No Rest For The Homeless: Bill Would Ban Sitting Almost Anywhere On Oahu

In Honolulu, being homeless is already a crime in many ways.

It’s illegal to sit or lie down in Waikiki and parts of 17 other neighborhoods. It is also against the law to obstruct a public sidewalk or store belongings on public property. And that’s not even taking into account anti-vagrancy laws at the state level.

But for City Council Chair Ann Kobayashi, the existing laws don’t go far enough. She introduced a measure last month, Bill 73, that would criminalize sitting or lying on a public sidewalk within 800 feet of a park or school from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Civil Beat plotted the property parcels of Oahu’s schools and parks on a map and circled them with an 800-foot perimeter to illustrate the impact of Kobayashi’s bill. It shows that the ban would be a massive escalation of existing sit-lie laws, making large swaths of the island off-limits to homeless people looking to rest.

Read more: https://www.civilbeat.org/2020/10/no-rest-for-the-homeless-bill-would-ban-sitting-almost-anywhere-on-oahu/