Honolulu mayor vows tougher approach on homelessness

Emboldened by a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that gives local governments more power to clear homeless encampments, Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi plans to double down on removing homeless people from the street.

“I’m going to be very aggressive about that, and you’re just going to begin to see it now,” he said.

His team is still figuring out what that looks like. But during a recent interview, Blangiardi said that he interprets the court ruling to give officials wide latitude, allowing city workers to remove homeless people from sidewalks on the charge of trespassing.

“Counties can determine how they want to enforce trespassing anywhere,” he said.

About two-thirds of Oahu’s roughly 4,500 homeless people sleep outside rather than in shelters, a big change from a decade ago when a majority of homeless people were sheltered. That new level of visibility is spurring Blangiardi’s drive to clear the streets.

To help with tougher enforcement, the city’s legal team is reviewing a new state law, Senate Bill 3139, which allows police officers to call for mental health professionals to treat homeless people who appear incapacitated and unable to care for themselves.

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And the city is setting up a command center to keep track of individual homeless people’s whereabouts and statuses. The intention is to help connect homeless people to shelters and services, spokesperson Adam LeFebvre said. More details will be released in the coming months as city officials discuss ideas with service providers.

Blangiardi, just elected to a second four-year term, has high hopes.

“We’re going to know every one of these people. We’re going to know where they are, where they’re being treated … That is, again, modernizing the city,” he said.

His new approach is drawing criticism from advocates for homeless people who liken Blangiardi’s policies to his predecessor Kirk Caldwell’s. Under Caldwell, the city’s strategy was to pressure homeless people off the street and into shelters, a controversial philosophy he called “compassionate disruption.”

Blangiardi’s administration continues these practices, and despite what the city’s lawyers say, he feels he has license to ramp up enforcement, he said.

More Legal Leeway

The Supreme Court’s June decision, City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, gives local officials dealing with homelessness a much stronger hand, particularly important in Western states like Hawaii.

That’s because a prior federal court decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose decisions apply in the Western states, said cities couldn’t outlaw outdoor camping if there weren’t available beds in homeless shelters.

That decision, Martin v. Boise, gave advocates like the American Civil Liberties Union legal grounds to sue cities for unconstitutional enforcement practices. Last year the ACLU filed a lawsuit against Honolulu to stop it from enforcing a law that prohibits people from sitting or lying on the sidewalk in specified business districts.

A judge denied the ACLU’s effort because Honolulu’s law doesn’t cover the entire island, meaning that homeless people could sleep somewhere outside the business districts.

Months later, the Supreme Court’s decision made it more difficult for the ACLU to win its case, and the opposing parties agreed to dismiss it.

In June, the city held a conference call with members of the media to discuss how the Supreme Court’s decision would change its handling of homelessness.

“We don’t think that there will be any increase in enforcement,” deputy corporation counsel Ernest Nomura said at the time.

He said it would be up to the City Council whether to expand the sit-lie ban or take other actions to address homelessness.

But Blangiardi doesn’t want to wait for the council to pass stricter laws. The Supreme Court decision means he’s “good to go” on getting more aggressive against homelessness, he said, regardless of what the City Council’s attorneys might say.

“That’s why their lawyers are supposed to brief me, but I keep telling the lawyers, ‘I don’t want to meet with you, I want to do it my way until I end up in court,’” Blangiardi said.

He did not disclose many details of his plan. But he emphasized that homelessness is an urgent issue in Honolulu, where he said a majority of residents feel unsafe walking by encampments spread out over portions of sidewalk and in parks.

“Ninety-nine percent of people should not be subordinated the way they’ve been,” Blangiardi said.

A Continuation Of Caldwell Policies?

He and his critics, like ACLU legal director Wookie Kim, agree that treatment should be the city’s focus rather than criminalization. Blangiardi doesn’t think this focus conflicts with his goal of tougher enforcement. But Kim thinks that the mayor has already matched Caldwell’s punitive approach, despite his campaigning to end sweeps.

“Mayor Blangiardi’s current approach is not very different and not very distinguishable from Mayor Caldwell’s approach,” Kim said.

Caldwell oversaw the implementation and expansion of the sit-lie ban, as well as more clearing personal property from parks, beaches and sidewalks. Homeless encampments were frequent targets.

Advocates criticized these approaches for criminalizing homelessness without having much effect on getting people into shelters and housing.

While Blangiardi continues these tough actions, he said that he focuses more on treatment and has been building and acquiring shelter space to provide alternatives to sleeping on the street. He said his administration is taking other actions to prevent homelessness in the first place.

The city gave about 22,000 struggling households hundreds of millions of dollars in federal pandemic money through its rental and utility relief program, which he says helped prevent a spike in homelessness during the pandemic.

And rather than send police to intervene with every homeless person in crisis, in 2021 the city started using refurbished ambulances in a program called Crisis Outreach Response and Engagement, which operates out of the Department of Emergency Services. The idea is that people can be treated and referred to shelters and tiny house villages called kauhale, if they consent.

“We want to give kudos to the city for implementing C.O.R.E. That in itself is a very significant step,” Kim said. But he worries the city’s other approaches, like clearing and temporarily storing camping materials, are too tough.

C.O.R.E. workers and police officers often join colleagues from the Department of Facility Maintenance to enforce the stored property ordinance, city homelessness coordinator Sam Moku said. But he argued that these actions shouldn’t be viewed as targeting homeless people, even though they tend to be impacted.

“That is not a homeless strategy. That is purely enforcement of an ordinance on property, and that’s something that is separate. I don’t get involved in those discussions,” Moku said. He said that 650 tons of property were removed from public spaces last year.

But Kim and other critics, like Nanakuli Neighborhood Board member Germaine Meyers, argue that this amounts to continuing the homeless sweeps Blangiardi vowed to stop in his 2020 campaign, just with massaged language.

“They start calling it ‘beach cleanups.’ Because ‘sweeps’ sounds like you’re sweeping humans off of an area,” she said.

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This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.