Sleep on it
HONOLULU HALE / Among the many human endeavors either expressly prohibited or requiring a special permit in Honolulu city parks: fixing a surfboard, having a meeting, throwing a golf ball, washing a car, sailing a model boat and playing “musical instruments which are limited to two octaves or less, including but not limited to the following musical instruments: (i) tuba, (ii) tympani, (iii) maracas, (iv) uliuli, (v) castanets, (vi) tambourine or (vii) percussion instruments in which a human hand or drumsticks are used to create sounds therefrom.” It’s not at all clear that a proposed ban on tents and shopping carts would crack the top 10 for the most ridiculous of regulations, let alone the most Orwellian.
Nevertheless, Hawaii Kai City Council member Charles Djou’s campaign against what he calls a “vagrant takeover” of our parks continues Wednesday with hearings on Bill 7 and Bill 8. The former would make it illegal to “Construct, utilize, place, occupy, leave, or in any other manner situate any tent that contains one or more walls.” Bill 8 would outlaw bringing in shopping carts.
Djou says his goal is to “clean up our city parks,” though he adds, “I don’t think either one is going to fix all the problems regarding vagrants.”
Djou says laws banning sleeping overnight have proved inadequate. “I think the public doesn’t give these vagrants as much credit as they deserve in terms of their understanding of the law,” he says. “They get up at 10 o’clock at night and then go to sleep again at 5am. The original law has helped but it did not solve the problem as I had hoped it would have.”
Darlene Hein, director of community services at Waikiki Health Center, finds it all a bit exasperating. “How do we get people into better living solutions so that we’re not playing these games?,” she wonders. “It all starts to get a little unreal, I think. It seems like for the last two years, we’ve been trying to ban more and more stuff. How do we get at the underlying causes of homelessness?”
Last summer, Hawaii was placed among the “meanest” states in the U.S. when it comes to policies on homelessness. Among the initiaves that ran afoul of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty: City attempts to eliminate overnight sleeping in Kapiolani Park.
The solution is simple, Hein says, and less expensive than what Honolulu is now doing. “We need low income rentals, mental health services and substance abuse services.”
Hein mentions research showing that a homeless person living on the streets costs taxpayers more–perhaps significantly more–than they would pay for solutions to the underlying causes of homelessness. She estimates that between emergency service calls, police calls, jail and court costs and other services, the average homeless person costs the community $35,000–$45,000 per year, and points to the case of “million-dollar Murray,” a homeless Reno man whom police estimated used $1,000,000 worth of city services over a 10-year period.
“Housing is less expensive,” Hein says. “People have to get past the idea that we’re giving something to someone people might not think are deserving.”
Djou is unbowed by the criticism.
“We need a carrot and a stick. I do believe that society has a duty to the least well-off to help them with health care, with job and shelter options. But it can’t be all carrots.” And so he will continue to submit legislation. “The ban on camping, on sleeping, on carts, that’s some of the stick.”
Hein, for one, thinks homeless people will find a way around a tent ban, and in the end she isn’t sure the shopping cart prohibition will make much of a difference.
“It seems to me that individuals are very resourceful, and as soon as you ban something, they find another solution. They’ll use things like strollers, rolling suitcases. As long as its just carts, people will find other things.”
Besides, she says, “There might be more appropriate things [for homeless people to use] than shopping carts. They belong to the stores anyway.”
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