WAI'ANAE — The city has begun systematically closing parking lots at beach parks along the Wai'anae Coast between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m.

Unwilling to force hundreds of homeless individuals to leave the beach parks without a place to go, public officials have instead decided to concentrate on curbing illegal nighttime activities in the adjacent parking lots.

"No Parking" signs have been posted at Kahe Point, Coves and Forac beach parks, and enforcement began this week. Three more lots are scheduled to be closed to overnight parking at area beaches next month, with more to follow in October and November.

"With the closures, what we're trying to do is restore some order at the beach parks," said HPD District 8 Maj. Michael Moses. "We get a lot of complaints about noise, drinking, drugs, prostitution — you name it, it's happening in those parks."

Ultimately, officials want to replicate the success of Ma'ili Beach Park, where 150 homeless were evicted in March and given a place to go, and the park has been reclaimed for use by the general public.

Lester Chang, director of the city's Parks and Recreation Department, has said returning O'ahu's inhabited beaches to the general public is a top priority. And he has indicated that another Ma'ili Beach-style cleanup on the Wai'anae Coast is in the works.

Whether that will happen by the end of the year is not certain, he said. But that's a goal.

Jo Jordan, who chairs the neighborhood board's parks committee in a community where coast residents have lived with tent encampments for years, believes that more park closures are overdue.

When the city shut down Ma'ili Beach Park on March 27, evicted the homeless and conducted a massive cleanup operation before reopening the park to the public, it struck a successful model that should be continued, Jordan said.

Since that day, Ma'ili Beach Park — once the most visible homeless encampment in Wai'anae — has been devoid of beach dwellers. Many who departed entered the new state emergency shelter that had just opened nearby in Wai'anae. Others moved in with friends or family, or in a few cases left the Islands altogether. Some moved on to area beaches elsewhere.

Authorities make it clear to those who return that they can pitch their tents at other coast beaches, but Ma'ili is off-limits.

"We know the Ma'ili Beach model worked," said Jordan, who pointed out that the Ma'ili model also called for closing the beach parking lot between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. "The time to begin applying it at other area beaches should have been sooner rather than later."

She called the new parking restrictions a good start. But she said by waiting to shut down and clean up other beaches, the city has created a revolving door through which homeless people can enter the shelter, leave if they don't like the rules, return to the beach, and then go back to the shelter again later.

"In essence, the city is enabling that epidemic," Jordan said. "The city needs to eliminate the options that have created that revolving door. I'm not saying go close all the beaches. But I'm saying start closing and cleaning more of them in order to eliminate those options."

SHELTER HELPED

Officials have said Ma'ili Beach worked because there was a new $6.5 million emergency homeless shelter in Wai'anae for the homeless to go to. An estimated 80 percent of Ma'ili's tent dwellers did just that. Now that the shelter has become virtually filled, the situation is not the same, officials say.

City officials have repeatedly emphasized that chasing homeless people off the beaches when there's nowhere for them to go merely compounds the crisis.

There aren't enough shelters available for beach dwellers to move to, Moses said. That was not the case when the new emergency shelter opened and the homeless were forced off Ma'ili Beach.

"The state is planning to build additional transition shelters in the Wai'anae area, but I don't think any will be ready for occupancy before 2008," he said. "So for now, the focus will be on controlling illegal activities, not on moving out homeless people."

Wayne Siaris, who lives with his wife and children at Forac Beach Park, said most of the park's homeless people welcome the parking lot closures because they're tired of getting blamed for illicit activities caused by outsiders who come in and make trouble.

"In the evening time, this parking lot gets really crowded, and you get the drinkers, the drug dealers, and there is a lot of violence and noise — that sort of thing," said Siaris, 42, moments after he had moved his 1976 Volkswagen Beetle out of the parking lot and onto a side street.

"For the past couple of nights, though, since they put in the no-parking signs, it's been pretty quiet."

TIMING STRESSED

The timing of the Ma'ili Beach cleanup — following the opening of the state's emergency shelter — was not a coincidence, Chang said. He said the city and state need to continue working together to lessen the homeless problem, just as they did with the Ma'ili Beach model. But timing is critical, he said.

"We're always watching to see when the right time is — when we feel, and the state feels, that these people (homeless beach dwellers) can be accommodated.

"And as we move forward, we have to work in concert again."

Meanwhile, Patty Teruya, chairwoman of the neighborhood board, said the homeless crisis can at least be mitigated by enforcing the parking lot closures.

"We hear the community's homeless concerns" about restoring Wai'anae's beach parks to the public, she said. "But we need to make sure that our parks are safe and that no illegal activities are being conducted in them.

"We need to weed these bad elements out."

Reach Will Hoover at whoover@honoluluadvertiser.com.