 Bingo, we're back, the 230 Rock, if you will. I'm Jay Fiedel here on the first broadcast day of the new year. We're doing community matters, our show about the community. And we have my co-host is Raya Salter. She's an energy attorney, but she's also a person who follows things in the community. And then we have our special guest, Curtis Kropar, and he is the CEO of HawaiianHope.org. These guys were doing a show just last hour, and then we had time in the salon together. That's our reception area here in the Think Tech Studio, and we started to talk about a new issue. And I thought it's worth having a show about this issue. So we're going to put this in the container of community matters. This issue relates to a new state homeless law that I think you'll really hate. You know, the state of Hawaii has a major homeless problem. We probably have the highest per capita homeless of any state, and it's very sad and tragic. And the question is, you know, do we recognize how serious it is? Are we doing enough to take care of it, or are we just going with the flow here, and is it just happening worse? And I think it's probably happening worse. And the question is whether the steps we are taking are useless or useful. In this case, I think we found one step, which has become effective as a new statute on what January 1, which is basically useless and destructive to the effort to help the homeless. And in fact, there was an article about this in the Wall Street Journal, the national examination of it, about Hawaii's troubles with the homeless and its inability to solve the homeless, and its ability to have a really crashingly bad statute and set up regulations here in Hawaii. So let's explore that. Why don't you give a little background on this, Raya, and tell everybody what's happening and what was in the Wall Street Journal just Monday? Well, according to the Wall Street Journal, a new law was allowed to take into effect that substantially changes the regulations that apply to homeless shelters. Specifically, they change the requirements for square footage and other types of upgrades that the shelters would need to have. And again, according to the Wall Street Journal, it is due to complaints from folks who, clients of shelters, who would like to see... I mean, homeless people who are in shelters, they don't like the shelters. Yes, that they are not as safe or comfortable as they could potentially be. However, also according to the Wall Street Journal, these regulations will require the type of upgrades that shelters in the state will not ultimately be able to comply with. And it is anticipated that there may be a 33 percent drop in available beds for the homeless population in the state. So let's look at the syllogism of it. So some of the people in the shelters don't like the shelters. They're not happy with the shelters. They want better living quarters in the shelters, even though the idea of a shelter is temporary. It's not long term. Not supposed to be long term. And then the state, in order to resolve that problem, the state orders that all these shelter operators, they got to build partitions and make better facilities in the shelters. But they don't actually appropriate one farthing to help them do that. They're on their own to find the money to do what the state is now ordering them to do. And let me go a step further. Because the shelters don't have the money, they're going to have to cut the number of homeless beds in their homeless facilities. Do I have it right so far? That sounds like at least how it was reported in the Wall Street Journal on New Year's Day. Yeah. So a statute and regulations that are supposed to help the effort to help the homeless actually has the effect of reducing the beds available to the homeless in the shelters. Wow. What a great result right out of the box here on the, basically the effective data of the bill. So I guess that's not a very happy picture, Russ Curtis. Tell us what's happening from your point of view because you do follow this. You have the data to tell us who's in the shelters and what the demographics are and how they're affected. So part of what our organization does is we design software and we actually manage some of the data for several of these shelters. And we keep hearing constantly people saying that, oh, people don't want to go to the shelters. Well, we can show you for a fact that several of these shelters have a waiting list to get in. Like many months just to get in. At least one of the shelters we work with, they have almost a three month waiting list to get into the shelter. And meantime, they're in the street because nobody's taking care of them. Well, right. There's no place else to go. No place else to go. Yeah. And so, I mean, that's just a fact. So that flies in the face of this notion about how they don't want to be there. Right. Right. And there are a number of reasons that's not just, you know, everybody, I keep hearing that, oh, they don't like the rules. Well, there's different reasons for those. There's different rules that are the problem. And now we've just created several more that will exacerbate, you know, it's just going to exponentially make the problem worse. Tell us how this is supposed to be playing out in the shelters and how the shelters react to it. Well, my understanding is there's three different components of this. The first component is that the facilities are supposed to be made safer. There's more physical space. I think the requirement is now 30 square feet per person at the shelter. So where shelters used to have beds, you know, side by side, now they got to spread them out. They used to put partitions up. The thing is for some of these shelters, it's just one big open room. And so... You know, when I went to Europe right after law school, I spent my time in youth hostels. Youth hostel was a great big room with multiple, with beds with multiple tiers, you know, double-decker or triple-decker beds. And they were, you know, a foot or two away from the next bed and the whole room was full of that. And then we ate together and we talked together and we had a wonderful time actually. And there was