Discussion: Hawaii Governor Declares State Of Emergency For Homelessness

Discussion for article #241854

The reason these people are homeless is not drugs and alcohol. It is the fact that wages are inadequate. Rents are too high. Hawaii is a canary in a coal mine. Go after employers who sit on big bundles of cash while their employees crash and burn.

Drugs and alcohol abuse are a result of these trends, not the cause of them. Greed is the cause of these issues and until that is dealt with, no number of clever low cost “shipping containers” will relieve chronic homelessness. Tax the hell out of these jerks unless they start addressing the problem of inadequate wages, and unbridled greed.

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Exactly. This is what “trickle-down economics” has brought us. An unprecedented redirection of resources towards the 1% while the bottom grows exponentially. If we don’t fix this soon, America is in for a massive crash.

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Build homeless shelters not…

http://www.sermoncentral.com/articleb.asp?article=Top-100-Largest-Churches

You’ll notice that almost none declare a ‘denomination’… that’s because they love all
denominations-------$5$10$20$50$100 and all major credit cards… No checks , please, unless you put up your first born as collateral in case of NSF…or a parent or grandparent.

And if you apply for their BankCard, you can get a discount on tickets to their CW entertainment jubilee.

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I wonder if this is being done because it’s affecting tourism? When I visited Waikiki, there were homeless people under the shelters. I wonder how many tourists complained.
Hawaii is an extremely expensive place to both visit and live. I bet the rise in homeless is due to stagnate wages while the price of food, shelter, and gas increases

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If you plan and forcefully take away a homeless people’s shelter, you are “CREATING” a state of emergency. It’s not as if it was caused by an act of God. In fact it was caused by an act of hate, callousness and insensitivity.

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This is just on the big Island, the rest also have their issues. Oahu has a full blown tent city at the southeast end with people connecting cars with cardboard to create space and block rain. From what I saw, they were all natives and it wasn’t, couldn’t actually be, far from President Obama’s home or from where he went to school.
That’s just not right.

Living outdoors in Hawaii is possibly better than in many places, because it’s Hawaii and has moderate temperatures, therefore more homeless people that give it a go. My point is that living in snow would sort of force you to find better cover.
I slept under the stars, close to the beach several nights and if the slightly drizzling rain doesn’t get you, it’s pretty freakin’ cool really, for a few nights anyways.

There is a very lax attitude in Hawaii, unfortunately being a surf bum and paying the bills aren’t exactly simpatico.
Living at the ocean isn’t cheap, hell-even camping at the ocean is fairly expensive these days. Hawaii is no different and possibly worse. If you hit bottom there, it’s a long climb out.

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Wait until the climate (and climate-induced war) refugees start moving around the world by the billions seeking a habitable place to live - in our children’s lifetime, if not our own. Drought and access to life-necessary fresh water, wherever and whosever it is, will reveal how slight our present religious and ideological differences really were.

This is just on the big Island, the rest also have their issues. Oahu has a full blown tent city at the southeast end with people connecting cars with cardboard to create space and block rain. From what I saw, they were all natives and it wasn’t, couldn’t actually be, far from President Obama’s home or from where he went to school.

This is on Oahu (nothing at all is being done about the people on the Big Island). They are predominantly Micronesians who can come here under the Compact of Free Association (the woman in the picture is one, they often wear that same kind of outfit) but have little ability to get a job in this kind of place, let alone make enough to get by in such an expensive area.

@maxi2013, it’s more about development than tourism. The homeless around Waikiki were mostly derelicts and other long-term homeless and were kicked out a while ago by a similarly bad policy that made it illegal to sit or lie on the sidewalk, or to lie on the beach after midnight (the latter has resulted in tourists being ticketed, which is pretty counterproductive). Of course nothing was done about the underlying problem and they just moved elsewhere to places where more locals frequent, like Chinatown. The group discussed in the article is mostly not people with addiction or mental illness problems, but there’s also a lot more of them. They had set up tents along several blocks of streets in Kakaako, which is an area that’s long been neglected but is starting to have more places move in and is slated for several big development projects.

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More of the source of Hawaii’s homeless - people coming from the mainland with one-way tickets and no money. This kind of crap makes me want to tear my hair out:
http://www.staradvertiser.com/homeless/20151018_arrivals_from_mainland_add_to_demand_for_local_services.html

It isn’t just Hawaii by any means, people migrate all over. I’m originally from SoCal and the weather there attracted lots and lots of people of all types. In Colorado where I’ve been for over 22 years, we have people living in the mountains and in tents, some willingly some not.
Being homeless means you have no home. I don’t even want to imagine what that would be like.

The difference is that it takes $500, minimum, to get anywhere else from here. You can’t just scrape together $20 for a bus ticket to another city where there might be a job or lower cost of living.

I don’t know, the recycling seemed to pay pretty well for the street people. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit it but we just left our beer cans and other recyclables right under our cars, by the next day, they were always gone.

The recycling system here is a shitshow. It only started up a few years ago, with great reluctance, and you can still only recycle at certain special centers, not at every store like on the mainland. I don’t even see that many homeless people collecting cans and bottles.