The city and state plan a deeper, data-driven approach to address homelessness starting in January that also could tap into city police and park drone images to gauge homeless activity across Oahu in real time.
The new approach represents the latest evolution to address homelessness on Oahu, said Jun Yang, the state’s homeless coordinator who had worked with former Mayor Kirk Caldwell to get more help for Honolulu’s homeless.
“I want to share data as best as we can so we can make the best decisions and tell funders,” Yang said. ‘This is the direction were going in.’”
A new, homeless “command center” will open in January at new city offices at the former Central Pacific Bank building on North School Street for the Department of Community Services, which oversees the city’s homeless efforts.
It will use artificial intelligence to sift through homeless provider apps to get more data on how homeless services are meeting the specific needs of Honolulu’s homeless, which could include mental health issues, substance abuse or serious medical treatment, said Anton Krucky, director of the Department of Community Services.
Under Mayor Rick Blangiardi, Krucky said the city’s focus has been to “create as many creative things to get a homeless person to say ‘yes’ to engage the system and change our services to meet that. You need to come up with a compelling reason for them to say ‘yes.’ You just need to have places to treat them.”
Not including its partnership with the state to develop more homeless kauhale communities or the city’s roaming pop-up HONU emergency treatment shelters, the city has often partnered with the state to open 10 new shelters on Oahu aimed at specific homeless needs, including:
>> “Medical respites” for people with serious medical needs that make them particularly vulnerable on the street.
>> Separate units in Wahiawa and Hauula for homeless families with children.
>> Other shelters, some in conjunction with the state, focus on substance abuse and mental health needs.
Krucky calls them “Beds of Many Flavors.”
“It’s a great start and speaks volumes about how much we’ve done,” Krucky said. “But now that I’ve got them up, I’ve got to make sure they’re successful.”
If not for specific shelters aimed at specific needs, Krucky said, “We can just go after the general population and see where they fit. But, in many cases, it wasn’t working.”
So the new focus of the state and city will be to track whether beds aimed at specific needs are going unfilled or are overwhelmed with demand, potentially requiring more similar bed space, Krucky said.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development only requires communities to count their “unsheltered” homeless population at least every two years, so no one knows how many people were living on the street in January 2025.
The 2025 Point in Time Count, instead, focused on a one-day snapshot of people living in Oahu shelters.
So Krucky said he has “no idea” whether Honolulu’s unsheltered population grew since January 2024.
“My speculation, without counting, even if they’re not flat or down, that is very different than the mainland,” Krucky said. “The mainland has had a huge increase in their counts and Hawaii has not.”
He believes the number of homeless has fallen in certain neighborhoods including Waikiki, Chinatown and Waimanalo.
The January 2024 Point in Time Count found that Oahu’s overall homeless population jumped nearly 12% to 4,495 people — up from 4,028 in January 2023.
Perhaps even more troubling, the 2024 Point in Time Count measured a 19% increase in homeless families since January 2023, including 635 children who can suffer lifelong consequences.
But the upcoming data-driven approach — tapping into numbers from social service agencies dealing with specific parts of Oahu — will enable the city to focus “on what to do in individual districts,” Krucky said. “We can do it differently.”
Along with real-time drone images, the new command center also will allow employees to communicate with city drone operators to offer their perspectives on what they’re seeing at specific locations, Krucky said.
As an example, Krucky said he wants to find out whether the city needs to provide more beds for homeless mental health treatment because “those people scare people because they’re unpredictable.”
More broadly, he said, the data will help determine whether state and city homeless expectations “were unreal. Are we following up with these people to make sure they’re not back on the street? It’s a start. No one was doing it before. We can do it differently.”
Yang, the state’s homeless coordinator, welcomes more specific data to apply more focus on homeless needs to get them the help they need.
In 2013, working on homeless issues for the city, Yang said his only available data was the annual Point in Time Count and homeless shelter data that included whether individual shelters were full or could accommodate more homeless coming off the street.
“It was hard for me to say we were making decisions based on data,” Yang said. “Where we’re at today is light years of where we were a decade and a half ago.”
Source: The Garden Island