Coping with Cohabitation: Micro housing project pushes homeless, business to coexist

Editors note: This is part 2 in a 2-part series focusing on county construction of a micro unit housing project in the Kona Old Industrial Area. Part 1 ran Sunday. The initiative is in response to the statewide homelessness crisis, but has been met with concern from the business community, which is already frustrated by the rising number of homeless in the Old Industrial Area and the increasingly aggressive and unsavory behavior being displayed by some members of the homeless community.

KAILUA-KONA — Kyle woke up to find one of his sandals missing.

He made the jaunt to HOPE Services’ Friendly Place to grab a bite and hopefully find a shoe. On this day, he went one-for-two. Come lunchtime, he’ll try again. Meanwhile, his guitar slung over his shoulder, he’s headed back to the beach, or maybe Alii Drive to strum a few chords and make a few bucks.

Kyle traveled to Hawaii Island from California five months ago to live with a friend. But because his landlord was renting out her brother’s property under an illegal lease, Kyle found himself relegated to life on the streets little more than a month after his arrival.

“I usually stay in different places on the beach,” he explains. “The cops came out once and kicked everyone off and gave everyone tickets, but I kind of hid in the rocks and they didn’t see me. It’s not too bad. I try to kind of keep to myself and not to get into the drama too much. Most people are just trying to get by, trying to survive.”

If he so chose, Kyle, 26, could save up and return to California to live with his mother. But a love for Hawaii partnered with his personal pride and a desire to figure life out on his own have kept him island-side. He’s also hopeful that in August he can join a friend who is acquiring property on Maui and take up farming.

Other housing options might be available to Kyle, but imposed, mandatory restrictions accompanying those opportunities have left him apprehensive.

“I could probably be living in a sober living place right now, but I like to smoke weed, and they don’t like that,” Kyle said. “They’d put me back on my psych meds, and I don’t like the reaction to the medication. I have schizophrenia, that’s what I’ve been labeled with, and the weed has a lot fewer weird side effects.”

Micro housing project

If he was planning to stick around Kona a few months longer, Kyle could apply for residence in the micro housing units the Office of Housing and Community Development is erecting on a plot of county-owned land just a few steps from the Friendly Place in the heart of the Kona Old Industrial Area. Construction on shipping containers to repurpose them into livable housing units is set for completion on Oct. 31. Roughly $2.4 million will be spent on the project.

Housing Administrator Susan Akiyama said tenants will be subject to an enforceable code of conduct, but added that drug testing and alcohol treatment won’t be required for acceptance. The housing project is using the federal Housing First model as its guide, which is designed with low barriers to entry.

“We will always encourage people to get clean and make positive choices,” said Malu Debus, Volunteer and Community Partnership Coordinator at HOPE Services, which won the contract to manage the housing project’s daily operations upon its completion. “But our goal is to end homelessness. It’s not like we’ll only end homelessness for those who are clean.”

Not only the lax requirements for entry, but also the small number of units will make competition for occupancy fierce, and Kyle would be unlikely to win a spot. Akiyama characterized the target population as the “most at-risk,” explaining that a vulnerability tool will be implemented to isolate the chronically homeless, who will rise to the top of the admittance list.

“‘Chronically homeless’ is defined … as an individual or family that is homeless and resides in a place not meant for human habitation, a safe haven, or in an emergency shelter, and has been homeless and residing in such a place for at least one year or on at least four separate occasions in the last three years,” according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. “The statutory definition also requires that the individual or family has a head of household with a diagnosable substance use disorder, serious mental illness, developmental disability, posttraumatic stress disorder, cognitive impairments resulting from a brain injury, or chronic physical illness or disability.”

Units in the micro housing project will be broken into three categories: four A-units designated as handicapped accessible, 20 B-units built for singe occupancy and eight C-units set aside for double occupancy or families. A-units and C-units will span 160 square feet. B-units will span 120 square feet.

Community blowback

Not every stakeholder in the project agrees with how the county has gone about implementing its homelessness initiative, which was given speed by an emergency proclamation issued by Gov. David Ige last October that allowed for the quick reallocation of resources to fund housing solutions.

The gripes begin with the location.

“I think the local government is undervaluing business because they’re not recognizing the very zoning that they’ve created for this area,” said Mattson Davis, the former CEO of the Kona Brewing Company who remains the landlord of the property. “It’s zoned industrial M-1. You can’t build residential facilities in M-1. But they passed a bill about 10 years ago to get exceptions so they don’t have to comply with regular development requirements. They’re saying the rules apply to everybody except themselves.”

The business sector has been stressing for years over the ever-growing homeless population and the increasingly aggressive and unsavory behavior displayed by some homeless individuals.

Complaints of public intoxication, indecent exposure, violent and verbally abusive behavior, trespassing and some homeless making visitors and employees generally uncomfortable have flooded the offices of the Kona-Kohala Chamber of Commerce and the Kailua Village Improvement District.

