Homeless in Paradise

“Officer, I ain’t a bad guy, I ain’t do no harm, I will move on soon, just need a break, a place to hide from the rain”. “Josh, we do know that, but we do also know that you know the law and that it is our job to enforce it”.

I only slightly notice the conversation when I enter the scenery. Three police cars are surrounding a homeless guy. The related police officers have stepped outside to issue Josh a ticket. Desperately, Josh clamps on his shopping cart, where he stores all his belongings, covered underneath a holey tarp. Josh fears that they are also going to seize his few belongings.  

And indeed, it is pouring down. Tropical storm Darby just hit Oahu two hours ago. At that point, I was riding my bike on a road parallel to the ocean. It turned out to be one of those which almost purposely transform into flood channels once heavy rainfall sets in. Since this can get rather sketchy, I quickly sought shelter in a mall-like shopping center nearby. 

I already figured that the area I am erring through is a habitat of rather large villas, more so little palaces (Later I should find out that, among others, Hollywood-actor Mark Wahlberg resided here before his passing). Anyways, the shopping center suits the area - or the other way around. It is a hub of the good looking, the healthy living, the bright America, with its open-minded, issue-aware, and climate change-understanding citizens. It is one of those enlightened bubbles where an America congregates its feet mostly bedded on sustainable Birkenstock-Sandals. 

Thankfully, it is also where I finally find a dry spot in front of a fancy organic food market. Here, even fruits and vegetables appear healthier. The customers wear multi-functional clothes from outdoor brands only, and organic horn-rims substitute the elsewhere more common Ray Ban glasses. A vender, who has put her dreadlocks like a belt around her waist (this is worth mentioning because I’ve never before seen someone using one’s hair in such an innovative way), explains the advantages of organically crafted protein bars to a distinctively shaped triathlete, who on his behalf sets the path for my personal record in counting someone’s visible veins.

On parallel basis, a hysterically glancing woman admonishes the store’s general manager that it is an “impossibility” not to provide this particular South American sounding super food (“Not the Quinoa!”), since she is hosting this special visitor group from the Galapagos archipelago and therefore is in urgent need of. My other ear catches the conversation of an outwardly transsexual person at the coffee counter fearing the further immigration from “Muslim Countries”, since the incoming people could potentially compromise his or her or one’s gender identity.

I leave the organic market hall to sit down in front of the store with a pretty conventionally brewed filter coffee urgently wondering how to make sense of all this. The rain is still coming down in buckets. Meanwhile, the National Weather Service has gracefully texted me the third automatic emergency alert within minutes, warning for flash floods in the area. Since I am still way too drenched, I refuse to develop a dry thought of complain for them not having alerted me earlier. 

 

However, I conclude that it might be actually interesting to assess America’s social fabric and it’s sometimes diffusing bubbles using different kinds of grocery stores and super markets as metaphors. The opening chapter could be called “Organic Food Store America”. The following chapter could be dedicated to, let’s say, the “Walmart America”. 

All of a sudden, a cumulative shrieking attack fills the hall and the surroundings of the organic store. Darby’s intensifying lightning caused the electricity to shut down a second time. The shrieking around draws my attention back to something which decidedly disturbs the picture I tried to develop earlier in “Organic Food Store America”.

It is the iconic police congregation around Josh. It is Josh’s precariousness which really does not fit into the picture. Especially since he and his cart with the patched tarp are sharing the parking lot’s neighborhood with blinking-new Subaru Foresters, Volkswagen Bullies, Volvo Minivans, and Toyota Prius’.

Josh has fallen into the usual singsong about his agony. He once had wife and daughter. Then bad things happened. Somehow, Josh says it all started with the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008 and the collapse of the American housing market. For him, this meant losing his job and his house, then the girls, while finding the alcohol, putting him into a spiral downfall. With a last ounce of strength (and money he borrowed from a distant cousin), he found his way to Hawaii. He wanted to start over, to live the American Dream’s episode of the second chance. Quite contrary, the paradise of Hawaii became an American nightmare for Josh. And quite literally, since only after a few weeks without finding a starting point, his savings had dried out. This left him in the position of being stuck homeless on an island while indebted on the mainland.

