NANAKULI, Hawaii (CN) — Homeless people living at Ulehawa Beach Park in Nanakuli were given a pink slip Wednesday morning, notifying them that their personal property had to be removed from the beach before 10 p.m.
The city was preparing to shut down a West Oahu beach park for a week for what officials referred to as a "park rule enforcement" operation, aiming to clear people camping illegally and clean up trash.
“It’s not targeting any particular individuals,” said Nate Serota, spokesperson for the Honolulu Department of Parks and Recreation in an interview with Courthouse News. “It's actually for the property that's stored there. It’s really a sanitation effort.”
Despite daily visits by outreach workers for two weeks, about a dozen homeless people at the Depots Beach encampment struggled to leave in time for the scheduled cleanup. Some cited disabilities and a lack of resources as reasons for their delay.
“I have nowhere to go,“ Maile Kaho'onei, a homeless resident with burn scars covering her back and arms, said. She said has lived at Depots Beach since her family home burned down in 2021, leaving her disabled and homeless during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Kaho'onei said the city's increased cleanups "drive me nuts," adding stress to her already difficult living situation and causing her to lose more of her belongings.
“They started sweeping us more and more, they keep pushing you further down,” Kaho'onei said. “It’s hard — not enough we struggle with the wind, the rain, and as you can see, mine is I salvage whatever I can and put it together to trade,” she said.
Kaho’onei fixes and trades discarded objects with others in the encampment and surrounding area.
She talked about the sense of community on the 58-acre stretch at Ulehawa Beach Park.
“I got good friends, you know, made here on the beach. We all try to take care of each other,” she said.
Ulehawa Beach Park has been home to a homeless encampment for over a decade. The stabbing death of a 62-year-old man in the area in December brought renewed focus to cleaning up the park.
Bradford Mercado, a man living in a single tent on the beach, said the city's cleanup efforts have become more frequent and less regulated over time.
"I've been here for seven, eight years," Mercado said. "When they come, they don't take the rubbish, they take your stuff and leave the rubbish."
Local ordinances require the city to store seized property for at least 30 days, but people affected by the Ulehawa Beach Park closure said the city has immediately discarded their possessions.
In 2012, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over Hawaii, ruled in Lavan v. City of Los Angeles that seizing and destroying homeless people's belongings was unconstitutional, ordering a minimum 90-day holding period for such property.
Some people cited King Kamehameha I's 1797 "Law of the Splintered Paddle," also called the "sanctity of life" law in Hawaii's Constitution, which has influenced modern human rights protections. It says, "Let every elderly person, woman and child lie by the roadside in safety."
Hawaii's sky-high cost of living was a common complaint among people on the beach.
A 2020 HUD report set the "low income" threshold for Oahu at $93,000 — nearly double the national average full-time salary of $48,672. A study by Payscale.com found Honolulu's cost of living was 88% above the national average.
While he acknowledged the trash problem on the beach, Mercado argued that displacing native Hawaiians further up the beach fails to address the root issues driving homelessness across the state,
“The problem is, there’s a lot of garbage people leave behind or people live with, I mean look around. Yeah, a lot of garbage on the beaches, especially right here. But they’re not doing their job, there’s ways for doing that, and this is not the way,” he said.
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