Homeless booted from Kakaako parks

Authorities finally pulled the plug on the sprawling encampments in two adjacent Kakaako parks and shut the parks down for “maintenance.”

The parks will remain closed until August 15 “or until further notice.”  Maybe that will depend a lot on the results of the primary election to be held August 13.

It’s interesting that they closed the parks without opening the new shelter that was promised when the governor declared a State of Emergency a while back.

The announced plan was to swiftly convert a maintenance shed near the parks into a temporary shelter, which was supposed to open five months ago and stay open no longer than two years.  That scheme quickly bogged down, although work on the interior has quietly resumed without any fanfare. Nobody seems to know when it will be finished.

Meanwhile, many of those evicted from the two parks have simply pitched their tents in a third park, Kakaako Waterfront Park, which is right next to the maintenance shed and soon-to-be shelter, down the street from the two closed parks, and around the corner from Honolulu’s biggest emergency shelter, which opened “temporarily” ten years ago and soon attracted hundreds of additional campers and squatters to the surrounding neighborhood and pretty much doomed the three public parks to the squalor we’ve seen there ever since.