 Good afternoon. Happy Friday. I'm Kauai Lucas. This is thing tech Hawaii. Hawaii is my mainland and with me today is Anthony Alto who wears many hats in this town today He's here as the co-producer of no room in paradise, which is a 90-minute documentary of Our homeless issues here in Honolulu. I've only seen it twice. I'm looking forward to seeing it again Do you have I Listened to your pod Cast with Chad Blair and you mentioned that the trailer had had over a million views Wow one point one million at this point. Yeah, excellent But surprisingly or maybe not I was surprised that The majority of them were from the continent and not in Hawaii Well, you know, well, I not very much I mean when your people go in to see your trailer, that's not as if they're typing in where they live or Why they are watching it from the mainland But I think it does Point to the fact that we have quite a large diaspora of people who were born and raised in Hawaii who now live on the mainland who still have an interest in things to do with Hawaii plus Hawaii is a place that holds a lot of interest for a lot of people who maybe have never even been here But when it comes to the diaspora the fact that you have so many people on the mainland In fact, a lot of the comments of people who saw the trailer were, you know I was born and raised in Hawaii I'd love to move back But I can't the cost of housing and of course if you're gonna be talking about homelessness Then one of the issues you're gonna be talking about is the cost of housing So in a way, I wasn't surprised that there were so many people on the mainland to who who are watching the trailer Any idea what the viewership was like it was broadcast several several times on three different channels I think I'd two channels. Yeah, KGMB, KHNL, the Hawaii news now channels I have no way of knowing how many people I anecdotally, you know, a lot of people are coming up to me I went to when I went to vote the lady looked up. She said, oh, you're the guy who who made that film on the documentary Which was which was good because we want people to be watching this we want attention this was not supposed to be just a sort of Documenting the problem fly on the wall take a look at this isn't this problem ghastly kind of thing It was it we definitely had an activist approach We had a campaigning desire behind it which was to change the attitude of the public at large and the way we wanted to do that was First and foremost to get them to see the homelessness human beings to understand what they're like My feeling is it's not that people Instinctively have an antipathy towards the homeless. They just don't know them. They don't talk to them I think what they see typically is what goes around the homeless They see their tents their shanties often a lot of garbage So they they see that garbage and they sort of think well Maybe the people somebody who can live like that must be human garbage and of course that's not the case I'm what I you know, I had my own biases going in One of the things I was surprised about was just how intelligent and articulate a lot of these people are And how open they are to admitting that they've made mistakes. I mean some of them will say I was shocked I was really shocked. I thought wow That's I think that's a testament to the way you went about filming it, too I mean, I heard it was 18 months, you know, that's a long time you were able to build relationships with these people But still to get that amount of just real Just bearing their souls was amazing. I didn't take much effort I mean sure we showed up and we sat down and we treated them like human beings as equals We talked to them. How did you find the people that you spoke with? Did you did you start with is his name Joshua Justin Justin Phillips the narrator? Yeah, we did well the what happened was Rick Vangiardi from Hawaii news now who's a hero in the sense that he is determined to make our community Face up to this problem and do something about it. He came to us And asked us to make a documentary and I think he did it because he understood that he's been running a lot of news clips about the homeless and I think he realized that he had done a good job in the raising awareness about the problem But that didn't mean that he'd necessarily done anything about Helping us move to the next step to start doing what we need to do to to address the problem If anything, I think he there was some there's a feeling out there I don't know that it's ever been poll tested or anything. There's a feeling out there that but people might be getting Fatigued homeless fatigue, you know, not another not another not another news story about the homeless kind of thing So he thought why don't we do a documentary and look at it more in-depth and We said yes, of course, we'd love to do it, but we know nothing about the homeless What are we going to do? So we went to the largest homeless agency in town, which is the Institute for Human Services We spoke to Connie Mitchell the executive director there and we said Connie we know nothing we need an education can you help us and she said well, why don't you go and meet with Justin Phillips who's our top field outreach guy and Let him introduce you to the streets and so we followed Justin around for three months And he introduced us to the homeless. Okay, and I I just want to repeat what he said right off the bat Then I knew okay, this is something really great when he said we don't have a homeless crisis We have half a dozen