Governor Green's anti-housing proclamation threatens ʻāina, culture, kamaʻāina, and the future of our keiki
by Wayne Tanaka, Chapter Director | Reading time: 4.5 minutes
Governor Green last month finally unveiled his long-hinted at emergency proclamation on housing, and Sierra Club attorney David Kimo Frankel perhaps sums it up best:
“It's unconstitutional, it's anti-Hawaiian, it's anti-environment, and it's anti-democratic.”
Ironically, it is also anti-housing, at least for most local residents, and especially for those struggling with housing insecurity.
To be clear: this proclamation does not target or require affordable housing development. It does not reserve new units for those truly in need of housing relief. New units built under its wide-ranging legal exemptions could even be purchased by individuals who own multiple residential properties. And the “Hawaiʻi residents” it purportedly serves could be anyone from anywhere who wishes to move here.
The theory this proclamation pursues is that if we build a massive amount of housing all at once, and make it available to all, housing prices will drop, at least for a moment in time - allowing teachers, nurses, and those making moderate incomes to afford a home.
That is a big if, especially since corporate developers themselves would compromise their own potential profit margins, if they build too quickly or make units affordable to those struggling to make ends meet.
And even if they did, story after story of locals unable to compete against overseas homebuyers and investors with cash in hand, and a real estate industry that acknowledges the ongoing global desire of the wealthy to move to Hawaiʻi, foretell the predictable outcome: new units built under the proclamation will be marketed and sold to those who can and will immediately pay for them - i.e., well-off people from around the world who want to live in “paradise,” and not the 44% of ALICE households in Hawaiʻi, or the much larger percentage of us who do not have the savings and income needed to afford a mortgage or market-rate rental.
Meanwhile, the fact that we live on islands with limited land, water, and infrastructure means that after any new market-rate housing is built and sold off, there will be even less resources for truly affordable housing - such as ADUs and ʻohana units, renovations of existing built spaces, and homes truly affordable to local residents.
While the wealth gap that would be exacerbated under this proclamation is cause enough for deep concern, its provisions also take a sledgehammer to foundations of government transparency, fiscal accountability, environmental and cultural protection, food security, climate resilience, and our constitutional system of checks and balances.
A few of these concerns are laid out in this Star-Advertiser column, reprinted here: “Housing order is a leap in the wrong direction” (please read and share this breakdown of the order, especially with those who might not consider themselves “environmentalists”!).
Historic preservation experts have also sounded the alarm about the threat this proclamation poses to the very soul of our islands. Leaders of the Historic Hawaiʻi Foundation and Society from Hawaiian Archaeology have described how it jeopardizes cultural sites, historic landmarks, and iwi kūpuna by replacing our historic preservation laws with a “streamlined” process that “lacks transparency, is contradictory, and offers a naïve and inadequate approach to historic preservation review.”
And Henry Curtis with Life of the Land has further offered his incisive take on how this proclamation “Bulldoz[es] Sunshine, Public Input, Accountability & Sustainability to Reward Developers.”
So what, or who, is pushing the Governor to pursue this ill-informed initiative? Perhaps the most obvious smoking gun on the proclamation's true underlying agenda is the its elimination of the Land Use Commission’s role in overseeing district boundary amendments (e.g., re-districting rural or agricultural lands to urban) of up to 100 acres. Such has been the years-long goal of groups like the Land Use Research Foundation, a landowner and developer advocacy organization which tellingly has a seat on the proclamation’s “Build Beyond Barriers Working Group.” The developer lobby's latest attempt to remove Land Use Commission oversight for district boundary amendments of up to 100 acres ultimately failed, yet again, just this past legislative session. Now, the Governor's use of his emergency powers to pull an end-run around the legislative process, to adopt a repeatedly rejected policy — one that would harm our food security, public trust resources, cultural practices, climate resilience, and local economy — clearly indicates how the narrow-minded, profit-focused developer lobby has captured the Governor's ear.
We cannot let even more of our limited lands and resources be consumed by housing for the wealthy, at the expense of struggling families, our environmental and cultural integrity, our social fabric, and our very ability to weather the ongoing climate crisis. However, the forces behind this unprecedented developer giveaway are some of the most powerful in our islands — and it will take all of us who love our Hawaiʻi nei to stop them.
Please join the Sierra Club of Hawaiʻi and the growing number of community organizations and leaders who are taking a stand against this insidious attempt to exploit our housing crisis, to benefit corporate developers and the wealthy. Commit to taking action to save the Hawaiʻi we know and love by signing up here, ask your friends and neighbors to do the same, and stand by for more actions as this campaign continues to grow.