Kaua‘i’s Only Emergency Homeless Shelter To Get Major Overhaul

With homelessness trending up on Kaua‘i, the island’s sole emergency shelter for the general population is set to get a complete renovation at a cost to taxpayers of roughly $18 million. 

“We need more beds, more staff, more funding,” said Jennifer Harper, CEO of Kaua‘i Economic Opportunity, which runs the Līhuʻe shelter. “We’re really seeing homeless tick up.”

Kaua‘i County is planning to expand the 50-year-old Mana‘olana Emergency Homeless Shelter — with dorms for men and women, plus family rooms — from 38 emergency beds to 108. The project will include construction of a community room, library and computer room, plus a new communal cafeteria and kitchen. 

The facility sits on nearly two acres owned by the county. KEO has a lease for the land for the next two years and manages eight one-bedroom, transitional housing apartments next to the shelter. The renovation will increase the number of apartments to 25. 

“This will be far improved, and it will serve a lot more people,” said Adam Roversi, Kaua‘i’s housing director.

More Beds, More Privacy

The Mana‘olana facility is the island’s sole emergency shelter for the general population. The YWCA has a 16-bed family violence shelter that’s only open to survivors and their children. 

The buildings for the shelter and transitional apartments show their age, Roversi said. The shelter building, originally an old schoolhouse, is over 100 years old. The transitional housing units were once the Housing Agency’s offices and were never intended to be used for living.

Four years ago, the county removed six old septic tanks and connected the property to the municipal wastewater system, which enables the facility’s expansion. The county allocated $920,000 across fiscal years 2026 and 2027 to create conceptual designs and conduct cultural and environmental reviews. 

Roversi said the county doesn’t have a projected date for when construction could begin. The cultural and environmental reviews are ongoing, and the plan is to get the project shovel ready — apart from needed building permits — for the next administration. 

The roughly $18 million cost would likely be paid for with a mix of state and federal funding and, potentially, contributions from the county’s housing development fund. Roversi said the renovation would probably happen in phases so there would always be some housing capacity for people in need. 

“We’re not just shutting down the entire place and removing all those available beds for residents on Kaua‘i,” he said. 

The shelter currently is split between separate dorms with bunk beds for men and women and three family rooms. The renovation will move away from dorms to semi-private rooms with two to four beds in each. Semi-private rooms will give shelter clients more privacy and give the shelter operator more flexibility to convert them to family rooms when there are more families in need. 

Dorms don’t work well in emergencies such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Mana‘olana had to temporarily shut down during Covid because people couldn’t be housed so closely together, Roversi said. 

“That demonstrated one weakness of congregate dormitory style housing,” he said. 

Homelessness Trending Up

The planned project comes as the number of people experiencing homelessness on Kaua‘i has been trending up over the last eight years. 

This year’s Point-in-Time count found that 516 individuals were experiencing homelessness on Kaua‘i. That’s a slight decrease from the last count of the island’s sheltered and unsheltered populations in 2024, when there were 523 people experiencing homelessness. In 2018, the count found 293 individuals experiencing homelessness. 

The 26 individuals who were staying at the Mana‘olana shelter during the Point-in-Time count remained there anywhere from 53 to 508 days. 

Harper, who recently took the helm of KEO, said the emergency shelter sees roughly 100 people a year and clients stay for varying lengths of time because there are not many housing options for them to transition into. 

KEO works with Family Life Center, another nonprofit that provides homeless services, and the county to find accommodations for clients, especially if it doesn’t have availability in its own transitional apartments.

The Mana‘olana shelter currently accommodates up to 25 people, plus up to 28 in the transitional apartments. The shelter and apartments are primarily run by three full-time people — including a newly hired resident manager who will live in one of the apartments — plus a security guard who works at night. Staffing, Harper said, has been a challenge and limits the number of occupants the shelter can accommodate.

Harper previously worked for the Kaua‘i Food Bank and said in the last two years the island’s nonprofit safety net providers have seen more people in need of emergency shelter. She’s also seen more families in need.  

Rowena Pangan, who runs Ho‘omana Thrift Shop in Wailua, said she’s also seen more people experiencing homelessness — particularly kūpuna, seniors. For the last eight years, she’s hosted weekly meals for the island’s homeless communities. Some who have attended became homeless after their lives fell apart through divorces, domestic abuse or other challenges. 

She thinks more people are experiencing homelessness than the annual point in time count reflects because many people camp in tents on family members’ properties or couch surf. She added that while Kaua‘i does need more shelters, it also needs other pieces of the safety net to help those in need get back on their feet, such as lower barriers to access services and more case management. 

“You don’t only need the shelter,” she said. “You need someone to come in there and say, ‘OK, why are you at the shelter, why are you here? OK, you only make $3,000 a month, let’s help you get into housing and this and that.’”

Roversi said the Mana‘olana renovation will go a long way in helping address homelessness on Kaua‘i by serving roughly 20% of the homeless population. 

“It’s a step in the right direction but not a solution by itself,” he said.