Roy Miyahira and Jun Yang have just stepped almost simultaneously into a pivotal moment in the landscape of homelessness in Hawaiʻi. Each is the third person to hold their position in as many years.
That may be where their obvious similarities end.
Miyahira came out of private sector retirement with no experience in homelessness services to become director of homeless solutions for the City and County of Honolulu. Yang moved from homeless coordinator for Hawaiʻi’s Department of Transportation to become director of the state Office of Homelessness and Housing Solutions.
With two-thirds of Hawaiʻi’s homeless population living on Oʻahu, their success or failure will inevitably be intertwined. And for each, the road ahead is threaded with uncertainty.
Despite the state and Honolulu spending at least $188 million between them since 2022 to get more people off the streets, homelessness rose in 2024 after several years of decline. No one is sure yet why.
Amid a wholesale drive by the White House to refashion the federal government, millions of dollars in funding that flows to local homelessness services could be in question.
And against a backdrop of a climbing cost of living, some 28,000 Hawaiʻi households that pay more than half their income in rent live at constant risk of eviction.
“We’re all on a tipping point,” said Connie Mitchell, executive director of the Institute for Human Services, which manages several homeless housing programs launched by the state. “So it really puts us in a very precarious point in time.”
Navigating all of that falls to a large degree to Yang and Miyahira as they become the latest in the revolving lineup of officials to attempt to execute their bosses’ often ambitious plans.
Reception to the new appointees has been largely warm so far. Yang’s performance on homelessness at the transportation department is reassuring, service providers say. And though Miyahira is more unknown, nonprofit leaders he has met with came away encouraged. At the same time, some hope the two leaders will broaden their scope beyond that of their predecessors.
While the frequent turnover in these critical jobs has not gone unnoticed, most observers insist it hasn’t yet posed a problem because of the specificity of the overarching vision each is expected to follow.
“The leadership at the top is what matters most,” Mitchell said. “And right now, I feel like the governor and the mayor, at least on Oʻahu, are very much partnered in their strategies.”
Still, she said. “I hope they’ll stay for more than one year, because you’re just getting started after a year.”
On the state side, Rep. Lisa Marten, chair of the House Human Services and Homelessness Committee, said that each of the three directors under Gov. Josh Green has had enough savvy to keep things moving forward.
“It takes a little effort to make sure things don’t fall through the cracks in a transition,” Marten said, “but because the new appointees have always been so knowledgeable, I think it’s made these transitions pretty smooth.”
Both Yang and Miyahira face a moment as full of opportunity as challenges, and they need to work closely with service providers to seize it, said Laura Thielen, executive director of Partners in Care, a coalition of nonprofits, government representatives and community members that coordinates Oʻahu homeless services and funding.
“We have the governor and a mayor that are willing to put homelessness and affordable housing as their top priority,” Thielen said. “If we can’t make some really good movement on decreasing homelessness, then we’ve got some explaining to do. We really don’t have an excuse at this point.”
‘Flirting With History’
Certainly, the two new directors inherited high aspirations.
In his 2022 campaign for the state’s top elected office, Green — then the lieutenant governor — promised to cut unsheltered homelessness in half and eliminate chronic homelessness by 2030.
In January 2023, shortly after taking office and hiring his first state coordinator on homelessness, James Koshiba, Green declared homelessness a state of emergency.
Koshiba was gone within a year. No reason was given, but the governor’s office said he had worked to “lay the foundation” for achieving Green’s goals.
In February 2024, his replacement, John Mizuno, spoke with Civil Beat about Green’s vow to change the face of homelessness in Hawaiʻi.
“If we can successfully manage homelessness, this will set the blueprint for the rest of the country,” Mizuno said. “We’re flirting with history. It’s epic. No one’s ever done this.”
Flash forward a year and Mizuno, too, had stepped aside, just two weeks after criticizing aspects of a new Iwilei kauhale — Green’s signature tiny villages initiative — that was built off the utility grid and costs more to run, and where only 18 of 43 units were occupied as of last month.
Now it’s Yang’s turn to sound a similarly confident note.
“I hope to be able to deliver on the governor’s big vision for our state,” Yang said inside his shoebox-sized office on the fourth floor of the State Capitol.
“There are no other states saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to take that unsheltered number and we’re going to cut it in half and we’re putting our money where our mouth is, and we’re putting everything that we can behind this type of initiative.”
As Green’s effort to reduce homelessness got underway, Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi hired his fourth homeless coordinator since 2021, Sam Moku.
In a February 2024 interview on a city-sponsored podcast, Moku said, “There is a sense of urgency in order to execute.”
