At a quarter past eight on a wet Monday morning in January, Anderina Petero boards the Handi-Van outside the Jack in the Box on McCully and falls asleep against the window before it reaches the freeway. She has just finished her sixth graveyard shift of the week. Her daughter Marianeina, twenty-one, the cashier at the same restaurant, sits beside her. They are going home to a shelter in Waiʻanae.
Civil Beat sent more than a dozen reporters and photographers across the island for this year’s Point-In-Time count. The count is an annual tally of homeless people on O‘ahu. The reporters went to meet the people the counters were looking for. It is a generous piece of journalism from a paper that leans left. It is unflinching about the homeless.
The count ended with 4,539 homeless people on O‘ahu. This number can be spun to suit one’s narrative. The stories underneath are less obliging.
A mother and daughter work the Jack in the Box graveyard shift in McCully. They commute by Handi-Van from a shelter in Waiʻanae. A man cycles in and out of the state hospital. Each time, he is released under Act 26 because he is not mentally fit to stand trial for the petty crime that brought him in. A meth user in Pāwaʻa park has tried every rehab program. They are “just on replay,” he says. His friend died at the park of an overdose a year ago. Two men sit on the District Court steps, newly out of jail. They scrounge bus fare while their girlfriends remain inside, soon to be released. A woman with a bad knee and a medical history of three strokes lives under a bridge. She has cleared the trash from a fouled stream and seen an eagle ray return to the water.
The progressive account of homelessness is mainly a cost-of-housing problem. It fits the mother and daughter exactly. A fifty-dollar rent increase was the final straw for them. It does not fit the man in the park. He has tried every rehab program and remains in the park. It does not fit the insane man. He is the heir of a twentieth-century reform. That reform closed the state hospitals and promised something else would replace them. Nothing did.
The conservative account says homelessness is moral failure, and the answer is to clear the encampments. It fails when it meets the woman living under a bridge. She had a job and a home before three strokes took both. She exercises more visible dominion under an overpass than most of us in our homes. It fails against a working mother praying her way through six graveyard shifts a week.
There is real work here for the state, and conservatives who pretend otherwise are not serious. Honolulu’s housing supply has been throttled by zoning, permitting, and policy that protects the property values of the already-housed. A median one-bedroom rent above $2,000 is a political achievement. Only policy can undo it.
The state can also restrain the publicly destructive, and currently does not. Act 26 sends a man who cannot stand trial back onto the same streets to commit the same offenses. We call it compassion. But it is the abandonment of a legitimate sphere of state authority in the name of compassion. The man and the public both pay for it.
What the state cannot do is reform a soul. The drug rehab programs that succeed tend, it turns out, to be religious. The man in Pāwaʻa park does not need another program. He needs what no program can deliver. A program that addresses conduct without aiming to save his soul has missed the point entirely.
Every person in the count is an image-bearer of God. Every person in the count is also fallen. To remember one without the other is to slide into sentimentality or contempt. Neither has ever helped anyone.
God works ordinarily through families, through churches, and through the small voluntary associations. They gather to meet needs without being asked. The modern welfare state has spent six decades displacing these little platoons. It is now puzzled that it cannot replace them.
This does not excuse those little platoons, many of which have failed to serve the needy. Anderina wears a bracelet that reads John 3:16. She is a member of a church in Kailua. She has not been there in two Sundays. The Handi-Van takes 90 minutes each way from McCully to Waiʻanae, six nights a week.
Does her church know? Do they care? It is not clear.
At a quarter past eight on a wet Monday in January, on a Handi-Van rolling west toward Waiʻanae, she sleeps with her head against the window. Perhaps today will be a day for rest.
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Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