right and then he mentioned the mentally ill he mentioned the micro-nesions He mentioned the addicts and on and on and on and I was just like finally somebody is not trying to Simplify this into meaninglessness. So it's 90 minutes for a good reason, right? Rick asked us to do 60 minutes and after six months we went back to him We said it's gonna be 90 minutes actually what we asked for we we asked for a week-long series of a half-hour specials And he said you guys are nuts forget about it And then we said well how about 90 minutes and he said I'll see what I can do And then but when he started to see the footage that was coming in and what we were trying to do He understood and he said okay, it's gonna cost me an arm and a leg because don't forget he showed all of these Documentaries in prime time without any commercials. So Hawaii news now You know let go of a fair bit of income that they could have been making in those time slots So another reason to take tip one's hat to to Rick Blangiatty And I'll just mention that at the end of the show will have information about how you can order a DVD By making a donation to IHS let's make that clear. Yes, it's a gift Wonderful, it's a gift you can get a DVD or you or video streaming video on demand if you make a gift I mean, I shouldn't say you're not allowed to actually predicate it on but if you make a $15 gift donation We will we will make a gift. All right Okay, so back to the okay, so 90 minutes is a really naughty problem with All different angles to it and you guys dove in and went around and actually met them where they are, right? And I think the 90 minutes actually goes by quite quite fast precisely because we look at the different aspects But well, there are two for a few reasons. I mean one is filmmakers. We knew that we had to tell a story You know if we just had talking heads there Lathering on about their expert opinion people would have switched off pretty fast. So we have Two homeless families single mothers with their children who serve as the spine the thread if you like from the start of the film To the end of the film we follow each of the stages and they explain why they become homeless And when you find out that a woman has been raped at 16 and suffered years of domestic abuse physical abuse a mention Mental abuse emotional abuse until the point where she says enough and she grabs her five kids and leaves the home leaves the car I mean, this was of middle-class woman Leaves everything behind and ends up camped out on capa hulu that already is getting people and she's and what does she say? I mean she says I know what society thinks of us. I know what I used to think of the homeless I used to I used to talk the phrase she uses I used to talk a lot of crap about the homeless and now she finds herself in that situation and She says, you know, we're not what society would think of us I think she says something that I suspect a lot of people in the audience want to hear Which is I feel so ashamed and in fact the shame isn't hers The shame is them on the man who raped her the shame is on the boyfriend who beat her up all of those years But she's the one who's ended up homeless on the streets by the canal and she feels that shame and she wants to get off the canal Unfortunately as part of this process of going through what she's gone through in her life She's also became an addict, right? And so we see her dealing with that and in the film Yeah, she gives birth to her sixth child conceived on the banks of the kappa kappa llama canal and it turns out that while she was pregnant she had been smoking ice and Fortunately the baby was born without any method in its system But so we follow that story from start to finish and then along the way We look at some of these other issues. So we look at the the issue of the mental health Yeah, let's take a moment on that because the the numbers in that were really eye-opening I commend you for your the people you spoke to were great. I'm looking forward to talking to everyone Myself for a half hour or so Johnson and he said It would save two billion dollars a year if we had the appropriate Care for the seriously mentally ill and Colin Kippen put that number at 1300 he said there are 1300 of our homeless Population who are seriously mentally ill. No, not quite. I have to correct you and you're not but okay in Honolulu On a walk when we're talking about roughly 1350 chronically homeless Chronically homeless of people essentially the shorthand way of say they're the people you see on the streets Because what you have to understand is that in fact, they're only the tip of the iceberg The majority of the homeless are not people who live on the streets The majority of the homeless are people who are couchsurfing. They're living out of their car At worst, they're living in a homeless shelter. They are not on the streets You have to be chronically homeless to be living on the streets So two-thirds of them are people that we never see typically they're people who who've had a they've lost a job They've had a medical issue They may need first month's rent security deposit You you help them with that they get housed and you never see or hear from them again but the chronically homeless are Rotating in and out of the system again and again and again and again and they're living on the streets And they're the ones who are costing us huge amounts of money of those that 1350 I forget exactly the numbers, but maybe a third of severe mental problems. Okay, so fewer