COMMENTARY
$20M homeless shelter a good investment
By Curtis J. Kropar
Regarding the Jan. 20 editorial, "Shelters won't solve Isles' homeless crisis": While the commentary is basically right, I can also assure you that everybody who works with the homeless also agrees that building only shelters will not fix the problem.
But a shelter is the absolute of starting points and deeply necessary.
The bottom line is that without the basics of shelter it is impossible for a person to even consider higher functions in life, like saving money, having a good job or pursuing a better education, yet alone the very most of fundamentals: feeling safe.
Would you truly feel safe if each night you had to figure out where you are going to sleep? How or if you're going to eat? If you are going to be missing your belongings in the morning when you wake up? Or concerned that some drunken clubgoer is going to urinate on you or beat you while you are sleeping?
Yes, we need to do more than just build shelters, but we also need more shelters. A lot more.
Currently there are only about 2,000 people housed in all of the shelters combined. It is estimated that on any given day there are 6,000 homeless on this island. Even if all 558 affordable rental units were available immediately, that may still leave roughly 3,000 unsheltered homeless out there. Approximately one third of them are children.
It is evident that we need more places, even if only temporary, for people to sleep and feel safe.
Temporary shelters provide multiple things:
Case managers need to know where they can find their clients on a regular basis. It's hard to help someone when you go looking for them and they are not where they were last. Sweep a beach? Start over from scratch. Shelters provide that consistent place for a point of contact.
We need more shelters. Not just one, but maybe 10. And while $20 million may sound like a lot for a single shelter, getting it right the first time outweighs the long-term cost of taking a shortcut or skimping.
Now that the Next Step shelter has been open for almost two years, all involved have solid experience to know the extent of needs that must be met.
Twenty-million dollars is really a cheap investment into the first step of altering the life paths of real people, their families and their descendants. It's not the cost, but the cost effectiveness that counts. And doing it right the first time with a well-planned and implemented shelter is a better alternative to the pothole patchwork of having to do it over and over.
Curtis J. Kropar is executive director of Hawaiian Hope, a nonprofit organization that provides computer services to homeless shelters and service providers. He wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.
