4/30/2023 0 Comments Keep it simple waikiki![]() Of course, housing is the solution, but it’s an expensive solution. “It’s hard because, where do we put everyone?” she said. Kobayashi acknowledges her legislation is not a real solution to homelessness. The bill also comes at a time when housing experts are expecting a wave of newly homeless people as thousands of Hawaii residents remain unemployed and unable to pay their rent and bills. “This increases the potential for infectious disease spread.” “Clearing encampments can cause people to disperse throughout the community and break connections with service providers,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states. The bill was introduced despite federal guidance that says to leave homeless encampments where they are, unless individual housing units are available, to help control COVID-19. “They’re not going to vanish,” Hoex said. For unsheltered people, laws like these mean citations from police, missed court dates that turn into warrants and jail time, said Richard Hoex, a 43-year-old homeless man who has staked out a spot on Kapiolani Boulevard. Cory Lum/Civil Beatīut new laws and enforcement don’t make homeless people disappear. “No one plays there anymore.” City Council Chair Ann Kobayashi has long supported sit-lie bans. “The people right across the street are just getting so depressed because every day they walk out of the house and have to look at all the homeless and they can’t even use the sidewalk, or the park,” Kobayashi said. Grandparents are afraid to take children to the park, she said, and Little League has been out of the question for years. She proposed the latest bill with Crane Park and neighboring Kaimuki High School in mind, she said. The effort failed in the face of community opposition. “That is a distinct possibility.”īill 73 is nearly identical to a bill Kobayashi floated in 2017 that would have applied around schools and libraries. “For a lot of folks, they will move out of an area and move right back in, or to other places they haven’t been, like a residential area,” she said. Many people are under the false impression that when the police enforce vagrancy laws, homeless people are taken somewhere that will meet their needs, said Laura Thielen, executive director of Partners In Care, a nonprofit homeless advocacy coalition. The proposal is already raising concerns among housing advocates and homeless service providers. Zoom in on different neighborhoods on the map to see the impact. It shows that the ban would be a massive escalation of existing sit-lie laws, making large swaths of the island off-limits to homeless people looking to rest. to 9 p.m.Ĭivil Beat plotted the property parcels of Oahu’s schools and parks on a map and circled them with an 800-foot perimeter to illustrate the impact of Kobayashi’s bill. She introduced a measure last month, Bill 73, that would criminalize sitting or lying on a public sidewalk within 800 feet of a park or school from 6 a.m. ![]() ![]() Cory Lum/Civil Beat/2020īut for City Council Chair Ann Kobayashi, the existing laws don’t go far enough. HPD already issues thousands of criminal citations annually for violations of homeless-related laws. And that’s not even taking into account anti-vagrancy laws at the state level. It is also against the law to obstruct a public sidewalk or store belongings on public property. It’s illegal to sit or lie down in Waikiki and parts of 17 other neighborhoods. In Honolulu, being homeless is already a crime in many ways. ![]()
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