It would be easy to glance at our Page One display today on the homeless along the Wai'anae Coast, and figure you've read it all before and turn the page.

We've written extensively about the subject, and it's natural for readers to wonder what more we could say.

What's important about this five-part series is that it documents for the first time that while many of the homeless are still having trouble with drugs, alcohol and mental health issues, more and more are not plagued by any of those issues but are stuck on the beach simply because they cannot afford to live here.

Many have jobs and kids in school and were barely negotiating the hard curves of life when something — a rent hike, a medical illness, the apartment building where they lived being sold — hit hard and sent them spinning into the abyss. Next thing they knew, they were pitching a tent on the beach with their family and what few possessions they could take.

The stories are real, and it's heartbreaking to read about Zalei Kamaile, a 54-year-old musician who used to play 'ukulele on cruise ships until her landlord sold the home they were renting. Now she, her 78-year-old mother and her 45-year-old disabled friend live on a Wai'anae beach. This was a woman who used to wonder why the homeless didn't just go out and get jobs. Now she knows.

"I open my eyes and here I am," she told reporters Will Hoover and Rob Perez, and you can almost hear the hopelessness in her voice. "It's terrible. I wouldn't wish this on anyone."

Or Alice Kaholo Greenwood, who at age 60, finds herself caring for a 5-year-old adopted son on the beach five years after her husband died and a few months after her landlord sold her rental home. "I never once ever thought that I'd be a homeless person," she told us. "I'm still kind of shocked about the the whole thing. I thought I'd be set in my life right now."

Is there anything sadder than a Wai'anae first-grader who gets his choice of toys and pencils and stickers as a prize for good behavior and picks out a can of tuna? Or a fourth-grader at Makaha Elementary School asked to draw a map of her home and, not knowing what else to do, sketches a tent and a walkway that leads to a public restroom?

The situation is bleak. Not a single affordable rental unit has been built along the Wai'anae Coast in a decade. One 60-unit public housing project had to be leveled because it was uninhabitable. The two main transitional facilities on the coast come with waiting lists that are months long. Some 10,000 people are on a list for federally-funded Section 8 housing. The state's waiting list of 4,200 applicants — halted for eight years — was restarted in July, only to be inundated again.

In a meeting I had recently with Gov. Linda Lingle, she mentioned that one of the reasons she's excited about her job each day is because she represents state government and people have an expectation that government will provide for them. And give her credit for signing into law a provision for the state to lease land for $1 a year to nonprofits who maintain affordable housing as well as getting millions of dollars approved for transitional and emergency housing for the homeless.

But the problem in Wai'anae goes far beyond government's control. Unemployment is high among the homeless, and there are none of the large-scale businesses in the area that can provide decent-paying jobs or economic opportunity for the surrounding area. Few people with the clout to make a difference live or work there, and because of its isolation, it's easy for the power structure to ignore the obvious.

In what other area in the state would we tolerate 16 miles of tents along the beach except in a place that is conveniently out of sight and out of mind?

Every case of homelessness is different, and of course there are mental-health issues and drug problems and even those handfuls of people who really aren't interested in helping themselves. It is also understood that the vast majority of people who live on the Wai'anae Coast are hardworking residents who are tired that their proud community is usually only in the news because of the few thousand who live in the bushes and under bridges and on the beach.

But after reading this series, I came away convinced that we are not doing enough for the more vulnerable among us, and there has to be a broader discussion of the issues that go beyond the responsibility of the governor or the mayor or the state Legislature. It falls on all of us.

It is said that a measure of society is how well it takes care of its most vulnerable. Using that standard, how do we measure up?