Goodbye to Tent Living in Honolulu

by Josie Raymond · 2010-04-14 15:35:00 UTC
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Starting next Monday, tents are no longer allowed in Honolulu's beautiful parks. While the law applies to everyone, I think we all know why it was instituted — to get those pesky homeless people from living in the park. How else to explain why police have been handing out fliers about alternatives like shelters and rehab centers?

Before the law was passed, local elected officials had quite the task of defining a tent. Finally it was decided, a tent is "a collapsible structure consisting of sheets of canvas, fabric or other material attached to or draped over a frame or poles or a supporting rope." Hmm. Sounds a lot like a sheet held up by a stick that might be constructed by a homeless person who can't afford a tent, right?

A local shelter director told the Honolulu Star Bulletin that she supports the new ordinance because being arrested for having a tent "may become a way treatment becomes a possibility." Is it naive to wish that people didn't have to get arrested to get treatment?

In 1999, the City Council approved a similar ordinance that banned using public parks as "living accommodations" but Hawaii's Supreme Court struck it down in 2007 because it could be enforced so arbitrarily by the police. The stringent definition of a tent is meant to remove arbitrary enforcement. The mayor's office says the ordinance "will apply equally to everyone." People with firsthand experience with similar ordinances would beg to disagree.

John Joel Roberts hit the tent pole on the head when he wrote on Inforum, "Homelessness, whether in a neighborhood in downtown Los Angeles called Skid Row, or a perfectly white sanded beach called Waikiki, should not be allowed. But banning canvas tents is not a permanent solution. Such a ban just pushes homelessness off the beaches and into other parts of the island."

Photo credit: °Florian

Josie Raymond is a Change.org editor who has reported from the streets of the South Bronx, written for several magazines that folded (not her fault) and fixed thousands of typos.
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