nothing wrong with having these beds a foot or two apart and having, you know, because the alternative for us, we didn't have any money, was to be out on the street sleeping, you know, on the bridge. Well, let me say, I have also had wonderful times in European youth hostels. And not to be in defense necessarily of the changes. But I do think that comfort and privacy and dignity and safety for people in homeless shelters is an important issue. I think perhaps because, you know, having a lot of experience in New York where shelters can be very, very dangerous, it is an important issue. So that's my... Okay. How dangerous are these shelters? You talked about safety, right? And I like to know, how dangerous are they? In New York, they'd be more dangerous, I think, actually, right? Well, you know, when you think of safety, it's not just that, you know, somebody's going to, like, reach over and beat you up or something like that. It could be anything. You know, some people, they're just paranoid of anybody too close to them. You know, hey, you're too close. I don't want you... You know, you're always looking at my stuff. You're looking at my business. You're... You know, it's more about just physical, personal space, you know. So that is part of it. It's not necessarily that, you know, there's people getting in fights at the shelters because if that was the case, I'm sure we would see the news every single day where the police or the ambulance or somebody is at the shelter and they're taking people away or, you know, something that's not happening, you know. And so they are relatively safe. They're safe. To space things. It's a comfort thing. It's a comfort thing. You know, this is a big issue. But, you know, Rye's right is it is something that we need to address and needs to be addressed that, you know, certain people, they need to have space. You've got families with kids who are living at the shelters. You need more physical space, right? But I think we took this in a step, like way overboard because now we're mandating it for the entire facility, you know, for everybody who's in the facility. And the ultimate response is, okay, if you have a building that is only so many square feet to begin with, and now you're saying you have to allocate X many square feet per person. Well, it's a simple math formula. Okay, well, that means that I can only fit so many people into the building now. And so a shelter, you know, there's several of them who've been in the news recently talking about this. If you've got, you know, 300 people in a building that require 30 square feet each, you just reduce the capability of housing 100 people. So, okay, so that means that they have to go out. They have to leave now. I just assume so. I mean, what else? You know, well, you can't not comply with the law, right? I mean, I suppose they could refuse to comply with the law and leave them in there and let the police throw them out. But that doesn't sound like a great idea here in the United States. And that's only one of the issues. That, you know, I mean, the physical space requirement is only one of the issues. The second issue of this is that the shelter programs, they were basically two-year programs. Once you move into a shelter, move into the system, you've got two years to get yourself together. Okay. Is that an adequate amount of time? Yeah, even that's not too short. Is that happening? Or are you now you have the data, so can you tell us do they actually leave at the end of two years or are they staying longer? We see people who move out within six months, they get everything put together. They do, you know, what they need to. I mean, there's some people in different circumstances, you know, every story is different. I know for a fact I've met people, they've lived in Hawaii all their lives, right, but they were born in California. And I didn't even believe in myself, but I called to confirm California has a 12 to 20 week waiting period for a copy of your birth certificate. So if you don't have your birth certificate and you are required to get it, you may have to wait 12 weeks just to get a copy of it before you can get your ID, before you can get a bank account, before you can get a job. Welcome to the high tech of the 21st century. To Mark, right? Yeah, you know, and like I said, I didn't believe that. So I actually wrote an email to California and, you know, their director responded back to Mr. Kropar. You know, I said, you know, hey, you know, here's our clients telling me this and I don't believe them. I tell me really what's happening because I want to set this guy straight. And he said, well, dear Mr. Kropar, unfortunately, your client is correct. It's 12 to 20 week. So it makes it harder for the homeless person to get settled and organized and get another place and get a job for that matter. Right. And now we're saying that, well, you can't do it in two years. You can't do it in six months. It's 90 days. You have 90 days. I think that's what the new rule is that they want 50% of the people who come into the programs to be housed in permanent housing in 90 days. OK, even if we can get them their birth certificate and their social security cards and their all their documentation and all the paperwork and all their for the Kofo participants, their I-84s and all these paperwork, even we can do all that. Right. And we magically get them, you know, a job and payroll and or or benefits or whatever we get all the stuff done. Where are they going to go? There's no, I mean, that's part of the problem is no housing. Yeah, I have to say, because it's like, even if I can see sort of like not having to your requirements simply for the sake of paperwork. I mean, that maybe doesn't make any sense. However, the real issue is the lack of affordable housing. I mean, we've got people, you know, sorry. And I'm not complaining about this. It's an observation. We've got people who have been living in public housing for 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, two, three generations. And why? Because there's no place else to go. They can't afford. They can't afford anything else. Yeah, yeah. Before we go to a