Category Archives: Housing

The pets and homelessness connection

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I recently ran across a very interesting little article about the role of pets in the creation of homelessness (“Renters fight back to keep their pets—and homes”).

The article describes how two legal programs in Los Angeles—one addressing landlord-tenant issues, the other providing aid to people trying to keep their pets—found they were dealing with two pieces of the same overall issue.

Los Angeles-area courts hear some 54,000 eviction cases each year, and no one knows how many more move “voluntarily” at the first landlord threat. Pet issues — sometimes legitimate, often not — are high on the list of why: Evoking a previously unenforced “no pet” clause is one good way for property owners to empty a building before it’s put up for sale, or to push out low-rent tenants in a gentrifying area.

Pets also hamper tenants from finding any housing at all — about half of Los Angeles’ rental units and most homeless shelters don’t allow them. The federal Fair Housing Act requires landlords to make “reasonable accommodation” for tenants with physical or mental disabilities, a requirement that includes accepting certified service or emotional support animals. But tenants can’t insist on rights if they don’t know they have them.

Enter Prado’s public interest law firm, the Housing Equality and Advocacy Resource Team (HEART), and the legal services offered by the Inner City Law Center via DDR’s Pet Resource Center on Skid Row. These parallel efforts may represent the first time no-cost attorneys have focused solely on pets as the driver of housing problems. They also mark a powerful merger of movements: the struggles for social justice and for animal welfare.

Seeing how many of Hawaii’s homeless have pets suggests that these same issues play a role in at least a significant part of Hawaii’s problems.

It makes me wonder whether any of Hawaii’s animal welfare organizations, including the Humane Society and SPCA, facilitate access to legal assistance and other types of general support?

And do those dealing with housing issues keep track of the proportion of cases that revolve around pet-related issues?

It’s the connection between pet and housing issues that’s important here.

Over time, intervention program counselors have repeatedly seen families forced to choose between their housing and their animals’. The problem is widespread. A survey by the National Council on Pet Population Study and Policy found the top two reasons for surrender of both dogs and cats were “moving” and “landlord not allowing pets.” In a 2015 motion, Los Angeles City Councilmember Paul Koretz noted that “since 2011, at least 22.6 percent of relinquished dogs and 18.6 percent of relinquished cats” had been turned over to city shelters because of tenancy restrictions.

And this:

Humans evicted because of animals face predictable financial and emotional consequences, including job loss, depression, poverty. Eleven percent of Los Angeles County’s unsheltered homeless directly cite eviction or foreclosure as responsible for putting them on the street. Animals made homeless when their people lose housing face life in a shelter cage. Keeping dogs out of shelters and keeping people off the street are part of the same fight.

Anyway, I thought it would be worth sharing.

If you’re active on animal welfare or housing issues, please share your perspective on this.

A picture of Inequality

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This was the scene at the end of Kahala Avenue in front of Waialae Beach Park this morning. It was a very typical morning.

The house in the background, which sits on about 1/3-acre of land, sold at the beginning of 2019 for a reported $5,283,000. The buyer is a Japanese company based in Hokkaido, Japan. The company director who signed the deed made the news less than two years earlier by paying $22 million for a condominium in the Park Lane condominium at Ala Moana Center.

The house boasts two floors with total living area of 9,351 square feet. It has 14 rooms, including four bedrooms, five bathrooms, and two half baths, according to real estate records. It seems to be a corporate investment in Hawaii real estate.

Back to the beach park. The small red car has been parked across the street in front of the $5.28 million house for months. It is home to a man who would otherwise be considered homeless. It’s his bedroom, his living room, his storeroom, and his workshop. I’m not at all sure how he survives. I can’t say he has nothing, because his car appears to be stuffed with, well, stuff. But I think it’s fair to say he has very, very little. He moves the car from one parking space to another in the same short block to avoid being ticketed by police. But he is somehow surviving.

The Yin and Yang of our modern life.

2,063 Tourists are in Hawaii Today

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Well, that was apparently the visitor count on September 29, 1932, according to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin of that date.

Although they refer to tourists “in Hawaii,” the article seems clear that they’re talking about Honolulu, and likely Waikiki in particular. Apparently there weren’t many visitors traveling to the neighbor islands at that time.

Just click on the clipping to see a larger version.

It’s a lot different today.

According to preliminary data gathered by the state Department of Business, Economic Development, and Tourism, the average daily visitor count for Oahu during the three months of 2019 was 114,165.

Lee Cataluna was right on point with her recent column in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser about all the illegal transient vacation rentals in our neighborhoods. The Legislature voted to collect taxes from them. Cataluna replies that local residents want to stop them, not tax them.

Here’s a part of her column.

Are Hawaii residents mad because vacation rentals aren’t kicking in their share of state taxes?

No. That’s not what you hear. That’s not what people post online about the strangers coming and going at the house next door or the all-night parties down the street in the house that used to be a home for actual neighbors, not transients. That’s not what they talk about with their friends when they say, “I don’t even know whose car is parked in front of my house!”

It’s not, “Make them pay!” It’s “Make them stop!” Nobody who lives with these illegal hostels on their street or across the fence is worried much about them paying taxes. Nobody who has to jockey for parking or deal with the lights on all night or watch as strangers take pictures of their backyard plants is asking for money.

They want their peace and privacy back. They want actual neighbors to be their neighbors, people they can get to know, who can cat-sit for them when they go on trips and who will call them at work when they see something amiss and say, “Hey, Barbara, you left your side gate open. Want me to close it for you?”

Hawaii residents want tourists to go back to all the vast prime beachfront that our kupuna saw taken away and paved over, built up and maximized for tourism. That was the unspoken deal, that we would give up Waikiki and Poipu and Lahaina and Wailea to the tourist machine but keep the country country and the neighborhoods neighborhoods. The deal has now been broken.

Confusion over housing prices

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The front page of this morning’s Honolulu Star-Advertiser illustrates the confusion of the media, and the public, over the issue of housing prices.

This story and graphic took up two-thirds of the front page. The sub-head reads: “Sales and median prices for single-family homes and condos all fell for the first time since 2010.”

Slightly lower, or “weakened” prices, add up to a “stumble.”

This, of course, is the view of the real estate industry, which tends to mold news coverage of real estate sales.

The problem is that real estate and “housing” sound like the same thing, but in practice they are very different.

While reporting a slight dip in real estate prices as a “stumble,” the media also give prominent attention to our crisis in housing affordability. From this perspective, a prolonged dip in housing prices would appear to be something to cheer about.

So the news coverage of “real estate,” on the one hand, and “housing” on the other, appear as contradictory and misleading. Some news reports bemoan the fact that Honolulu is one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, while others gloat about increasing “values”.

No one really wants to say it, but this is an example of “haves” and “have nots,” both significant parts of the population, with different interests in real estate and housing. If you own real estate, you are likely cheered up by rising prices. If you don’t own anything, then rising prices are just a reminder that you’re still unable to own a home, or find a reasonable rent.

Perhaps the Star-Advertiser or other media could lead the way in trying to reconcile these divergent ways of viewing the business of real estate and the human reality of housing, although I’m not sure how that can be done.