Sadly, Hawaii is not alone with this problem. Lake Tahoe has been swamped with well-heeled transplants from the SF Bay Area that moved to the mountains during the pandemic and subsequent remote work movement. That has meant people who work in the hospitality industry and other businesses are literally getting shoved out of the area by high rents and/or their rented house being turned into a short-term rental, since demand is so high. People who work in the hotels and resorts in the basin have to commute from nearby cities of Reno or Carson City (Hawaiians don’t really have an option like that).
I don’t know what the answer is - some places are getting loved to death. Do you artificially suppress demand by limiting access? Will that drive costs down for locals? Or do you just let capitalism fly and disregard the consequences? For me, I would rather not have iconic spaces like Hawaii and Tahoe be turned into another Disneyland.
I agree with you but I’m thinking that like in most cases, the answer boils down to money. Huge real estate prices mean very large property taxes and big revenue for government. Limiting access and driving down value means a lot less revenue.
…while Hawaii isn’t alone in the “real estate pricing problem”, the issues facing indigenous Hawaiians are significant and much bigger than just being a place that is being “loved to death”. Hawaii was literally stolen in a coup d’état. The problem isn’t “love.” Its racism. Its colonialism. Its broken promises. It’s not listening and not including native Hawaiians in the process.
We can’t address high real estate prices without first addressing why native Hawaiians have to deal with bullshit like this. The answers start here.
Limiting access to whom? The “well-heeled transplants” from the Bay Area are the locals now, and they became locals by exercising basic constitutional rights. We don’t have internal migration controls where US citizens have to get permission to buy property and move within the USA.
Of course we could always be in Miami where I am where vast gouts of Latin and Russian money, much of it ill-gotten, plus plenty of good old fatcat American money have driven the prices through the roof, encouraged real estate development far beyond the ecological carrying capacity of the local environment, priced folks of whatever ethnicity born here out of the market, etc. Oh yeah, and rampant highly seasonal high volume tourism too.
Serious income & asset inequality ensures the WAG 1% of world real estate that is super-desirable will be priced according to the interests of the 0.0001% of people who control far more than 1% of the money.
Hawaii has a triple whammy because it is so isolated there’s no nearby hinterland for the now-poor to retreat to, the inherent high cost of being a long way from the mainland vs, e.g., being just 50 miles offshore, and the way it was stolen from the Natives there much more recently than the rest of the USA (and Canada) was stolen from the Natives there 150-250 years ago.
I don’t know what others mean by it, but I’d personally expect it to mean:
Tourist caps
Taxing the tourists and using that money to rebuild and maintain the local region.
I know that the latter exists, at least, so from that point the question is whether the local government is actually using those funds for preservation and:
Rule by tourism industry is only true if local government allows it.
The solution to this, of course, is for the hospitality workers to be paid more, which their employers should be able to afford to do, by raising their prices to the level the rich influx will support. Given time, the invisible hand of the free market would guide the local economy to this solution. Except that the free market, by itself, is horribly inefficient, and it would take so long to make this correction that the situation probably would have shifted again.
Oahu now has the highest rate of homelessness in the US (per a post-grad researcher at U of Hawaii I spoke with in June). Locals can’t afford the housing prices anymore. It’s tragic.
My understanding is “no”. But that’s for current Native land. Which at least on the US mainland is the “reservations” the natives were herded onto 150-200 years ago. Which were generally land chosen precisely to be economically useless to 19th century farming and industry.
If one takes the perspective that all of the USA, including Hawaii, once belonged to the Natives and should still do so today, then yes, pretty much anyone can buy pretty much anywhere that was once Native land but hasn’t been for a century+.
Well, for a very particular and narrow corner case. And, Lord Feldon’s comment was related to the San Francisco Bay Area, which has nothing to do with what’s currently designated as tribal or reservation land.
There is no such thing as Native American land in the U.S., is there? I mean, not fee simple. All “Native American” land is actually held by the federal government, in trust. Meaning it’s technically government property, and not for sale. That’s the reason nobody can buy it, not some “internal migration control”.
I’m not entirely sure what you are arguing here. What you seemed to be disputing was a statement that, in the U.S., we don’t have “internal migration controls,” and asking about whether there were controls about buying and moving onto tribal land.
Yes, that does seem to be something that’s controlled, but it is a corner case, because 99.9+% of non-Native Americans who are trying to buy property and move here in the U.S. are not trying to buy property on a tribal reservation.
Also, today I learned that there are no tribal reservations in Hawaii. There are areas in the state which are known as “Hawaiian home lands,” and which appear to be limited to ownership by people who are at least 50% native Hawaiian, but I do not know much more than that about them.