In theory if you look at the point in time count that they do every year once a year in January how many of them are Addicts, I think it's supposed to be something like 20% that number is wrong It's wrong because if you go up to somebody and say are you an addict? They're likely to say no I've actually suggested to them that they should just say to them. When was the last time you use drugs? Because actually who asked the homeless on my experience who asked them that they tend to they tend to give you an answer My experience is probably 75% of the people on the streets are addicted and of them Maybe half of them became homeless because they were addicts and half of them became addicts because they were homeless But whichever way it is They're costing us a lot of money and we're spending it in stupid ways. We're spending it on emergency health services We're spending it on on ambulance rides. We're not spending it on helping them It's very difficult to get a detox bed You know it can take two weeks For an addict an addict says, you know what I'm fed up with this I want to deal with my addiction they should be able to pick up the phone say I need a detox bed and find one But it can take two weeks Anthony since you're speaking about picking up the phone I just want to say that if somebody would like to call in we have a number you can call and That will be up on the screen four one five eight seven one two four seven four and We're gonna take a little break and come back and talk some more Hi, I'm Stacy Hayashi and you can catch me on Mondays at 11 on think tech Hawaii Stacey to the rescue see you then Hi, I'm Chris Ethan with think tech Hawaii, and I'd like to ask you to come watch my show the economy in you Each Wednesday at 3 p.m. Aloha. My name is Danelia D. A. N. E. L. I a and I'm the other half of the duo John Newman, welcome We are co-hosts of a show called keys to success Which is live on the think tech live network series weekly on Thursdays at 11 a.m. We're looking forward to seeing you then Aloha Okay What is my mainland I'm coi Lucas with me here today is Anthony alto who is with the amazing documentary no room in paradise and the 90 minute documentary is Now reverberating throughout the community. I mean you've said that you you probably can't go out anywhere now without people Well, I don't know about that Typically when I open my mouth and they hear this this silly Brit accent they let then they click on. Oh, you're the guy But I just want to very quickly go back to those numbers because they're the numbers important Well, Alan Johnson who's the executive director of Hinamaka, which is our largest Drug rehab Agency in the state said is if we change how we deal with this problem of drug addiction We can save two billion dollars over five years So what's that got to do with it's got to do with the fact that we're turning people away Who want to help with their addiction because they don't meet medical necessity yet? Which is nuts because as he says in the film what we're telling them is go away and become sicker Well, of course the sicker they are the more costly they are to help and then we're saying to them But don't get too sick because the way that our Drug rehab facilities are set up. They don't get reimbursed for anything. That's medical So if you show up with an addiction, but you've also got say diabetes or something They are not allowed to have a nurse or a doctor on staff to treat that If they did they wouldn't get reimbursed for it And so they have to turn you away because you know they can't bring somebody in they know they've got a medical problem So we're turning those people away and they're becoming sicker There's a guy in the film who's lost his leg to diabetes, right? And he is costing us huge amounts of money So I mean there are many different ways that I could go into and I won't give you the whole the whole Shaggy dog story about all of the different elements of where we could be saving money But we are spending hundreds of millions of dollars of as it is if we change the way we spent them we could make a permanent dent in this problem and that really comes through and from so many people putting it together in it and in There were other areas that I thought were brilliant like the going out to the harbor and why and I and Thank you so much for portraying that in in such a Hawaiian friendly way They're great people in the boat harbor, although I would say the majority of them have by their own admission ice addiction issues But they're living with them. I mean a lot a lot of them have jobs. They got in fact that you will see Buildings like contracts is pulling up in the morning looking for people who who from the boat harbor because they know that an ice addict You know, you've got like gas in your system. You're going out there. You're working really hard I mean, it's it's ironic But and and they keep their the area where they're living very neat and clean and tidy They police themselves so there's not much crime or anything going on there But but but having William Isla explain how this basic lifestyle the living at the beach some period of time was was You know, just normal a couple generations ago actually last week after watching the movie the first time I Was speaking to a woman from Hawaii Island who was Hawaiian and she was saying oh, yeah, every you know every summer We would move down to to Kailua to the beach side and we just camp and we lived on on the beach for a few months And then right wintertime