For Honolulu’s Homeless, an Eviction Notice

HONOLULU — From his home on Ilalo Street, Banery Afituk can feel the breeze off Mamala Bay, two blocks away. Walking out his front door, to his right, he can make out the tops of the luxury ocean liners, and to his left, some of this city’s finer high rises. “I like it here,” he said, as his three children played around him.

Home for Mr. Afituk, his pregnant wife and their children is, in fact, a tattered tent rising low off the sidewalk, one of dozens that have sprung up in a colony of homelessness near the downtown of this tropical tourist getaway.

But all these tents, including Mr. Afituk’s, are about to disappear. Hawaii redevelopment officials told residents of this fetid colony that by Tuesday they would remove the estimated 75 remaining tents, lean-tos and other structures, forcing about 100 people who have called the area home to find somewhere else.

State officials said they were simply trying to enforce the law and clean up the waterfront district to encourage development in a desirable corner of the island where the tents, piles of garbage and wandering homeless offer quite a contrast to the rest of Oahu.

But this forced exodus is only the latest chapter in Hawaii’s difficult relationship with its homeless as it wrestles with two forces: a warm climate that facilitates outdoor living and the threat to the image of the state that is central to tourism.

Advocates for the homeless said this latest sweep would have the same effect as the last few: the homeless will simply take their tents elsewhere.

“I understand that they are caught between a rock and a hard place,” Doran J. Porter, executive director of the Affordable Housing and Homeless Alliance in Hawaii, said of state officials. “This isn’t an appropriate place for lean-tos and tents.”

And Mr. Porter said he knew full well that state officials were under pressure from the business community. “My concern is that they need to have solutions of where these folks are going to go,” he said. “We can’t keep kicking them out of one place where they go to another. That’s why they are there in the first place: they were kicked out of Waikiki and the beaches. This has been going on for years.”

Anthony Ching, the executive director of the Hawaii Community Development Authority, said his agency’s mandate to redevelop this 600-acre plot had been jeopardized by the illegal dwellings. He said once they were gone, city workers would power-wash the sidewalks and clean up garbage and grassy areas.

“We are not evicting them per se,” he said. “We are telling them they can’t have structures on the roadway. That does not inhibit their use of the sidewalk.”

In the tents, people appeared accepting of their fate.

“I have no idea where I’m going to go,” said Douglas Sencio, 52, who works at a carwash, as a young girl next to him ate spaghetti from a pan bubbling on a portable camp stove. “It’s comfortable. We try to make it comfortable. And they come to take it from us. They said, ‘You have to move, you have no choice.’ ”

This patch of poverty is in a stretch of Honolulu that most tourists probably do not see, unless they glance down some of the side streets running off Ala Moana Boulevard on the trip from the airport. It makes for a startling contrast in a place better known for the surfers on the wild beaches of the North Shore and the developed beaches of Waikiki, where tourists can be seen carrying frothy drinks down the beach, listening to the soft strum of Hawaiian folk music at the House Without a Key.

There is block after block of tents and tarps, shopping carts, bicycles and piles of garbage. Mr. Afituk said he went to a nearby restroom in the morning to bring back gallons of water to wash his children before school.

The dearth of nearby toilets or garbage pickup has contributed to the depredation of a neighborhood that the Hawaii Community Development Authority is eager to redevelop. In recent years, the University of Hawaii moved its medical school to Ilalo Street, and a nearby park where homeless people once camped has been renovated.

Still, there is evidence of a shift in attitudes toward the homelessness problem with the election last year of a new governor, Neil Abercrombie, a Democrat. He appointed a homeless coordinator soon after taking office.

But national advocates for the homeless said Hawaii had been slow to recognize the extent of its problem and to take advantage of federal resources to deal with it.

Neil J. Donovan, the executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, said the state was one of many trying to deal with the homeless through ordinances, like the one barring tents, rather than programs to create housing. “That’s just such a short-sighted approach,” Mr. Donovan said. “It’s all about a lack of affordable housing.”

In 2009, the coalition named Honolulu the eighth meanest city in the country in its dealing with the homeless. Still, Mr. Donovan said Hawaii’s situation was particularly challenging: on an island with limited land, escalating property values have made affordable housing scarce.

“A lot of communities have different options to present to people,” he said. “In Hawaii, if you are persistently poor, you are really stuck where you are, on the islands.”

The stories of the Hawaii homeless are not dissimilar from those in other areas: of jobs lost, time in prison, struggles with alcoholism and mental illness, of broken marriages.

“I’m just trying to save enough money to get a place,” said Michael Taylor, who said he had been living on the streets for about six years. “They’ve been chasing us all around town. Everywhere you go, they tell you to move on, or threaten to arrest you.”

Mr. Afituk, who like many of the homeless here came from Micronesia, said he and his family had been forced to move out of a one-room apartment after he lost a job last year. He said he was now working as a fire marshal at Pearl Harbor, but did not make enough to rent a home. “I can’t afford it,” he said. “It’s $1,200 a month for a one-bedroom apartment.”

And as in other temperate places — like Santa Monica, Calif. — Hawaii’s climate is a draw to people looking to live outside. “I love it: free rent, free electricity,” said Sherri Watson, 43. “Who wants to stay in a bed-bugged shelter?”

Todd Wilbur, 36, said: “It’s not right that they shuffle us from one side to the other and back and forth. They just make us go in circles. Over here they are going to build a shopping center, another cafe. Why don’t they put up affordable housing instead?”