A recent Advertiser editorial disputing both the effectiveness and judgment of City Councilman Rod Tam's proposed ban on bus-stop sleeping, was about as right on as right on gets.

Police enforcement of such a ban would involve a process of highly subjective judgment calls, and is not the kind of task we want to charge law enforcement with performing.

Moreover, such enforcement can only further contribute to the creation of a culture of hostility between the police, and what is, of course, a noncriminal element — the homeless. Already, being the tip of the spear in efforts to hound the homeless from our state parks and other locations deemed relatively safe for sleeping, the police have, to some extent, become "the enemy." And, besides, law-enforcement is hardly where one looks for social-economic solutions in the first place.

Solving the problem of homelessness is properly within the domain of social services, and it has long been the state's Department of Human Services that has been responsible for the maintenance and operation of the basic safety net for needy families with children, the destitute aged and disabled — the groups most at risk of becoming homeless.

This safety net, however, on the watch of the current director of DHS — Lillian Koller — has become shredded. It has been torn apart by policies shaped by a philosophy toward public assistance that less is inevitably better, that caseload reduction, by any means, is always a good thing.

Of course Koller's actions are well-intended, and it is hardly through inaction or ignoring the problem on her part, that homelessness in Hawai'i has surged over the past five years. Moreover, Koller did not invent the simplistic idea that reducing the state's public assistance caseload was a good thing in and of itself. This idea has had the stamp of official validity across the nation, at least since passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996.

However, while it is also true that there are many factors other than economic that contribute to the problem of homelessness, there is a fairly obvious correspondence between Koller's activism in the service of reducing public-assistance expenditures and what The Advertiser calls "O'ahu's most shameful shortcoming."

Cash assistance to Hawai'i's most economically disadvantaged, those who are least able to work or earn sufficiently to house themselves, has always been the principal means for their being sheltered. Making such assistance more difficult to obtain and keep translates easily into homelessness.

And what is far more tragic than the inconvenience of having our bus stops used as places where the homeless sleep is the fact of families sleeping in our parks. Every night a park near where I live becomes an ever-growing village of the homeless, populated by parents who cannot earn enough to rent. There children, as a result, are victimized by an unhealthy environment.

This administration's response to this startling increase of homeless families have been efforts at the creation of more affordable housing and the construction of three transitional shelters — woefully inadequate responses.

It is time for a rethinking of public assistance, of re-imagining welfare, not as a "free ride," or a bad thing, but as means to solving a persistent problem of free-market economies —that even during economic prosperity a rising tide does not lift all boats.

It's time to relax public assistance policies — especially for families with children who, if receiving such cash assistance as a supplement to their own meager earnings, might just be able to put a roof over their heads that is not a canvas tarp or car top.

This is money that is there and is going unspent, which it needs to be if the safety net — to keep the disadvantaged from falling into homelessness — gets at least a patch job.

William J. Carroll Jr. retired from the Department of Human Services after 26 years of service. He is an advocate for Hawai'i's economically disadvantaged. He wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.