Haunani-Kay Trask : CONTEXT QUESTION 2 : How does the economy harm your students?

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Transcript

When I came home from college, Hawaiʻi's economy was booming. It was really good. You could still get a walk-up apartment in Makiki - one bedroom - for $200 a month.

Forget it, forget it! The housing crisis in Hawaiʻi is so extreme. You have people living in their cars, on the beaches. You have tremendous homelessness. Tremendous.

I think Maui County, they're estimating something like one out of four people is almost one paycheck away from being homeless, because of the rents, because of the crowding.

And tourism involutes that because it's very wealthy… - It's getting to be like Jamaica in one sense - very wealthy areas, with lots of gates, lots of police, lots of guards, and poor people all over the place. Homeless people everywhere. Everywhere. On the beaches, in the mountains, in the bushes.

For example, we lock these two restrooms here, because after four or five o'clock, there are very few people in the building. Then about seven o'clock the nighttime people come in, dance halau,(1) practice. In that interim period we used to have a lot of homeless people come down from Mānoa stream to use the bathroom. They're trying to take a bath in there. And I said, "What homeless people?" This is what the security told me - they said, "Oh Haunani, there are hundreds of homeless people living up in Mānoa, all the way up the stream!"

First of all, that place is so laden with mosquitoes. It's so filthy. That Mānoa stream has variously been described by the EPA as the most polluted stream in the United States.(2) They have all these old septic tanks in those old Mānoa houses just discharging into the stream. This was about six years ago that the security told me there are hundreds of homeless people up there.

Hundreds of homeless people living on the beaches who go to work. They go to work! I mean, they get dressed in the luas(3) over there and they go to work. But they can't afford to find a house. Or you have 23 people living in a two bedroom apartment. That's not going to make for peaceful ethnic relationships.

There's a very, very wealthy Waikīkī, Kāhala, and extremely, extremely impoverished...

And that always generates what's being generated, which is drugs and gangs and random violence against tourists, against anybody actually who's there, against each other.

That wasn't the Hawaiʻi I grew up in.

Notes

(1) halau: A long house or structure for canoe or hula (dance) instruction. Halau also refers to the hula school or academy itself.

(2) water pollution: In a 1996 report, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) identified a number of contaminants that damage Hawaiʻi's waters such as discharge from industrial and wastewater facilities, seepage from household wastewater disposal systems (including cesspools), seepage from landfills, runoffs from urban and agricultural development (fertilizers, toxic chemicals, siltation, etc.), and introduction of foreign species (plants and animals). (Report to Congress 1996/1998, Hawaiʻi. United States Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Water, 1996/1998.)

(3) lua: Toilet; bathroom.

Excerpt from Lovely Hula Hands: Corporate Tourism and the Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture:

Fact: Nearly forty years ago, at statehood, Hawaiʻi residents outnumbered tourists by more than 2 to 1. Today, tourists outnumber residents by 6 to 1; they outnumber Native Hawaiians by 30 to 1. (Eleanor C. Nordyke, The Peopling of Hawaiʻi, 2nd edition. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1989. pp. 134-172.)

Fact: According to independent economists and criminologists, "tourism has been the single most powerful factor in Oʻahu's crime rate," including crimes against people and property. (Meda Chesney-Lind, "Salient Factors in Hawaiʻi's Crime Rate," University of Hawaiʻi School of Social Work. Available from author.)

Fact: Independent demographers have been pointing out for years that "tourism is the major source of population growth in Hawaiʻi" and that "rapid growth of the tourist industry ensures the trend toward a rapidly expanded population that receives lower per capita income." (Nordyke, The Peopling of Hawaiʻi, pp. 134-172.)

Fact: The Bank of Hawaiʻi has reported that the average real incomes of Hawaiʻi residents grew only one percent during the period from the early seventies through the early eighties, when tourism was booming. The same held true throughout the nineties. The census bureau reports that personal income growth in Hawaiʻi during the same time was the lowest by far of any of the fifty American states. (Bank of Hawaiʻi Annual Economic Report, 1984.)

Fact: Groundwater supplies on Oʻahu will be insufficient to meet the needs of residents and tourists by the year 2000. (Estimate of independent hydrologist Kate Vandemoer to community organizing group Kupaʻa Heʻeia, February 1990. Water quality and groundwater depletion are two problems much discussed by state and county officials in Hawaiʻi but ignored when resort permits are considered.)

Fact: According to the Honolulu Advertiser, "Japanese investors have spent more than $7.1 billion on their acquisitions" since 1986 in Hawaiʻi. This kind of volume  translates into huge alienations of land and properties. For example, nearly 2,000 acres of land on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi was purchased for $18.5 million and over 7,000 acres on Molokaʻi went for $33 million. In 1989, over $1 billion was spent by the Japanese on land alone. (Honolulu Advertiser, April 8, 1990.)

Fact: More plants and animals from our Hawaiian Islands are now extinct or on the endangered species list than in the rest of the United States. (David Stannard, Testimony against West Beach Estates. Land Use Commission, State of Hawaiʻi, January 10, 1985.)

Fact: More than 29,000 families are on the Hawaiian trust lands list, waiting for housing, pastoral, or agricultural lots. (Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, phone interview, March 1998.)

Fact: The median cost of a home on the most populated island of Oʻahu is around $350,000. (Honolulu Star-Bulletin, May 8, 1990)

Fact: Hawaiʻi has by far the worst ratio of average family income to average housing costs in the country. This explains why families spend nearly 52 percent of their gross income for housing costs. (Bank of Hawaiʻi Annual Economic Report, 1984. In 1992, families probably spent closer to 60 percent of their gross income for housing costs. Billion-dollar Japanese investments and other speculation since 1984 have caused rental and purchase prices to skyrocket.)

Fact: Nearly one-fifth of Hawaiʻi's resident population is classified as near-homeless, that is, those for whom any mishap results in immediate on-the-street homelessness. (This is the estimate of a state-contracted firm that surveyed the islands for homeless and near-homeless families. Testimony was delivered to the state legislature, 1990 session.)

(Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi,  revised edition. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1999. pages 138-139.)