Six months later, in an interview with Civil Beat, Blangiardi vowed to get 1,000 people off the streets – a goal he reiterated in his State of the City address last week.
Then in December, the city announced Moku was stepping down for family reasons.
This month, asked about his goal as director, Miyahira — who said he took the job to give back to the state where he was born and raised but left 35 years ago for a career on the continent — spoke at first in less expansive terms, though later he affirmed Blangiardi’s aims.
“There’s just not a way right now to end homelessness. Not right now,” he said. “But to reduce that or to close off that pipeline for people going into experiencing homelessness. That’s number one.”
Good Signs, But A Caution Flag
Gauging the progress Yang and Miyahira’s predecessors made toward the goals Green and Blangiardi set is also hampered by a lack of recent data from what’s known as the “Point-in-Time Count,” a federally mandated effort to count people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January around the country.
The last Point-in-Time Count was taken right when Mizuno and Moku came on board in January 2024. And the next complete count isn’t scheduled until January 2026, leaving a gap in data that — while often considered an undercount — provides a useful and widely recognized baseline.
Beginning without that baseline is particularly difficult for the two new directors because the last count found cause for concern, with no way to know whether it was a blip or the beginning of a trend.
Until 2024, homelessness had been declining for several years.
On Oʻahu, the count found just over 4,000 people who were homeless in 2023, down nearly 19% since 2017, and statewide the homeless population had dropped about 14%, to 6,223.
“Based on the data, there has been a lot of progress in curbing some of the increase in homelessness,” said Anna Pruitt, director of the Office for Poverty Research and Action at the University of Hawaiʻi. “People are getting housed. There’s a lot of great work being done.”
However, in 2024, the total number of people homeless on Oʻahu went back up 12%, to nearly 4,500. Within that, the number of unsheltered — those who spend the night in places not designed for sleeping, such as cars, parks and abandoned buildings — rose, too.
And, statewide the overall number of people who were counted as homeless — both sheltered and unsheltered — in January 2024 rose slightly to almost 6,400, not including the people left homeless by the Maui wildfires, who were tallied separately.
Pruitt said it is too early to judge from a single year’s data whether this was a one-year spike or whether the trends are shifting.
“Obviously we don’t want to see an increase like this and it indicates that something’s going on,” she said, “but I can’t tell you what that is just yet.”
Pruitt added that there had been concerns the numbers would rise in 2024, as they did nationwide. That’s in part a delayed reaction to pandemic-era benefits running out, such as expanded child tax credits and other policies that made it easier for low-income residents to receive increased benefits.
“There were a lot more resources available for people, and then they were taken away,” she said. “I do think that that’s a part of it and then I think also just the economic situation we’re all in right now probably plays a role, too.”
Believing In Kauhale
The court of public opinion is much quicker to judge, of course, and that is the one facing the two new directors as they begin their work.
“We hear from everywhere that we are seeing a lot more … homeless individuals,” Yang said.
Without the data, Yang said he doesn’t know yet whether that’s the case. What he does believe, he said, is that the kauhale initiative his office leads is key to getting people off the streets and into permanent housing.
“It’s how we’re going to make a big change here,” he said, noting that since taking office, Green has also directed at least $20 million a year toward nonprofits that provide outreach and other homeless services.
During Mizuno’s tenure, 15 of the 19 kauhale now up and running were opened, providing 852 beds. They range from a 34-bed facility in Kāneʻohe’s Haʻikū Valley to the off-grid Iwilei tiny home village for 43 residents. Yang said the 19 kauhale have about a 95% occupancy rate overall.
Some are dedicated to people who are homeless and have substance abuse disorders. Others are geared toward people with mental health issues. One is focused on providing housing for people who are homeless and acutely ill. Another is specifically for homeless veterans. Some are for families with children. Two are for kūpuna, or the elderly.
Kauhale are typically run by nonprofits under a contract with the state. In addition to housing, they provide services ranging from mental health counseling to job training to residents who, it is hoped, will find support in a community setting and work toward greater self-sufficiency. Some kauhale are set up as long-term housing, others are intended to be more temporary.
Now it’s up to Yang to push forward toward Green’s goal, announced in his January State of the State address, to open 12 more kauhale by 2026 and bring the total number of kauhale beds to 1,500.
“I’m committed to trying to get there,” Yang said.
Asked how many people have transitioned from kauhale into more permanent housing, however, Yang said that data is not available yet. The state’s priority is getting the villages set up and running, he said.