The Office of Housing and Community Development has fielded several of those calls as well, but Akiyama said that community outcry was exactly the reason she felt the urgency to pursue the micro housing project with immediacy.

What baffles Davis is why a housing project aimed at getting homeless people off the streets and away from storefronts would be situated in the middle of the Old Industrial Area where many of the complaints originated.

“The reality is come a year and a half from now, there will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 or 50 semi trucks coming in and out of that street to go to the new brewery,” Davis said, referencing the state-of-the-art, 100,000 barrel facility coming to Kuakini Highway in 2018. “It’s a huge economic developer in Kona, and homeless are going to be wandering around.”

Davis isn’t alone in his questioning of the county’s choice of locale.

“We have concerns because we want to make sure business can still happen, and homelessness does cause some difficulties for businesses in the community, especially in the visitor industry,” said Executive Director of the Kona-Kohala Chamber of Commerce Kristin Kahaloa. “There’s a lot of business happening in that area, and it’s going to continue to grow there. Do you want the homeless population to reside where there’s a lot of business?”

Akiyama said the county is sympathetic to business concerns, but that available land for projects like micro housing isn’t easy to come by. Furthermore, the county needed to act fast after the Governor’s proclamation and also needed to find a usable site within a reasonable distance of the areas where most homeless spend their time.

Akiyama added her biggest fear is that the county would construct a facility that would grow derelict over time because of a lack of accessibility.

“Most of these people are on foot. If I put a project like this up the mountain, the homeless probably wouldn’t come, and I would have made an investment for nothing,” Akiyama explained. “Because after all, we’re not building a jail. We’re building housing and a place for services. Since we already had the shelter and Friendly Place there, and the county had the property next door, it just made sense.”

A failure to communicate?

It’s not merely the logic of the county’s decision irking business owners and managers, but what some stakeholders have contended was a lack of appropriate outreach.

“It was the business community that took the initiative to engage with the county,” Kahaloa said. “We didn’t have a choice with the location. It would’ve been great if we’d been able to work with the county on that stage. When the location was identified and already in place, that’s when we were invited to the table.”

A coalition of business leaders has since been formed and meets monthly to address concerns, assess progress and engage with the county. Akiyama supports the notion and the coalition’s input, and attends the meetings herself.

Akiyama conceded leadership groups like the Business Improvement District and the Chamber of Commerce weren’t consulted until the time to make adjustments to the project’s location had passed. She did disagree in part, however, delineating between leadership groups with a “bird’s eye view” and businesses on the ground, so to speak.

She said she reached out to businesses themselves in the vicinity of the project, who were actually thrilled something was being done. In that way, she believes the county did its due diligence. She said Davis was one of the first people to whom she spoke, but he was adamant he knew nothing of the plans until it was too late to alter them.

Akiyama added that when HOPE Services accepted the contract to manage operations, it was required to adjust to a 24-hour model for all services, which Akiyama contends is already moving some homeless traffic off the street and indoors during certain business hours.

If achieved on a wide scale, the housing of homeless could put an end not only to unseemly behavior around storefronts but also to scenes like the one John Poggensee, the state of Hawaii Director for Baseball for the Amateur Athletic Union, witnessed recently at the Old Kona Airport Park.

Upon arrival, Poggensee saw a group of young children playing with what he initially thought were darts. But upon approach, he realized the kids were flinging used hypodermic needles at the side of a wooden shed, attempting to stick them into the walls.

He was outraged at the sight.

“This is where our keiki play sports, make friends, share birthdays and are just looking to be outside and enjoy the day,” Poggensee said. “The homeless situation has gotten out of control and unsafe. I personally arrive to the baseball fields early to spray bleach and water in the dugouts and on the bleacher seats where our parents sit to enjoy the games. After completing that task, our coaches and parents must look for broken glass, used needles, condoms — you name it, it’s there.”

If every homeless person has a bed, several concerns raised by businesses and the community should more or less cease to exist, Akiyama said.

Justin Murata — Real Estate Manager of the Queen Liliukalani Trust, which owns and rents most of the land in the Old Industrial Area — said the Trust floated an idea about using another piece of its land further away from Kona’a primary tourism and business sectors that could offer space for additional units. However, no formal offer was ever made.

“We were just trying to think of alternatives as the current location is not really set up for that type of residential use because there are no sidewalks, the lighting isn’t the best and it’s an industrial area,” Murata said. “This was all kind of after the fact. We weren’t really in the loop on the micro units, and the county was well on the way to completing the project. It was kind of too late for that. We feel that we should have been included as a major landowner in that area.”

Akiyama praised the Trust’s suggestion, but said regardless of the timing, it wouldn’t have made a difference. The property was simply too far up the hill.

What’s the impact?

The questions that remain are how much of a dent will a 32-unit development actually put in the problems surrounding the Industrial Area, and is housing alone enough to address the underlying issues that lead many from the comfort of shelter to the unforgiving terrain of the streets?

