Posted on: Friday, December 6, 2002

City must get honest in evicting homeless

With annoying disingenuousness, the city is quietly reopening the Waimanalo Beach Park campground — without the major improvements it promised when it closed the facility three months ago.

By now it's even more obvious that the closing was all about evicting dozens of homeless adults and children who were squatting there. The city has somehow acquired an amazing faith that, once evicted, homeless people somehow disappear forever. All the people kicked out of A'ala Park, Fort Street Mall, etc. — gone, like magic!

As we said in September, the Waimanalo community is right to want its beach park back. It's not suitable for a makeshift resident community. And Waimanalo churches and community organizations did a good job of trying to accommodate those evicted.

But it's unrealistic — and inhumane — to relocate homeless people through eviction alone. The proper way to relocate them is to establish a suitable alternative location for them first. This common-sensical solution appears to be missing.

Adding to the tragedy is that when the homeless denizens of Waimanalo Beach Park were scattered, the social agencies that dispensed their medications, that helped them look for jobs and housing, that ministered to their needs and afflictions, lost track of them.

Homelessness, and the gritty conditions this visits upon a community, is of course not confined to Hawai'i. Cities across the country have dealt as thoughtlessly with their homeless as have ours.

Perhaps we're naive to expect a little more from a city in the Aloha State. But we do.