  

The stories of the homeless, or “Residentially Challenged People”, as some authorities say to sound less derogatory, are manifold. And, they are apparently very American. Throughout the U.S.’, more than 60.000 families share the varying destinies of homelessness. On Hawaii, where they intersect with the heavily influential tourism sector, they tell a pretty restrictive story in particular. The Aloha State is leading the pack among U.S.’ states in terms of homelessness per capita. Alone on Oahu, with a population of about 950.000 people, the Department of Housing and Urban Development counted about 5.000 homeless individuals. In 2015, Hawaii’s Governor David Ige, responded and declared a state of emergency over the issue.

A friend of a friend of mine once put very simple why people, if possible, were moving out West or into warmer areas in the South like Florida once their lives start falling apart: “Because at the end of the day you can at least still sleep on the beach”. On Hawaii, recent homeless laws made even that impossible. Beaches and Parks close down during the nighttime. After measures backed by the tourism sector, which generates almost $7 billion in income revenue for Hawaii, throughout the densely populated touristic areas of Waikiki and Chinatown, it became illegal to sit or lie on sidewalks.

Indeed, the phenomenon of homelessness comes hand in hand with an increasing criminalization and restrictive measures against RCPs. All over the U.S., growing metropolitan areas are trying to extinct homelessness from the public screen. The National Law Center for Poverty and Homelessness finds that this extinction is of systematic nature and goes hand in hand with the criminalization of homelessness. Throughout the largest 180 U.S.’ municipalities, there is an uptick in criminalizing very fundamental necessities like sleeping, sitting or lying in public.

Behind the steering wheel of this criminalization also sits an increasing gentrification of booming metropolitan areas. Nationwide, more than a tenth of low-income housing was shut down since 2001. According to the NLCHP, this is the result of constant decrease in federally subsidized funding since the 1970s. This not only put out more and more people on the streets, but also increased competition for the remaining affordable units. Now add up (or just read or watch Michael Lewis’ The Big Short) the effect of the 2008’ housing crisis, and it outlines a more appropriate picture of the state of housing precariousness the States are in.

At the end of the day, people like Josh still can’t go up in smoke. Instead, they are being pushed around until finding a place where they can rest for a few hours. In the particular case, I find him a few blocks down the street. It still did not really stop raining. Josh now sits in the parking garage of another supermarket. An older generation of cars parks here. Shopping carts are hardly filled with fruits or vegetables. Seemingly stereotypical, I ran into a person who has filled up her cart with white toast and peanut butter.

Among the run-down cars, two or three other “residentially challenged people” are resting. Here is where they belong, a place for the losers. Their losing streak’s destiny is fittingly embedded into a bubble of shattered asphalt, half-rattled neon light, diabetes-triggering foods, and the nestling conscience that they are not going to disturb the wrong ones. Sometimes, however, Josh’s world and the organic food store world irregularly collide, incidental to a tropical storm.

As I outlay these bitter and dystopian thoughts in my head, a police cars pulls into the parking lot. One of the officers’s from earlier steps outside and hands Josh a filled-up brown bag with sandwiches, together with a steaming cup of coffee.

“Give me your tired, your poor, 

your huddled masses yearning to breathe”.

 

Sometimes appears this glimpse of another part of America. It is an America of the caring, the looking-out for each other despite all hardships. It is when then the Statue of Liberty’s very fundamental lines, live on into existence. Usually, America does a pretty good job in segregating, in blending out contradicting realities. 

But sometimes they interfere and people start to think about the bubbles they work, shop, and live in. The more this happens, the more natural and convincing America lives up to its alleged standards. Maybe, this is exactly what keeps this controversial social fabric together. It certainly prevents America from becoming a nation of cynics.