Posted on: Wednesday, June 2, 2004

EDITORIAL
Homeless crisis requires new solutions

At one level, it's dismaying that the City Council is refusing to pay to implement the centerpiece of the city's effort to address homelessness.

The good news, minimal though it may be, is that the city now can go back to the drawing board, looking for more up-to-date solutions for homelessness than Mayor Jeremy Harris' now-failed proposal for a campus-like comprehensive housing and service center.

Homelessness is a problem that's sure to get a lot worse here before it gets better. According to government figures, it's worsened by 61 percent in the last three years. No one can take pride in the city's dismal record of rousting homeless people from beaches, parks and malls without ever suggesting where they might be welcome.

And now the council is diverting $15.3 million intended to build Harris' transitional center for the homeless to other concerns, mostly unrelated to homelessness. If Harris' proposal seems outdated, we're amazed at the lack of government agencies making homelessness a priority, and we applaud him for taking the issue on.

Fresh thinking is urgently required. O'ahu's greatest need probably is not another large short-term shelter like the one Harris has proposed. That should be intuitively obvious, according to Lynn Maunakea, executive director for the Institute of Human Services, the state's largest shelter:

"The solution to homelessness is housing."

Instead of warehousing people — that is, letting them languish in shelters — it's necessary to move them into permanent housing as quickly as possible, Maunakea says.

The bottleneck is the lack of affordable, appropriate housing. In fact, the inventory is dwindling rapidly, with the closing of Weinberg villages in Hale'iwa and Wai'anae and the city's proposed sale of its affordable housing developments.

The problem is to find ways to encourage landlords to welcome tenants who, on their own, are often undesirable in conventional terms. Assessment of homeless women at IHS, for instance, determined that 80 percent were "severely and persistently mentally ill."

Such diagnoses should qualify them for state services such as treatment, counseling — and housing, if only it were available.

The trend on the Mainland is not toward new homeless shelters, but permanent supportive housing. Homeless clients are assigned to management teams, which provide a cocktail of services from psychology to nutrition, including, for those who need it, management of their welfare or disability income to ensure that their rent is paid on time. The state should join the city in devising these service-delivery teams.

Once people don't have to move from place to place, they can find stability in treatment for mental illness and drug treatment, and then jobs.

"All they need is a place to live," Maunakea says.