The most recently published Hawaii Island Point in Time study, which was conducted in late January of 2015 and which tracks the homeless population, found that 82 percent of the Big Island’s approximately 1,241 homeless were unsheltered. That’s more than 1,000 individuals and a 55 percent increase from 2014.

Even more troubling, 70 percent of Hawaii Island’s 110 homeless family households were unsheltered. Dangers exist for any person roaming the streets, but specific concerns of rape, sexual exploitation and abuse grow with the numbers of homeless women and children.

“There’s some freaky people out there,” said Kendall, the homeless man from part 1 of this series.

He is fortunate enough to have a monthly disability check, and through Aloha Independent Living via HOPE Services, Kendall will grab a bus to Pahoa today where he will move into an apartment and off the streets for the first time in more than a year.

But many homeless have no income to speak of, and while not all of the island’s 1,000-plus unsheltered homeless reside in Kona, the 32 beds provided by the micro unit housing project appear insignificant.

“We’re going to have more people in this situation because we have a terrible housing issue in West Hawaii,” Davis said. “Go find 20 acres on the edge of town that looks to the future. The county coming up with 32 beds is a nice gesture, but we probably need 300 to really do something.”

Akiyama said the current plan maxes out the space available in the Old Industrial Area, but the units will be portable. If funding and interest at some point allow for expansion, the portability renders a move possible.

Murata said the Trust would revisit offering a new piece of its land in the future, and Akiyama said the county would be open to listen, but added that’s getting a little ahead of the issue.

“I know 32 units isn’t enough, but I want to make sure the model can work. If it’s successful, we might expand,” Akiyama said. “We had the land, we were ready to go, we had the funding. At some point, you just have to make a decision, bring the stakeholders to the table and move forward.”

Akiyama’s urgency and attitude is something Gaylene Hopson, a volunteer with the USO and VFW Auxiliary, can appreciate more than most. She works frequently with homeless veterans and is fed up with bureaucracy and the idea that throwing money at the problem without implementing appropriate accountability standards is any sort of solution.

Recently, a homeless veteran she’d been trying to help place in living quarters — John Wayne Cowee — passed away. His housing solution arrived only hours too late.

“A couple days after J.C. passed, we received a call. Funding had been found and there was a place for him to live,” Hopson said. “I said it was too late. He’s dead. He died in a dirty field. That’s no way for a veteran to lose his life, and it’s pure bureaucracy. We save the honu, we save the feral cats, we build a dog park, our politicians spend money on their own personal toys and a veteran dies in a dirty field. It’s absolutely egregious.”

Management

Once construction of the units is completed, the county involvement will ratchet back significantly. At that point, HOPE Services will take over management of day-to-day operations.

“The most important thing will be the management of the shelters,” said Debbie Baker, Executive Director of the Kailua Village Improvement District. “With good management tools in place, I think negative impacts will be much less.”

Susan Graffe of BMW Hawaii, Davis and one business manager in the Old Industrial Area who asked to remain anonymous because of fear of retaliation all expressed doubt in the micro housing project’s efficacy, particularly because of what they fear will be a failure of the initiative to address the underlying issues causing homelessness.

“I think what we might be defining as the issue for Kailua Village business is not the issue that the department of housing is trying to solve,” Davis said. “They’re trying to build more units and provide more available housing. They’re not necessarily trying to provide food, clothing, mental health help or substance abuse counseling. They’re trying to provide more affordable housing.”

Akiyama countered that assessment by saying it is far and away the most common misconception she’s run up against during the process. State and federal funding for housing projects like the micro housing units require services be made available, she said.

“We’ve hired HOPE Services as our contractor, and part of our agreement is they will develop a management plan that includes all of these services,” Akiyama explained. “The agreement says they don’t necessarily have to deliver services themselves. They can partner with other agencies because dealing with the homeless takes a village. Services are not required to be offered on site, but as the operator, they must make those services available.”

Availability is one thing, but based on the Housing First model, tenants in the housing project will not be required to pursue all of them. Still, Debus said her organization is readily equipped in this area, and HOPE Services location adjacent to the project as well as some of its basic services in which she expects all tenants to be interested should help service providers get their foot in the door.

Debus said offerings will include substance abuse counseling, mail services, dental services, help with acquiring photo ID and birth certificates, meals, outlets to charge electronic devices, storage units, renter education classes and money management advice. Anything else the county requires, HOPE will outsource to a community partner.

“We’re very grateful to have the opportunity to expand our services because it’s definitely needed,” Debus said. “(The number of units) is not sufficient for the need, but we’ll accept it. We encourage these types of housing units to be created and expanded to the point that we don’t need to exist anymore.”

Regardless of perspective, no one in the county government, nonprofit sector, business community or the homeless population itself believes the micro housing units will solve the homelessness crisis in Kona. But amid all the questions and concerns, a few rays of optimism shine through.

“It’s a struggle, man,” Kendall says to me as he picks up his bags and makes his way to his new apartment in Pahoa 200 agonizing feet at a time. “But this is a start, yeah?”