More people than ever are sleeping on Oahu’s streets, parks and beaches, according to data from an annual homeless survey released Wednesday.

The Point in Time count — a federally mandated effort to identify the number of people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January — located 4,494 homeless people on Oahu this year, a roughly 12% increase from 2023.

While the overall number of people homeless on Oahu is virtually the same as it was pre-pandemic, the unsheltered homeless population has continued to grow year-over-year, doubling in the last decade.

In 2014, a majority of the island’s homeless population slept in shelters. Today, nearly two-thirds of homeless people on Oahu are unsheltered — a category that encompasses people camping on sidewalks and parks, sleeping in their car and living in structures cobbled together from discarded materials.

It’s a challenge that city and state leaders say they are planning to tackle head-on by building 14 additional kauhale, or community-focused homeless shelters, in the next six months.

“We are not running away from the uptick or the stats,” John Mizuno, the governor’s homelessness coordinator, said at the press conference, held across the street from a homeless clinic and medical respite center in Iwilei.

A Collaborative Effort

Gov. Josh Green and Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi — along with their respective homelessness coordinators — presented a united front at a press conference on the data release Wednesday, emphasizing their commitment to working together to address the issue, along with their belief that homelessness is indeed solvable.

Blangiardi said he was “neither encouraged nor discouraged by the numbers” and stressed that the fact that the homeless population has not grown more is a testament to the work being done by the city and state.

But, while less than 0.5% of the island’s population is homeless, Blangiardi said, homelessness is a persistent issue that is “in everyone’s face.”

In 2024, there were 2,766 unsheltered homeless people identified by outreach workers, up from 1,318 in 2012.

Blangiardi said that on a recent trip to Washington, D.C., with fellow mayors seeking to raise more attention to the issue, the topic of addressing homelessness had increasingly centered on mental illness.

Blangiardi and Green both pointed to a state student loan forgiveness program for health care workers as a possible solution to help address persistent shortages in care. Homeless outreach organizations have been struggling with staffing shortages, complicating efforts to help chronically homeless individuals who may not trust new caseworkers and clinicians.

In addition to building additional kauhale, the state has committed money to fly homeless people who are originally from other states back to places on the mainland where they have family, Mizuno said. In the last two weeks, 17 people have flown to the mainland through the program, he said. 

Green also stressed that more people volunteered to conduct the annual homeless survey this year, raising the possibility that the numbers of homeless people aren’t increasing but rather the ability to count them has improved.

Ongoing Disparities

Although the island saw an overall increase of 12% in the number of homeless, individual communities saw much larger shifts.

The number of homeless people in the area encompassing Ewa Beach and Kapolei surged by 42%. Meanwhile, the Waianae Coast continues to have the largest unsheltered homeless population of any community on the island.

One theory in the past on the sharp differences in different communities was that homeless people were moving from one part of the island to another. During recent Point in Time surveys, volunteers and outreach workers recorded the precise location where they interacted with homeless individuals.

The geographic data showed that most homeless individuals moved less than a mile from one year to the next, said Anna Pruitt, a faculty affiliate in the department of psychology at the University of Hawaii Manoa who worked on the Point in Time count.

“They’re not moving that much,” Pruitt said. “So there must be some other explanation or additional explanations for why some of these regions are experiencing sharper increases than others. And so that’s something that we want to explore next.”

Though the Waianae Coast has a larger unsheltered homeless population than downtown Honolulu, the area has only two emergency homeless shelters.

Mizuno said the city and state are focused on Iwilei and the West Side of Oahu as priority areas and expect to be building more kauhale sites in both locations.

The survey data also showed persistent disparities in who in Hawaii is experiencing homelessness. Half of Oahu’s homeless population surveyed identified as Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. Of the more than 500 unsheltered Native Hawaiians who answered survey questions, nearly half said they were eligible for Hawaiian homelands.

Civil Beat’s community health coverage is supported by the the Cooke Foundation, Atherton Family Foundation and Papa Ola Lokahi.