After a three-year wait, Angelina Rivera-Porter was thrilled when the state last year notified her that she was at the top of the list for a hard-to-get affordable rental in an O'ahu public housing project.

Because she was homeless, Rivera-Porter initially was placed in a category of applicants receiving the highest preference for government-owned apartments. She was told she might qualify for a three-bedroom unit.

But then something befuddling happened.

After Rivera-Porter informed the state housing agency she was living at a Waimanalo beach with five of her children, the homeless woman said she was told she wasn't considered homeless under the state's housing regulations.

The policy gives top preference to homeless people only if they're living in transitional shelters.

For the hundreds, if not thousands, of Hawai'i residents living in beach tents, in their cars or in other makeshift quarters, the rules effectively penalize them. The non-sheltered homeless are lumped with the scores of other eligible people at the bottom of a three-category priority list for public housing, meaning their waits likely will last years longer.

"I don't understand it," Rivera-Porter, 37, a full-time housekeeper at a hospital, told The Advertiser. "How can you say I'm not homeless when I'm living on the beach with my children?"

Rivera-Porter's attorney, John Robert Unruh of Legal Aid Society of Hawaii, was equally dumbfounded, saying the policy doesn't make sense. "It's almost too incredible to believe," he said. Unruh is representing Rivera-Porter in her administrative appeal of the state's decision that she does not qualify for the top priority group.

The preference policy, by creating an additional bureaucratic hurdle for the non-sheltered homeless, is yet another example of state practices aggravating the worsening homeless crisis, critics say.

"The whole policy needs to be revisited," said Michael Ullman, a homeless advocate. "It's clearly dysfunctional when someone is getting preference living at a shelter vs. someone not living at a shelter."

SUCCESSFUL TRANSITION

The policy is based on the premise that families in shelters are required to comply with a social services plan, getting parenting, budgeting or other structured assistance to help them turn their lives around. When the families are ready to leave the shelters, the reasoning goes, their lives presumably will be more stable and they will have a better shot at successfully transitioning into public housing, where they have to pay rent regularly and abide by lots of rules.

Linda Smith, senior policy advisor for Gov. Linda Lingle, said the state's objective always is to get homeless families into emergency or transitional shelters as quickly as possible, allowing the families to get professional assessments on what can be done to improve their situations.

"We want to get families in a place where they get a roof over their head, are stabilized and in a position they can be successful in public housing," Smith said.

"It's to make sure there's some basic assessments. It could take a day, it could take five days. Some families can take months."

A spokesman for the Hawai'i Public Housing Authority, which handled Rivera-Porter's case, said he was prevented from commenting on it because of confidentiality rules.

PREFERENCE POLICY

In a recent interview, Patti Miyamoto, interim executive director for the housing agency, acknowledged that the preference policy needed to be streamlined to cut down on the time it takes to screen and place applicants within the categories. She said that review adds to the time the agency takes to fill vacant units. Under pressure from the federal government, the agency is trying to cut that turnaround time from an average 352 days to fewer than 30.

Housing officials didn't respond last week to questions about what changes they may be considering to the preference policy.

The state has about 12,000 people on a wait list for 68 federal projects totaling more than 5,300 units. The waits average three to six years, depending on a variety of factors, including when the applicant signed up and which of the three preference categories the person qualifies for.

The top category includes sheltered homeless residents who are in compliance with a social services program; domestic violence victims; and people involuntarily displaced from their homes.

The next-highest category consists of those living in substandard housing and those paying more than 50 percent of their annual income for rent.

The bottom category — the one Rivera-Porter was knocked down to — includes, among other groups, families with incomes meeting the agency's target requirements.

The average wait for those in the top group is one to two years, while those in the bottom group typically wait more than five years.

Even if a homeless family living in a tent or car couldn't qualify for the top category, as was the case with Rivera-Porter, Smith didn't know why such a family would be placed in the bottom group instead of the middle one, which includes substandard housing. "Common sense," she said, would suggest that a tent or car on the beach would be considered substandard housing.

Housing officials didn't respond to a question about that issue.

While the preference policy may have made more sense years ago when few Isle families were living on the beaches and most went through the shelter system, Hawai'i's non-sheltered homeless population has mushroomed the past two years, making the policy out of touch with today's crisis, advocates say.

And although social services may not be as accessible to families on the beaches as those in shelters, such services are available, making the policy even more obsolete, advocates say.

If anything, they added, families on the beach are the ones who need housing the most.

"The people who are non-sheltered should be the ones who go to public housing," said Connie Mitchell, executive director of the Institute for Human Services, a homeless shelter operator.

If concerns arise about a non-sheltered family not having enough social-services support, that support could be provided once the family is in public housing, Mitchell said.

Social service workers say a family like Rivera-Porter's would make a good candidate for public housing.

WAIT LIST FOR SHELTERS

With her full-time job, she is able to get by without any government assistance, such as food stamps or welfare, according to Rivera-Porter. She also has been in regular contact with a social worker. Five of Rivera-Porter's children, ages 4 to 14, live with her.

When the state told Rivera-Porter she had to be in a shelter to qualify for the top preference group, she tried getting into one, but they all had wait lists, according to Melissa Chun, the social worker who has assisted her. When Rivera-Porter contacted IHS, some 35 families already were signed up for space in its shelter for single women and children.

IHS's Mitchell said 35 to 50 families typically are on the wait list.

After Rivera-Porter was disqualified from the top preference category, she signed up in July with the housing agency for the wait list for Section 8, the subsidy program for private rental units. The state accepted applications for one week, then closed the process because they received more than 4,000 — so many that the wait for those on the tail end of the list could stretch to more than five years.

When Rivera-Porter's Section 8 application was processed, she was placed back in the top priority group by the same agency that previously disqualified her, according to Chun.

LEASE NOT RENEWED

That eventually led to the agency contacting Rivera-Porter again, saying she had reached the top of the public housing list and was being considered for a three-bedroom apartment — again.

This time, Rivera-Porter emphasized that she had been involuntarily displaced from her rental unit in mid-2005 because her Kalealoa landlord opted not to renew the lease because of a remodeling project, she said.

After losing her Kalealoa home, Rivera-Porter said she and her kids ended up on the Waimanalo beach in June 2005 because she couldn't afford rents elsewhere. She has been homeless since then, sometimes staying with family or friends.

Unruh, her Legal Aid lawyer, said that involuntary displacement should've been enough to qualify his client for the top preference last year — even if she wasn't living in a homeless shelter at the time. Involuntary displacement is one of the qualifiers.

But the agency concluded once again that she didn't qualify for the top group, according to a November letter from the department.

Rivera-Porter is appealing that decision, and a hearing has been set for this week.

If she remains on the bottom list, the agency told her she essentially would have no chance of getting housing, Rivera-Porter and Chun said.

This preference policy "is not necessarily helping the families that need help the most," Chun said.

The policy is only the latest state practice to come under fire in the context of Hawai'i's homeless mess.

The government's diversion of more than $200 million from affordable housing funds over the past decade, the hundreds of vacant units it has in federally subsidized housing projects, the lengthy time it takes on average to fix those apartments and get them reoccupied and the state's spotty history with the Section 8 rental subsidy program also have drawn criticism. Those factors, which critics say likewise have worsened the homeless crisis, were the subject of a recent Advertiser story.

Reach Rob Perez at rperez@honoluluadvertiser.com.