“We’re in a buildup phase right now, but we are mindful of long-term metrics and instituting processes to best track these as we continue to meet the homelessness demand statewide,” he said in a statement this weekend.
Already, though, Yang is being asked to describe how the kauhale initiative fits into the larger picture of addressing Hawaiʻi’s homelessness.
State Sen. Joy San Buenaventura, who chairs the Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee, said she has asked Yang for something she said she didn’t get from Mizuno, a “global map” that identifies the needs of the state’s different homeless populations, the plans to meet those needs, and what it will take to get there.
“I want to see where we are so that we don’t just put money in kauhale when really there is this huge need for transitional housing and vice versa. I want to see what their plan is,” said San Buenaventura, who is also a member of the state’s Interagency Council on Homelessness.
“I told Jun Yang, ‘This is what I want,’” San Buenaventura said. “That way when we give them money, we will be able to see with goals right where we are and what we need. I still don’t have it, but, you know, he just got in.”
On Oʻahu, political leaders are also eager for a broader strategy to be articulated.
On the Westside, council member Andria Tupola said previous homelessness directors didn’t focus enough on what each district needs, but more on specific neighborhoods such as Chinatown and downtown that are greater magnets for tourists and office workers.
“It’s kind of daunting to work with homeless coordinators that kind of are just, ‘there is no plan,’” Tupola said. “It would be so much wiser for us to have district plans and then for the city to ask, ‘How’s the district plan going? How can we help? Where are we at with everything? What are the next steps?”
According to the 2024 Point-in-Time count, the Waiʻanae Coast had the largest unsheltered homeless population of any community on Oʻahu. As many as 200 at one time lived in a makeshift village off Farrington Highway called Puʻuhonua o Waiʻanae. Its residents hope to soon complete a move to permanent housing on a 20-acre parcel of land purchased in 2020 by a nonprofit founded by leaders of the encampment.
Enforcement, Services Too
One next step has been clear.
Blangiardi’s promise to move 1,000 people off Oʻahu’s streets came on the heels of a June 2024 Supreme Court ruling, City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, that local governments can enforce anti-camping regulations meant to curb public homelessness, even if people have nowhere to go.
The mayor said the ruling gave his administration leeway to pursue a strategy of more aggressively clearing homeless encampments.
Honolulu residents, he told Civil Beat, were tired of encampments spreading across sidewalks and throughout parks.
“Ninety-nine percent of people should not be subordinated the way they’ve been,” he said.
This is another place, however, where public data on the execution of homeless strategies seems to be lacking. Asked how many people have been moved in sweeps since August and where they had ended up, the city said it did not have those numbers immediately handy.
Compiling the exact number of how many encampments have been cleared since then would require culling data from multiple agencies that are charged with that task, including the city’s police, facilities maintenance department and an outreach team that responds to nonviolent calls, said Honolulu’s communications director, Scott Humber.
Humber said, “It’s safe to say that the city has performed dozens already in 2025.”
The city will continue to clear homeless encampments large and small, Miyahira said, but at the same time make sure services are available to people who are forced to move on.
While city staff do not issue citations when closing down encampments, police may give them out for trespassing or other criminal violations, Humber said. Data about citations issued was not immediately available.
The strategy has critics, including Wookie Kim, the ACLU of Hawaiʻi’s legal director. He said that while his organization has no solid data yet, since the Grants Pass decision, it appears anecdotally that Honolulu has stepped up efforts to clear encampments.
“Regardless of the ultimate goal of getting people into services and into housing, we should not be endorsing or condoning a system that uses the threat of criminal punishment to do that,” Kim said. “We’ll be watching what the city does. And if they take more extreme measures, we will definitely consider pushing back against it.”
Miyahira is confident in the city’s methods.
“I’m not sure aggressive is the right word, but we’re just being very assertive about where we want people to be, and we really want to try to convince them,” he said. “Just being firm and assertive and trying to convince people to get where they need to go, that approach, I think, is necessary to get a thousand people off the street.”
Miyahira said he will coordinate with homeless service providers and other government agencies to make sure that when encampments are swept, there are places for people to go and get what they need.
“My goal is to get providers to go and offer help and assistance and direction for these folks,” he said. “It is absolutely necessary and that’s going to be hand in hand with any type of enforcement or straightening out of a neighborhood. We have to have the services to deliver to them.”
For example, when a Waimānalo encampment was cleared in mid-March, members of the city’s Teamwork Hawaiʻi program were there to offer services such as shelter, employment assistance and medical care, he said.
Miyahira said he didn’t have details immediately available about how many of the four people at the encampment took up the offer for help.
