homeless cabins on rd 1

[pahoated]

You can't tell anything at 5am. Try walking around Kamehameha around 2am after the bars have closed, go down the back alleys, the unlit parking areas. You will see the true demographics, as gaunt bodies crawling up from the river bank and spreading out. From 2am to 5am, it is their world. The word homeless is too general to provide any adequate description of the demographic. The homeless in Oahu are different from the homeless in Hilo, and they are different from the homeless in Kona. Nobody said there were no families among the Hilo homeless but their percentage is small compared to the bums and derelicts. If you go down by the river around 2am, you will also see that there are a lot of white faces. One guy I saw at 2 in the morning was a very pale white guy, dressed only in pajamas, barefoot, pulling a suitcase behind him down the middle of the street, obviously not all there mentally. There have been some recent dudes, old geezers in wheelchairs, they are white, and appearing to use the wheelchairs more as portable seats than being paralyzed. I see them get up and push their chairs to a new location. Even the state acknowledges there is a fair percentage of mainland transplants that got in over their heads and don't have the airfare to go back. As for the Micronesians, they are homeless by circumstance. The state is allowing them to move here due to distress, but don't have a plan for them once they are here.

The point is this is an obvious real world problem and it is growing. It looks like Hilo is aware of this and there have been other rumors about more shifting of the homeless southward. People want to argue over number of flea hairs, fine. That is what Punatics do. Just don't be surprised if there is more news about more of these shelter areas, maybe HPP next.

"Aloha also means goodbye. Aloha!"