break, I just want to ask you one thing. I came up in our earlier discussion, too. And that is some of these shelters, because of these rules, have indicated they'll have to close. Is that right? At least one so far, yes. They've, they've, they didn't even bother filling following the applications, because they knew from the get-go there's no way they can comply with the rules. So they've already announced their closing. That's really sad. Thoughts about that, Raya? Well, it's extremely sad. Even if it is important, even if there are improvements needed to the, to the shelters, the streets, being put, the streets is not an acceptable alternative. Yeah. And that's the bottom line of all of this. The shelters are intended to provide some temporary, some viable temporary alternative. And these rules do discuss this further. They're counterproductive. Now, to be productive at least for one minute, we're gonna take a short break. Watch this. Hello, this is Martin de Spang. I wanna get you get excited about my new show, which is Humane Architecture for Hawaii and Beyond. We're gonna broadcast on Tuesdays, 5 p.m. here on Think Tech Hawaii. 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. Hi, this is Jane Sugimura. I'm the co-host for Kondo Insider. And we're on Think Tech Hawaii every Thursday at three o'clock. And we're here to talk about condominium living and issues that affect condominium residents and owners. And I hope you'll join us every week on Thursday. Aloha. Aloha, and welcome back to Community Matters here on Think Tech Hawaii. Today we're talking about some new state rules that have gone into effect that have adverse effect or could potentially have adverse effect on the number of beds in homeless shelters in the state. So we're calling it a new law that you're gonna hate. So we're here with Jay and also Curtis from Hawaiian Hope. They do, they work with a lot of the shelters talking about this, talking about this problem. Yeah, by the way, this bill was signed by the governor or not. What happened? Where's the, you know, we got a homeless coordinator. We got some focus going on in homeless. It's one of the biggest problems the state has. So where's the administration on this bill? Well, in terms of the status, this, according to the, again, to the Wall Street Journal, this was allowed to take into effect Governor E. Gay neither vetoed nor signed it. Okay. That leaves us in sort of the Netherland here. We don't know how the administration feels that it passed, but... Well, I can, if I can interject, I can tell you. Yeah, please, interject. We want you to, that's why you're here. Please, yeah. Help us understand the politics. Well, I don't know, I don't know the politics side of it, but I do know for a fact that the service providers said, don't do this, you know, they're on record. The shelter people. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, because they, I mean, you know, come on. They know the net result. These are the guys who are providing the services. And so if you say that you're gonna have to do this, this and this, the first question is, okay, so how do we serve that many people and comply with these rules, right? You know, before we, I mean, if I can go to this, before we took the break, we'd mention about the shelter, you know, not, the one that's gonna close down, right? If I can, Lighthouse in Waipahu, they did not apply for the renewal of their grants. This was, you know, this was on the news. Yeah, it was that. Bill Hummel is the Shelter's Director down there. You know, and not only is he the Shelter's Director, but he's the MSW Instructor at HPU. This guy knows what he's doing. He knows what he's talking about, right? He is the expert, right? He's the Instructor. And he's said, there's no way to comply with all of these requirements. It's, you know, it's the 30 square feet thing. On top of that, there's the requirements of toilets and a number of toilets and number of sinks per the number of people in the facility. And on top of that, it's a 90 day requirement to get the people through the system hurry up, get them into permanent housing. It sounds like micro-mismanagement to me. And we can't, they can't tell you, you know, if the operators are gonna tell you that, you know. We can't do this. That you shouldn't do it, then you do it anyway. And then they wind up, you know, a guy like Hummel totally committed, right? Cares to the bottom of his boots about dealing with this problem. Cares about the lighthouse and all the time and effort and, you know, the guts that he put into making it work up to this point. Yeah, for 10 years. And he says, I'm folding, I'm folding, boys, I'm out of here. That's how I feel about this new law. That really speaks volumes to me. Yeah. You know, there's, I mean, I'm kind of a speechless because, you know, so he's one facility, but that one facility is a, I'm not even sure the right word to use. It's an incredibly important step because that's one of the few true emergency shelters, right? Where? You can go and stay the same night. You can just. I mean, it's hard to go and stay the same night in other shelters. Yeah. You can't get in. Well. Waiting lists, something. Some of them have waiting lists, right. Some of them are waiting lists. Some, they're not considered emergency shelters that consider transitional shelters. So you can't just go and show up and stay. You have to get on the list. You have to go to the paperwork, get the process, you know, da-da-da. You know, and like I said, I know for a fact that some of the shelters we work with, they have waiting lists that are months long. And so, but Lighthouse was one of those facilities where you could walk in, stay the same night that you showed up. You know, and okay, now what? I mean. Yeah, well, that's the question. We have a few minutes left for that discussion. So let me ask you, Raya, you know. What now? What do we do? Suppose I make you queen of Hawaii. Yeah. All right, queen, I'd like to be queen. What do you do? You have complete control of this statute, the regulations, the shelters, and you make commandments. Make some commandments for me. Make some