I was just chatting with a friend yesterday and he says he's the one who found the stolen bell. He was having lunch under a tree and was reading the paper about the bell and there it was in the weeds by the tree. He said a tarp was behind it, perhaps it had been stashed or thrown out since after the newspaper article it became too "hot" to sell as scrap. He didn't have time to wait for anyone to arrive to pick the bell up, but he called a local plantation museum who in turn called the police, I think. He was not mentioned by name in the newspaper and he wasn't sure if that was a good thing or not, although he seemed to think the museum should have gotten some credit at least. In any case, the bell has been found and returned to the hongwanji. Good thing for the thieves, can you imagine the karma involved in that sort of act?
New article on homelessness on Oahu:
Homelessness in Hawaii grows, defying image of paradise
IMHO, I don't think homelessness has changed much over the decades except by volume. Now that Micronesians can move here to Hawaii as of the past few years, a large segment of the homeless are Micronesians.
I see a lot of them at yard sales, too, buying things they probably can't afford otherwise, although I've also known of some of them who were buying things to ship to Micronesia. The non-homeless ones seem to live in multiple families per house and frequently I'll see large groups in vans. They have such nice embroidery on their skirts, so I generally notice them. I'm surprised that style of skirt hasn't become popular since it's pretty.
As I see it, there are multiple reasons for the current volume of homelessness as well as homelessness in general. In no particular order:
1. City Planning. There's not much zoning for what used to be called boarding houses, or rooming houses. The Building Code assumes everyone is going to live in a fairly sizable house and have separate bathing and eating facilities. A lot of these types of rentals disappeared when they let a lot of the folks out of the mental institutions when Reagan was president. I think it was Reagan, anyway. With too many crazy people in one spot, it got to where running a boarding house wasn't worth the effort anymore.
2. Cost of housing. It's a sheer supply and demand sort of thing and there's more folks who want to live in Hawaii than there are houses for them to live in. Cost of rentals goes up, the ones on the lower end get tossed out.
3. There's also a lot more computers involved in rentals these days, too. Background checks, employment checks, etc., etc. Folks who haven't been part of the system aren't going to have a credit score. This is also keeping folks from finding employment sometimes, too.
4. Section 8 rules and regulations. We had a house to rent earlier this year and about 30-40% of the inquiries were if we would accept Section 8. Some of them were Section 8 holders from the mainland. We had about sixty inquiries about the rental overall, three or five of them were from mainland people, at least two of those were Section 8 mainland people. Looking into how Section 8 handles rentals, there's no way we would ever rent to a Section 8 renter and it's not because of the renters but because of the way Section 8 is set up. Your house has to be pre-approved to be a Section 8 rental and that can take months. Then, if something becomes wrong with the house - even if the renter does it themselves - you won't get paid and the renter doesn't have to kick in for their portion until whatever it is has been fixed AND Section 8 has come out to approve the repair. Which from what I've heard, can take months. So, there's a lot of folks who might consider renting to Section 8 but won't because of the rules.
5. Decreasing sizes of Hawaii houses & apartments. It used to be that in order to afford rents, folks would share houses. Either multi-generational or multi-family. Now the physical size of houses is decreasing to where you just can't cram enough employable people into them to afford them. A lot of the homeless have jobs, but they don't make enough to pay rent. There's loads of families which have a house only because both parents are working more than one job.
6. Folks not buying into the typical "American Dream". When logically looking at the amount of effort necessary to rent a house in Hawaii, why would anyone want to? If they can find a hidey hole somewhere to sleep and stash a few personal things, that will save more money each month than most of them can hope to make in a month. The apartments they can afford (maybe) are not nice ones. So work hard and live in a miserable place or be homeless?
7. A lot of them have dependents they are caring for, so not only are they having to provide for themselves, but for children or elders as well. I've known several kids who grew up homeless on the beach. They're working hard not now as adults and they have distanced themselves from their families since they had dysfunctional families in more ways than not being able to afford housing. But when renting a room or apartment, it's harder for folks with dependents since they need more space and have less folks working in the household.
8. Alcoholism, drugs, poor education, and the myriad other reasons for not being employable. Generally, no employment = no income = no housing.
9. More rules and regulations for folks (churches, institutions, etc.) who want to help the homeless. Each time an outreach program shuts down, that puts more pressure on the governmental agencies which are already over stressed.
I'm sure there's a lot more reasons for homelessness, too. Although these are just generalities, there's probably a different story for each homeless person.