we would move Malca right and that that is a problem in the sense that the feds Don't accept what they call 10 cities. It's verboten. It's taboo. You're not allowed to talk about them Their solution is housing first get something into housing And then if they got a problem once they're in housing will it will deal with that problem? The problem with that of course is we don't have enough housing or the kind of housing we have isn't appropriate Well, that's who when that was so moving to have Nancy and Nancy Nancy who moved I mean she was so Nancy The first step in putting her life back together was actually becoming homeless because what she found was a community She was so isolated when she was an abused mother living at home Isolated alone nobody to talk to about her problems She moved into this homeless encampment and suddenly found people who understood where she was coming from what she was going through She made friends her friends made her children made friends So when she moved off the canal she moved back into an apartment by herself and she suddenly find very isolated and lonely and Started using ice again, you know and so that then points to another problem I mean there are two essential pillars to this problem one is a lack of affordable housing Which extends far beyond just the people who are homeless? I mean there are tens of thousands of people in this state who are very close to being homeless If you if you're earning minimum wage You're being paid eight dollars and fifty cents an hour and I met a number of people especially amongst the Micronesians dishwashers Burger flippers who are being paid eight dollars and fifty cents an hour They're making they work a 40 hour week They're making thirteen fifty a month before the FICA taxes are paid taken out of that How is anybody supposed to be able to rent a place on that kind of money? It's impossible one of the things we should be doing immediately in my humble opinion or maybe not so humble my wife would say not so humble We should be raising the minimum wage It should be fifteen dollars. This is Hawaii. It's one of the most expensive places in the nation You cannot live on eight dollars and fifty cents The minimum wage is supposed to rise to ten dollars and ten cents in 2018. That's no when you're enough That's something in my opinion all of the progressive All of the the elements of the progressive community ought to be able to unite around today It's something I think that would be a good way of us all Dealing with the angst that we feel about what's about who's going to be our next president We probably don't want to get into the politics of that stuff But but you know the one thing this this Donald Trump has said is he wants to spend money on infrastructure Maybe as a as a would-be real estate magnet Maybe he could see the benefit of building more affordable housing, but even if we built enough affordable housing We have to find a way of helping the chronically homeless stay in that housing and that means For the people who are severely mentally ill having more mental health services, you know I try not to talk in moral terms about the homeless issue because It's not my place to say you're immoral But I think in that one specific area when it comes to people who have severe mental health issues It is a moral issue. I think it is immoral that those people are living on our streets You know people people are afraid afraid of people who are mentally ill. They think they're violent In fact, they're the ones who suffer the violence and it's just not acceptable you Mental illness is like coming down with a lifetime Physical illness like not communicable, right exactly. It's like diabetes. It's not their fault They shouldn't be living on the streets. We need to be spending more money on the kinds of things that will help them Stay on their medication be able to get a job live a normal life I mean a lot of them could do it if we had the support services So we need to have case managers to go and see them every day We need drop-in centers respite care and what have you if we did that and the policy of the way who is allowed to give medicine Under what conditions I had us talk with Maria Grahams who said it so eloquently in the film We wouldn't treat a dog this way She said we pick up dogs that we see in this condition on the streets The condition that some of these homeless people and we see a dog like that if we see a dog like that in somebody's house We call up the Humane Society and they will take that dog away and give it treatment But we can't do that with the homeless because of their civil rights We are I understand how we got in this situation. It was only 25 years ago You still had mentally ill people in Hawaii who were chained to their beds So they had no civil rights at that point and we've got the pendulum has gone from one end all the way to the other We've got to find a way a happy medium so we can deal with that But so that's the only area where I would I would inject a moral turn and say we are morally obliged to take care of The mentally ill and spend more money. All of that money was cut during the Great Recession. The money has not been put back There are other areas Such as the drug addicts, for example, we've been talking about that. Okay. I personally I think that that we should show compassion Addiction is a disease But if you don't feel that way if you think you know, they became addicts. It's on them The problem is it isn't just on them. It's on us because they