Tag Archives: poverty

A Place in Paradise: Housing in Hawaii

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Beach Bums & Babes

           While the beaches and scenic vistas on Hawaii Island are unparalleled, in between those lovely views, the country’s more significant housing issues are playing out in paradise. In my few weeks here, I am learning to see a few systemic problems just under the surface. My perspective comes from my ability to choose where I would like to stay. As I get to know the island, I see the truth to the classic complaints about this island. Housing is expensive, and there is little public infrastructure.

              The old adage, “it is who you know NOT what you know,” goes quite deep in Hawaii. I initially spent two weeks at the home of an acquaintance, introduced to me by our mutual friend in Tokyo. From there, I began to search for my own place to rent. Getting started here required me to call upon a lifetime’s worth of patience and resourcefulness. I found both my current home and my car privately through a circle of acquaintances.

Between Luck & Charm

              My studio rental is a convenient sub-lease from another traveler. With a gorgeous garden setting, fully furnished, and entirely solo, it is a pleasant change from my first two weeks here, in the acquaintance’s home with five other housemates. Though my temporary studio is beautiful, it includes a cat, traveling geckos, and barking neighbors. As I explore homes in this area, I know people like me are part of the problem. I have some savings to work from and can work online.

              The influx of computer-clad techies is pushing the cost from residents beyond control. A new friend and fellow slow-traveler is renting an off-grid cabin (hear, no running water, solar-powered electricity, and 10Mbs speed internet) for $1,300 a month in Puna. For her, this is a good option. A helicopter pilot rents a furnished single bedroom with no kitchen and no internet for $900 a month in Kona. He has running water and hot showers. I think he got a deal. For the locals, these rates are beyond reach.

Poverty in Paradise

               The town of Hilo, for example, is densely packed and rainy. Poverty is all around. I cannot help but notice the people pushing worn-out shopping carts from corner to corner. The Landless Lot, my free-verse poem, was written in Tokyo but echoed here. Affordable housing for working people is often in poor condition, if even available. Many city-side homes have upwards of 5 cars parked outside, a tell-tale sign of house-hacking when some share a home with multiple renters (much like my acquaintance’s home).  

              Though I am in a decent position to look around my limitations go beyond my budget. (I do not have the F-U money to buy a $3 million condo with thousands in monthly association fees. For anyone interested, there are some of those available in the posh North Kona.) For creative solutions, I have considered buying land and building on it. Two immediate hurdles are (1) permitting and (2) wastewater management. 

Delays & Cesspools

              If I were to buy land and build on it, there are multiple avenues for delay. First, the best contractors, builders, and architects are booked up through the following year. Second, getting a building permit could still take over six months with housing plans drawn up. The slow-moving housing and building departments remind me of Japanese bureaucracy. A labor shortage further compounds these delays. Most surprisingly, while I have been looking around Hawaii Island, I learned about cesspools. A cesspool is essentially a hole in the ground where you let wastewater drain. Cesspools are a popular option when a home cannot connect to the sewage system or won’t go through the expense of a septic system. The cheap solution: a cesspool that barely leads off your property. Later, it will drain into a lava tube on someone else’s land. The consequences are enormous public health concerns. Guess where the wastewater goes? When there is a lot of rain in the areas around Hilo, the beaches get runoff from turbid water. Locals know to check for water quality warnings. Though the EPA has committed Hawaii County to eliminate commercial cesspools, residential builds have a longer leash.  

Why Bother?           

   Hawaii County still manages to pull a lot of potential residents from the mainland. By comparison, cheap land prices in remote areas have their draw. Of course, incoming mainlanders create more cost competition for the islanders. Here, I have only part of the picture; the federal government’s program for native Hawaiians still has not delivered on many promised homes. As I pop around and everywhere, I see that Hawaii Island is a microcosm of the country’s housing crisis. The crisis here is compounded by a few active volcanos and poor infrastructure. Thank you for following along on my adventure!

The Landless Lot

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Do you see me?
A roving mass of human forms, itinerant 
shifting from one ledge to another
outfitting corners of shelter with plastic crates
the shelves, the detritus of China's factory molds
feeding our ever growing hunger

An exsistential hole in man's rumbling, hungry stomach

The mass leaping under clouds
thundering for resolution
and our scurvy ridden human crawlers 
between crevices, moving back and forth 
as we shift onward in time

No respite under concrete bridges while
trams zoom by overhead and time
passes these vermin by

In the cold cycle of seasons 
the landless lot muffle into the snow
cherishing the root of flowers
and cooking on cement ledges

Their plight, a pleasant artificial contrast for 
their well-heeled home living comparers
Plush buttoned up purveyors of soft lit parlors
accesorised in glass ornaments 
twinkling before muted backrounds

The mass of unhomes, relearning routes
and park avenues, descending onto corners 
scraping shreds of goodwill from an indifferent human flow
Trickling into gambling houses and pouring into empty seats
chancing their last 100 yen for a game with no end

Degrowth: A Critique of Capitalism

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Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman wrote, “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” The economic policies of the World Bank & IMF have increased global inequality. The COVID pandemic illustrates how public health and environmental failures spill past national borders. Our interconnected planet faces transnational phenomena that increasingly have the potential to disrupt our day-to-day lives. Global economic development and justice require a model of development which values global public goods.

Dr. Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist, writes on global inequality, “The notion that aid is a meaningful way to reduce global inequality represents an extraordinary failure to grasp the structural forces that produce and perpetuate global inequality. Poor countries don’t need charity, they need justice.” Contemporary global economic inequality and environmental degradation are two sides of the same problem. They represent a post-colonial economic order meant to preserve the wealth of the global north.     

Development policies promoted by the IMF and World Bank demand the borrower countries resort to fiscal austerity and privatization. Argentina and Greece are excellent examples of the consequences of this type of policy. However, historical analysis of wealthy nations shows that protectionism and investment in human capacities ended up creating service-oriented prosperous country economies. Thus, the logic of privatization and the forms of development pushed on poor borrowers are flawed. Arguably, they are unjust.

 A fundamental theory in international studies is that economically tied democracies do not fight one another. The economic integration model linked strictly to GDP does not deliver long-term global peace and stability. As developing countries destroy their environment to sell natural resources to the global north, they undermine their growth potential. The marginalized poor suffer the worst consequences of environmental degradation. At the community level, the desire for economic development pits disparate parties against one another. A clean environment is a public good. When communities disregard this, conflict and degradation follow reckless economic growth.

We need new metrics. We can improve economic injustice and environmental degradation through complex systems thinking by valuing public goods differently. There are environmentally sustainable global development forms that correct the global North-South wealth inequity. Naomi Klein’s work suggests a starting point. We need a new analysis that considers human well-being. Solutions can develop once worldwide health and environmental stewardship become global concerns.

 Creative solutions and a re-imagining of global public goods are our existential imperatives. As this pandemic has shown, nation-states do not exist on their own. Good immunity to withstand disease, the knowledge to distinguish fact from fiction, and strong domestic infrastructure can have global consequences. When countries revisit national priorities with these well-being metrics, we will be on our way to just international development.