Chinatown tenants: shared bathrooms were kept locked overnight

HONOLULU (KHON2) — It’s not easy for 79-year-old Ruth Ellis to walk up steep stairs in her building, and she is expected to walk up and down every night to simply use the bathroom.

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Ellis and other residents said the management of the building on Chinatown’s Smith Street locks a gate to the bathroom on her floor at night. She lives on the second floor and management only keeps access to the bathroom on the first and fourth floors.

“They’ve been locked I mean, you know at 10 p.m. or so they lock them up and they don’t open them up until the morning,” said Ellis. “You have to have a porta-potty in your room because you know you have to go in the middle of the night.”

Ellis said she is recovering from a broken hip and she walks with a cane. A couple of doors down, Shirley Garcia leaves each morning around 5 AM for dialysis treatment. She keeps a bucket of water in her room.

Garcia said, “I bring the water over here inside my room so I can wash my face because I cannot go to my dialysis before I wash my hands and wash my face.”

Management said they locked the bathrooms because of homeless people entering the building and drug activity.

KHON2 reached out to the City’s Department of Planning and Permitting to ask if this is allowed, and we were told no.

The building manager Edward Broman said City inspectors visited the building Friday morning, and they were told that it was a violation to lock the bathrooms.

Broman said, “Trying to make the building safer, and that’s what we did. If we knew we were in violation we wouldn’t have done it. we would have figured out a different way.”

Broman said the bathrooms will remain open 24/7 from now on.

Tenants can access more information about their rights through the state’s Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, which operates the Hawaii Residential Landlord-Tenant Information Center.

Meanwhile, a request for investigation can be submitted to the City’s DPP to report concerns about possible building code violations.