commandments. Well, I, not being an expert on, state expert on homeless policy, I think I'll just back up a little bit and say, clearly Hawaii does have the highest per capita incidents of homeless people. This is not just a problem of, you know, the stereotypical sort of young guy on drugs who could be sort of getting his life together. There are elderly sick people. There are children and families. One third of all of the homeless are kids. One third. One third. As our children, so there's an extremely serious problem. I know that the state has chosen to sort of deal with this problem on an emergency basis which allows it to sort of take brief quick actions that can, you know, that can make it easier to be decisive, but it looks like we need to think about the money that we put towards this issue. We need to take a really serious look at housing affordability, the integrated services that are provided for families, for people with mental health and other pressures and do a little better than this because it looks like we're going to need to have more, you know, emergency housing for folks and when it's already a crisis situation. So I think we need to take a good strong look at how we can really provide more housing for people in the state. That would be my answer. If I was queen, that's what I would do. Excellent answer. Okay, Curtis, I'm making you king now or if you want to be prince, you can be prince if you like. What do you do with this new law just went into effect? It's not helping, counterproductive. I think by that gesture you mean let's throw the thing out. Well, you know, okay, I'm all for improvement. I want to see people feel comfortable in the shelters. You know, we, there's a lot of stuff that obviously we can be approved at different levels, right? But when you go back to the base of it is when the shelter providers tell you this isn't going to work and you just ignore what they've said, you know, we really need to rethink that. It's a whole lot of tootinals. This is a sort of social infrastructure issue. I think part of the problem is that for a lot of the, it's not just the homeless services but a lot of different things that I see the laws rules and things like that. It's an all or nothing attitude. You know, there's no middle ground on, okay, well, we're going to make this improvement but maybe, you know, we only, because we've got this many single people in your shelter that are quite fine with where they're at. They're just happy to be under a roof. You know, that maybe we can only have this applied to a portion of the facility, you know, instead of an all or nothing. And because the bottom line is, you know, we're constantly, constantly talking about we need to get the homeless off the street into the shelters, you know, through the system, we gotta, you know, go to the shelter. They don't like the rules. Well, okay, now, even if they want to go, they can't. There's no space. We've just lost a third of the beds. One thing I read in the Wall Street Journal is that it's unclear how these new regulations are going to be implemented. So I don't know if that means that there could be some flexibility or not. Well, I hope there is some flexibility. I mean, speaking from the context of this conversation, somebody out there, maybe Scott Morishiki, the homeless coordinator, want to back up a little and take a look at this and try to hear the various providers before he implements and maybe repeals or amends this thing so it becomes workable. Well, I want to come to Scott's defense just first. I'm not sure that it's totally under his control to do that. While he may be the... Well, he can only recommend, I agree. Right, you know, this was a state law that was passed, right? And, you know, so regardless even of what his recommendations are. It's all to me, the legislature, and it's the committees in the legislature and the committee chairs in the legislature, you know, who are gonna have to do something about it. But the reality is, as you said, Raya, that we have the worst numbers in the country per capita. And I'll add something else, too, to have the homeless in our community, especially in Honolulu, but all the islands, because we have high numbers on all the islands, it's shameful. And it undermines our society and it undermines the way we see each other and the way we see the community as a community. And every day that goes by, when we take either no steps or steps that are counterproductive like this one, we're worse in it and our community's the worst for it. We as a community cannot afford to have mistakes like this. We have to be much more akamai and we have to put our money where our mouth is. I agree. The idea of doing an unfunded liability like this is really bad news. It has to be changed. Yeah, that was one of the key things with the Lighthouse is that they said, even if they can comply with the other two requirements, they can't, there was no money for actually providing the physical upgrades to the building to do the compliance. You know, in a program we had a couple of years ago, we looked at the unfunded liabilities in general around the state and there are, by the count that we had at the time, 40 billion plus of unfunded liabilities where we didn't know where that money was gonna come from. Part of that was dealing with the homeless issue and my guess is that whatever number there was a couple of years ago to deal with the homeless issue, it's more now, there are more homeless. It's more expensive to deal with them and the people expect us to build bathrooms and walls and reduce the number of individuals in a given facility is more expensive yet. So we're talking about billions. We're talking about billions of unfunded liability and we're not bellying up to the issue at all. And it's about time we as a community and the legislature as a legislature got together and figured out how much money they're really willing to spend on this and what steps they're really willing to take because ultimately over time, this is undermining our whole society. Okay, Raya, you get to close. Well, that takes us to the end of another Community Matters episode, Mahalo and Aloha.