Why are homeless community members opposing a proposed ‘Homeless Bill of Rights?’
House Bill 1889 is widely supported—but not by some of the very people who it would supposedly protect.
“A homeless bill of rights is demeaning, in-and-of-itself, and disgusting,” said Michael Daly. Daly is a Waikīkī street artist and houseless advocate who was, himself, houseless at one point. “A bill on homeless rights shouldn’t just reiterate human rights. It should identify what makes homeless people special and unusual as a group and give them particular rights and protections that address their situation properly.”
That message was reiterated by multiple people with lived experience of houselessness who showed up Tuesday at a Senate Committee on Human Services (HMS) hearing to testify against HB1889 (2014), a bill that seeks to establish a “Homeless Bill of Rights” in the state of Hawaiʻi.
The bill’s supporters, which include the committee chair, believe that it would help extend compassion and aloha to houseless community members. But many of those community members feel that the measure is far too little, too late.
“I think it’s sad that we even feel we need this bill,” agreed Daniel Bishop, a veteran who is currently houseless. “How did I become a second-class citizen? How did I go from being born in this country with rights given to me at birth, to suddenly having to do this? I think it’s insulting—in so many ways—to serve this country and have this happen. I have to have this? Really?”
Despite the negative testimony, the Senate committee, chaired by Sen. Suzanne Chun Oakland, passed the bill by a vote of 3-0 (Sens. Chun Oakland, Josh Green and Brian Taniguchi present; Sens. Sam Slom, Michelle Kidani excused).
Daly believes the bill is both dangerous and too slow. “Once a bill like this gets passed, I think it becomes more of a problem than a solution,” Daly told the Independent after the hearing. “It becomes an institutional block that never changes. It’s like what happened with healthcare, nationally. It was supposed to be universal, but it was slowly whittled away to just being another instrument that actually prevents true change. Here was a real opportunity to take the city on, but it was missed.”
Daly is referring to the City & County of Honolulu’s Bill 7 (2013), which gave county authorities a green light to conduct sweeping raids on encampments of houseless community members, confiscating personal property and requiring people to pay a $200 fine to retrieve them.
D’Angelo McIntyre, another testifier with lived experience, echoed the call to take on the county over its aggressive ordinance. “I don’t think [HB1889] goes far enough in protecting people from the current draconian Bill 7. There needs to be a freedom from laws financially punishing people for being homeless … I’m already poor. The last thing I need you to do is take money from me, especially if I’m trying to save up to get off the streets,” he told the committee.
Daly said he also believes the bill should include the text from the Kānāwai Māmalahoe, or Law of the Splintered Paddle, along with protections for free speech and expression, freedom from unlawful search and seizure, the right to “habitat” and the right of “stay.” Instead, he said, HB1889 coincides much too nicely with the city’s policy toward the houseless.
“The bill [HB1889] doesn’t protect your things from being taken,” Daly said after the hearing. “The whole point is that homeless people are in a special category, yet the bill doesn’t include anything about Kānāwai Māmalahoe, which makes me feel like they’re deliberately trying to bury it. Here is the perfect opportunity to bring it up. It would fit perfectly. So when that’s not in there, alarm bells start to ring for me.
Laulani Teale, the director of the Hoʻopaipono Peace Project, testified in supported of the bill, saying it was a step in the right direction. But she agreed that Kānāwai Māmalahoe and other indigenous people’s rights should be included in the bill.
“While there should be constitutional protections for these rights already, what we’ve seen in practice is that they’re not being upheld in the field, simply because the situation is so difficult,” she told the Independent after the hearing. “The establishment of specific criteria that protect those human rights should align with our deeper principles, such as Kānāwai Māmalahoe … And with the great number of Kānaka Maoli that are among the houseless population, a measure like this is very, very important to native Hawaiians too.”
H. Doug Matsuoka, the leader of the Hawaiʻi Guerilla Video Hui, which has been documenting the deOccupy movement for several years, was hopeful about the bill.
“Because this is an election year, I think this bill has the potential to point both political policy and candidates toward finding a solution that accommodates civil rights rather than erodes them,” he said.
Congressional hopeful Kathryn Xian also testified in support of the bill. The Independent asked what she thought about the criticism the bill received from houseless people. Kris Coffield, Xian’s Campaign Manager, sent the Independent a prepared statement in response:
Kathryn agrees that more must be done to protect the houseless. This bill marks a groundbreaking first step, however, in remedying broader concerns by establishing a baseline against which policies addressing homelessness can be judged. At the Senate Committee on Judiciary and Labor hearing, Kathryn and other advocates will request amendments to enact civil remedies for homeless persons whose rights are violated and an expanded right to use public space. Future actions, including legislative proposals, will increase protections for the houseless against illegal search and seizure, property rights violations, law enforcement abuses and anti-homeless violence.
The HMS committee, along with Sen. Green’s Committee on Health and Sen. Clarence Nishihara’s Committee on Agriculture, heard a number of other bills related to housing, aging, foster care services, allowing child day care homes on agricultural land, and a bill that would create a tax credit for businesses that hire people with disabilities.
Michael Tada is a frequent testifier at hearings related to deOccupy, the houseless community, and people with disabilities and is, himself, disabled. He testified in opposition to the tax credit bill (HB2478), and his argument echoed much of Daly’s argument against the “Homeless Bill of Rights.”
“I don’t want people to hire me because they’d get a tax credit,” Tada said. “I want people to hire me because they believe in me; because they believe that I can do a job. It’s simply human decency.”
Most of the bills were passed with minor amendments or deferred until this Thursday at 1:15 p.m. to allow Sen. Chun Oakland’s committee to work on “problematic” sections of language. HB1889 next goes before the Senate Committee on Judiciary and Labor, chaired by Sen. Clayton Hee.
“We need to recognize that there is an epidemic of homelessness and that this is an emergency situation,” Daly said. “The people who are homeless are in a state of emergency. It’s time we started treating the situation accordingly.”