The Blangiardi administration opened more than 500 shelter beds in 2024 and delivered services to 1,438 individuals, Humber said. It often partners with the state, which in some cases funds the delivery of wrap-around social services and in others has helped purchase property for shelter facilities.
‘As Quickly As Possible’
In his seven years as homeless coordinator at the transportation department, Yang focused on clearing encampments and connecting people who were living on state rights-of-way with social services.
It’s a background that clearly sets him up for his new job.
Miyahira, on the other hand, spent his career in corporate settings, mostly with Nestle’s bottled water division in California. His interactions with homelessness, he said, came mostly through company volunteer efforts feeding people in San Francisco and Oakland.
However, he said his role — most recently as Nestle’s customer operations manager — was to be “a mover of goods and services to the end user.”
Now, it is people who are homeless who are the end users, he said, promising that while he lacks a background in homeless services, his corporate experience will pay dividends.
“I can execute,” Miyahira said. “My record shows what I’ve done before with complex situations.”
Nonprofit leaders who have met with him in recent weeks agreed.
“His background is in logistics. That’s a lot of what we’re dealing with, how do we work together, how do we get things done as quickly as possible,” said Thielen, with Partners in Care.
Both officials know they face a tough challenge in persuading the 4,000 people who were counted statewide in January 2024 living in cars and tents to accept services and shelter.
“Our engagements tell us that there are many who refuse services after multiple encounters,” Miyahira said. “It comes down to, do they trust our system, right? It takes a lot, probably, for them to come home or come over.”
It can be done, said Pruitt, of UH Mānoa’s Office for Poverty Research and Action.
“They definitely can be more difficult to house. They’re more difficult to build trust with, that can be true,” she said of people who are considered chronically homeless. “But a lot of folks who were difficult to house have been housed. So it’s possible, but it just may take longer.”
Pop-up centers that last 45 to 60 days and provide counseling, medical and other services could also be an effective approach to steering people off the streets and into shelter, Miyahira suggested.
That approach, he said, might resemble a limited version of the city’s mobile Homeless Outreach and Navigation for Unsheltered program. HONU, as it’s known, is a temporary center where police and outreach workers direct people who are homeless so they can have a place to stay overnight and get services such as food, laundry and referrals to housing programs. The HONU in October moved to Kapolei from Pearl City, where it had been located for six months.
Take Waikīkī, Miyahira said: “Maybe we should be there just for a short time. Perhaps we could just address the small little encampments near the golf course and get people to come over to our side.”
Federal Cuts Loom
Whatever else they do, Yang and Miyahira — and their bosses — must also confront a chaotic national political climate as the Trump administration threatens one federal agency after another with a cost-cutting buzzsaw.
“I see it as akin to a hurricane out in the East Pacific. We know that it’s coming our way,” said Honolulu Council member Tyler Dos Santos-Tam. “We don’t know if it’s going to be a Category 5 when it hits. It might just be a thunderstorm. But we need to prepare and need to plan accordingly.”
One window into the threat is through Partners in Care, also known as Oʻahu’s Continuum of Care.
The 60 nonprofits in the continuum receive an estimated $18 million in federal funds through the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which the Trump administration has eyeballed for major program cuts.
The loss of that funding “would not only devastate existing homeless programs but also have widespread economic and social consequences,” a new Partners in Care report says.
Asked whether he has contingency plans, Miyahira said he will stay focused on Blangiardi’s 2023 plan to address homelessness on Oʻahu.
“It keeps the blinders on for us just to execute and do what we’re supposed to do here,” he said. “All these distractions, the mayor and his staff will deal with it.”
Anton Krucky, Honolulu’s Community Services Director and former executive director of housing, a post that included responsibility for homelessness and housing, said the city has so far set aside a $10 million backstop should HUD incur cuts.
Yang said he has concerns about federal funding, but the kauhale initiative is better insulated from potential budget cuts because it relies on state dollars.
Since its 2023 launch, the Legislature has appropriated $78 million for kauhale, Yang said. Green has requested $50 million for the program this session, but lawmakers have said it’s unclear whether they’ll be able to provide that much given the uncertainty in Washington.
House lawmakers in early March also proposed setting aside $200 million in state funds to guard against potential losses in federal funding that could have impacts across its nearly two dozen departments. Competition for those funds will be steep.
Whether the Legislature could allocate funds to shore up the state’s other homeless programs if federal funds were to be cut is “a future conversation,” Yang said. “We’re not there yet.”
Article can be found at: https://www.civilbeat.org/2025/03/new-city-and-state-homeless-directors-...