

We applaud the fact that there's substantial sympathy among Waimanalo residents for the fate of these folks. That comes at some personal cost: They recognize that under present conditions, they're all but deprived of legitimate use of their park for camping, picnicking and the like.

The answer lies, not in evictions and park closings, but in a serious push to expand homeless shelter capacity and a major effort on the part of social workers to break this shameful cycle.