It's discouraging to read that beds are empty every night at the state's new homeless facility on the Wai'anae Coast while hundreds of homeless are still camped out at nearby beaches.

And the picture of shelter workers going hat-in-hand to the public beaches to ask illegal campers to please give the new shelter a try — and routinely being turned down — isn't pretty.

While it's far too soon to get impatient, the time will come when clearing the beaches and reclaiming them for public use — whether politely or not — will need to become part of the plan.

It's inhumane to roust the homeless off the beaches when no reasonable alternatives are available, but the homeless have no inalienable right to camp out indefinitely at public parks when other options are made available, even if the other choices aren't entirely to their liking.

On the Wai'anae Coast, the city and state are trying to do it right. The city has shown fair restraint in delaying evictions of the homeless from parks until the state provides shelters and other transitional and permanent housing for those displaced from the beaches.

The state is using Wai'anae as a model to move beyond temporary fixes to a system of services aimed at helping the estimated 6,000 people who are homeless in Hawai'i on any given day — 25 percent of whom are children — achieve self-sufficiency and rebuild normal lives.

There still isn't enough alternative housing to meet the need on the Leeward Coast and kinks in the system remain, but as these problems are worked out, the beaches are going to have to clear.

The state's new facility at the Wai'anae Civic Center, opened March 1 at a cost of $7 million, is O'ahu's first 24-hour emergency shelter, able to serve some 300 people a night in single and family units.

The shelter, operated on contract by U.S. Vets Hawai'i, served 343 people between March 1 and July 31 — 225 adults and 118 children.

But there are still vacancies every night, with some clients unable to adjust to rules and structured living and others simply preferring the freedom of the beach. Homeless people with mental illnesses and drug and alcohol addictions have been special challenges.

Patience is still in order because the Wai'anae emergency shelter is just the first step in a five-year state plan to help most of the homeless on the Leeward Coast — many of them working families down on their luck — gain the tools and services necessary to rejoin the mainstream.

More than just a place to sleep, the facility arranges schooling, job training, substance abuse counseling and other social services to put clients on the road to more independent lives.

"We're not just running a shelter, we're running a program," says Darryl Vincent, site director of U.S. Vets Hawai'i.

It's a worthy objective that deserves time to work, but the chances of ultimate success depend largely on quickly developing greater community inventories of affordable rental housing. At this point, we're barely holding on to what little we have.

And we must recognize that it's a task that will only become more difficult as the more functional and motivated homeless people are helped and we get down to the hard-core homeless who can't change or don't want to.

We've yet to develop an effective strategy for dealing with homeless people suffering from serious mental illnesses or drug and alcohol habits that they have no desire to give up.

Leaving these unfortunate souls to forever monopolize our public beaches will never be a workable long-term solution.

David Shapiro, a veteran Hawai'i journalist, can be reached by e-mail at dave@volcanicash.net. Read his daily blog at blogs.honoluluadvertiser.com.