Housing, whether the lack thereof or the price thereof, is something we’ve been suffering with in Hawaii for years. We’ve watched local families move from the places their families have lived for generations, exhausted, and finally defeated by the search for housing they can afford, until now more Native Hawaiians are living on the mainland than in Hawaii.
We’ve watched as the professionals we so desperately need in health care, in teaching, and in skilled trades endure that same exhausting search, with the same result: They give up on life in “paradise” and move back to where they came from. We’ve also watched as the labor market has gotten tighter and tighter, wages haven’t kept up (how could they!) with housing, and lesser skilled, but no less necessary workers for our communities depart for greener pastures.
So now, after all that watching, the crisis has reached a full boil, and finally, at long last, the housing dilemma is on everyone’s minds and attempted solutions are in everyone’s mouths. As Lizzo would put it: about damn time! The Legislature is seemingly awash with housing bills, the governor has appointed a housing coordinator and is working to make good on his election promise to make housing a key priority, and we hear that housing emergency proclamations are either forthcoming or will be out by the time this is published. Good on us, we’ve finally woken up.
In the flurry of competing attempts to solve this problem, though, we need to be clear about our terminology and how we talk about our needs, because the way we frame problems guides us, to a large extent, down the paths toward solutions. We can’t solve something if we can’t define what we’re trying to solve.
What we hear everywhere is the need for “affordable” housing, and yes, we need that, and yes, affordable is in the eyes of the beholder to be sure. But “affordable” has also become code for some sort of publicly assisted housing product, whether that be through outright subsidies, set asides for selected income levels, in designated affordable project areas, or on public lands. All well and good, we desperately need all those things.
But I think we risk missing more fundamental solutions to housing if we focus only on what we are now coding as “affordable” and aren’t looking at the full spectrum of housing needs at all the income levels that a housing market needs to be healthy. And in making that shift, we need to look at the barriers we’ve put in place and how we’ve shot ourselves in the foot with good intentions that have gone awry with unintended consequences.
We all want safe housing, but do we need (and can we afford) the current permitting environment that has created bureaucratic morasses that defy common sense, promote inertia and invite fraud? We all want agricultural and conservation lands preserved, but agricultural and conservation zoning combined equal approximately 98% of Hawaii Island, leaving approximately 2% maximized for housing and zoned for urban and rural use. It can be argued that this is more an artifact of the past than a useful land use pattern today.
Both the transplants who moved here and those who grew up here delight in the beauty and culture of our islands, but is it necessary to our delight to pull up the drawbridge to development with a NIMBY (“not in my back yard”) knee-jerk, to the detriment of our society’s continued viability. And do we need the multiple, overlapping levels of over-weaning community, commission and regulatory oversight that in one fashion or another foster NIMBY-ism and make Hawaii a true homebuilder’s nightmare?
So, by all means, let’s look at “affordable” housing solutions, but let’s also broaden the scope of our terminology to include housing that is, I don’t know, let’s call it “accessible” to people at all income levels. And to do that we need to make systemic changes directed not only at the affordable market but across the entire housing spectrum.
In our good intentions toward solving the “affordable” conundrum, let’s not delude ourselves into thinking we can solve the whole problem without deconstructing the framework that underpins an unsustainable housing economy. We solve that, and we go a long way toward a solution.
This column was prepared by the Vibrant Hawaii Housing Coalition. Visit www.vibranthawaii.org for more information.
