KAILUA-KONA — What do you really know about homelessness in your community?
The issue has garnered a lot of press over the past few years, yet misconceptions persist in conversations and comment sections about who Hawaii’s homeless are and how authorities calculate their population.
Three falsehoods swirling around homelessness on Hawaii Island tend to be the most common:
Homeless are primarily new arrivals from the mainland.
Only a small number of homeless are of Hawaiian descent.
Organizations and government personnel who survey the population employ leading questions to make the problem appear less prevalent than it actually is.
The first two misconceptions can be debunked with simple statistics. Bridging the Gap (BTG), the continuum of care servicing neighbor islands, uses data from the state’s Homeless Management Information System to determine how many individuals and households receive some form of homeless services on every island, as well as to create demographic breakdowns of those people.
Between July of 2017 and June of 2018, BTG provided services of some sort to 2,453 individuals comprising 1,341 households across Hawaii Island.
Only 8 percent of all those who received homeless services had lived in Hawaii for less than one year.
In fact, 67 percent of households BTG serviced during the same time period identified as residents of Hawaii for 20 years or more. And 64 percent of households possessed at least some measure of authentic Hawaiian lineage.
The numbers show conclusively that homelessness isn’t a problem being dumped on the islands from the mainland — the “other states buy homeless one-way plane tickets and send them over here” argument so frequently tossed around in conversations or during interactions on social media platforms.
An astute follower of the issue might read the numbers above and believe they lend validity to the notion that the county and state aren’t being honest with the public about how significant the homeless population is.
After all, the 2018 Point-In-Time (PIT) Count only registered 869 homeless individuals on Hawaii Island. In 2016, the worst year for homeless statistics in Hawaii history, that tally was 1,394.
It doesn’t take a math degree to notice the highest ever PIT Count homeless total of 1,394 is just a little more than half of the population BTG reported serving between 2017-2018 — two years after the 2016 count, by which time authorities had claimed a 38 percent drop in the homeless population.
If the homeless population is down significantly over the last two years, then why is BTG providing homeless services to almost twice as many people as the PIT Count tallied two years ago when the problem what at its apex on Hawaii Island?
Sharon Hirota, executive assistant to Mayor Harry Kim who has taken point on several of the county’s key homeless concerns, explained the discrepancy.
Firstly, she acknowledged the PIT Count is comprised only of the number of homeless people that service providers and volunteers can track down during the week they’re out pounding the pavement.
No one close to the issue has ever believed PIT Count tallies serve as completely accurate representations of homeless presence, only that they provide some scale of the problem and offer a way to measure trends.
Secondly, Hirota said the total number of people serviced is reflective of sways in the homeless population. Some given services may have become homeless after the most recent count and/or may be housed by the time the next count rolls around.
Finally, some receiving homeless services, such as rental assistance, aren’t actually homeless. They get a little help to navigate a financial bind and avoid losing the roof over their heads. Counters tally such individuals as having received homeless services all the same.
As for the PIT Count itself, it has well-established flaws. It’s unscientific, self-reported and collected in good part by volunteers. One thing the count is not, however, is misleading — the third common misconception about homelessness in Hawaii when combined with the notion authorities make it misleading to serve their own ends.
The most recent count concluded Monday, running six days. Surveyors asked people they found canvassing a simple question:
“Where did you sleep this past Tuesday, January 22nd?”
That’s it, aside from questions asked to collect background and demographic information.
If they had a roof over their heads that night, even if they didn’t the night after or for months or years prior, they were not considered to be homeless for purposes of the count. That’s because the point of the count is to create as close to a true snapshot of one given night as possible.
Hirota went out three times last week to participate in the count and said she ran into two people who fit such a description.
One of the highest ranking officials in county government working alongside Mayor Kim, Hirota wasn’t pleased she couldn’t count those individuals. It was the opposite. She was disappointed. But the count is a national process. It must be conducted uniformly or it loses its value as a gauge for trends and comparisons in the homeless population.
Every year, however, organizers work hard to paint a more accurate picture. If anything changes, it’s an addition of a question or a tool, a way to gather more information.
Hirota said this year, that manifested in the addition of a GIS system — a latitude, longitude and coordinate system to track the geography of where homeless were contacted.
The purpose, she explained, was to gain a better sense of where homeless individuals are congregating, making for more accurate surveys and outreach services in the months and years to come.