Some of the nation’s biggest airports have considered different approaches to clearing out vagrants.
• In the early ’90s, Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport thought about building a shelter on site. The same decade, Hawaii legislators weighed whether to set up mental health and alternative housing programs for the 70 homeless bedding down at Honolulu International Airport. Neither effort was realized.
• At Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, the city and homeless advocates sent outreach teams into the airport almost every night for two months in 2006. The effort cleared all but the most stubborn, and most of them have stayed away. It took city funds and five outreach teams available for near-nightly sweeps to make it happen, though.