are still costing us money They're treating the emergency room as their primary care. It's the most expensive way of using medical care We are spending this money already. It makes so much more sense to spend the money up front Providing the detox and the rehab facilities to get them off their drug addiction to hold their hand And I'm afraid it does take some hand holding but to hold their hand While they go out and do the therapy that they need to do while they go out and get the skills training that they need So they can end up having a job and then giving back to society by paying taxes by whatever else it is they do I mean we have a little clip of Another large chunk of the pie that you addressed and that is the aging the the aging population and their the silver tsunami and Unfortunately, we don't have the sound on this but this is Barbara Stan from AARP and Can you tell the this kind of the story that that you felt in making it around the seniors? well for a start of it we wanted people to understand that by 2020 we're so where are we now 2016 four years time a third of our society is going to be over the age of 60 That's why people talk about the silver tsunami. This is coming at us and when people reach old age a number of them end up requiring some kind of of long-term care long-term care on average costs a hundred and thirty five thousand dollars a year and on average somebody who needs long-term care needs Three years of it and how much money does the average working-class person in Hawaii have saved put away to deal with that situation? About three thousand five hundred dollars so clearly there's a mismatch here And this is going to be hitting us and what are we going to do about it? And I think that's the point that Barbara was trying to make and we illustrate it by showing that the Case of Thelma Suzuki like this lovely woman who was living on the beach in Waikiki for two months She had been in a foster home and had been abused in it and she said never never again I'm not going back to that and she was desperately afraid of going into the shelter There she is and she was desperately afraid you could see her clutching of her bag there And and she was really terrified and she went to IHS. She stayed two nights and then she left again and It took a few weeks, but eventually Justin Phillips was able to persuade her to go back to the shelter Yeah, and he was able to persuade her to go back to the shelter and You know we went back to interviewer for a month later, and she was saying I'm so happy I came here. I Feel safe here I'm never gonna live anywhere else and then we interviewed Connie Mitchell the executive director of IHS who says Well, I'm really happy that we got her off the streets. She doesn't belong on the streets But IHS is an emergency shelter. We can't have we can't have We can't be the the final destination For thousands of homeless seniors We've got to be preparing for this now and we're not and so we are going to be unless we start dealing with that issue No, we're going to be seeing a lot more homeless seniors So Did you we we've run into some ideas about ways to Address this I mean they were Stanford car who suggested that an increase in the Let me give you a very quick example of what Stanford car has to say He's basically saying that that an affordable rental Costs about 400,000 to build and the average worker making $14 and 50 cents an hour Which is the average income of the average renter in Honolulu Can afford to pay about the equivalent rent that would allow you to build a $300,000 unit so there's a hundred thousand dollar a unit unit gap and The legislature has said we want to build 22,000 affordable rentals in the next 10 years So it's easy to do them the math. That's 2.2 billion dollars So what Stanford says is well if we really want to you spend that 2.2 billion dollars Why don't we float a general obligation bond 40-year bond triple tax-free at today's interest rate? You know what the interest what what the what it would cost to amortize that every year to pay down that loan that bond A hundred million dollars. How much did the legislature appropriate this year for affordable housing? A hundred million dollars. We're spending the money already But a hundred million dollars is getting you maybe a thousand affordable units if we if we had all of that money Appropriated in the way that Stanford's talking about we could build more than double that number of units So we're spending again. We're spending the money. We're just not spending in a very clever way So we have about a minute left. I'd like to show the the how we can each individually make a difference in our own hearts and minds maybe by Watching a no room in paradise Ordering it and maybe inviting friends over to watch it. It can also be live streamed Yep by going to the site no room in paradise calm no room in paradise calm and making a simple $15 donation to the Institute for Human Services. So that's double-gooding it Well, that's a nice way of putting it. Yeah, we wanted that you know IHS they're all angels there We could have made the film without them But we saw them interacting with the homeless and every single one of them is a really Incredible human being so anything we can do to help them were happy to do and so if you if you give 15 bucks It's the holiday season. I think a lot of people can afford 15 bucks. You give 15 bucks to IHS Well, we'll give you a free gift of the film either a DVD or video on demand. Thank you, Anthony. My pleasure