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Hawaii governor vows to block land grabs as fire-ravaged Maui rebuilds
- Bostonian 3y ago"Land grabs" is a dishonest term for voluntary land sales.
- yesbutum 3y ago[dead]
- toomuchtodo 3y agoIt’s exploitation of vulnerable disaster victims. A pause on land transfers is warranted.
- talldatethrow 3y agoWhat if I need the money and want to sell?
- Bostonian 3y agoI don't see why suffering from a natural disaster leaves you unable to make rational financial decisions.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoWhich is why the governor of Hawaii makes the decision and not you.
- Bostonian 3y agoBeing the governor of a state should not confer the right to suspend property rights, which is what this is. Owning something means being able to sell it.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoIt is very common in disaster scenarios to put limits on trade or commerce when an emergency is declared. Emergency powers are broad, both at the state and federal levels. You are free to your opinion of course, the people of Hawaii will decide with their vote if the governor runs again. The governor is doing what they believe to best for their constituents. No solution is perfect. Democracy!
- slaw 3y agoIt is not democracy when Governor decides, it would be democracy if citizens of burned city vote.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoYou are technically correct, which is the best kind of correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy > Representative democracy, also known as indirect democracy, is a type of democracy where elected people represent a group of people, in contrast to direct democracy. Nearly all modern Western-style democracies function as some type of representative democracy.
- slaw 3y agoRepresentative democracy would be there if major of the burned city makes the decision.
- pixl97 3y agoDo you just keep making up new definitions as you see fit? There is a well defined order of how our 'representational democracy' works, and in every state in the US the state is the ultimate arbiter of authority as defined per their constitutions.
- oceanplexian 3y ago> Emergency powers are broad, both at the state and federal levels. This is often repeated by the media, but no, emergency powers aren't a magic card you can pull out to ignore the law. Emergency powers don't supersede the Constitution. The government preventing the sale of a property without any compensation would be very clearly considered a "taking". For example, even in cases of Eminent Domain the government still has to compensate you for the fair value of your property.
- mindslight 3y agoWell maybe you should work on that.
- Ekaros 3y agoIt is probably though process. But why not allow sales on valuation that matches last year for example? That should be close enough to fair market value and allow people to start rebuilding with the money.
- vineyardmike 3y agoIf they sell then how would they rebuild? They’d have no where to rebuild on. They should already have insurance to cover rebuilding.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoIf they have insurance, they will have an insurance payout and also a payment for the land that they sold. They might want to move somewhere else to be with family, or buy a house in a place with better fire protections. If you don't allow them to sell, you're basically turning in them into land bound surfs, they can't do what they choose with their own property
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hn8305823 3y ago> why not allow sales on valuation that matches last year for example? That should be close enough to fair market value Fair market value is what a willing buyer and seller agree on. Nothing more, nothing less. Who are you, me, or any other disinterested party to decide if, when, and for how much someone sells their land for?
- pixl97 3y agoBecause in magical fairytale land this is how things work. In reality shit typically gets a lot more complicated when you have one party that has just experienced a disaster and may have lost everything, including their loved ones. And another party with lots of money and large numbers of paid individuals enacting a coordinated plan.
- hn8305823 3y agoRemember when the Dow crashed 3000+ points at the beginning of Covid? The Treasury Secretary was asked when the stock markets would be closed down and he said something to the effect of "people need access to their money, we are not going to interfere with that". The same thing applies here.
- radicality 3y agoYeah, I was reading the article thinking they mean others will somehow take pieces of land they don’t own, start building on it, and then get to keep the land due to some obscure laws. But no, like you say it’s literally about voluntary sale of land.
- rowanseymour 3y ago"voluntary" is a dishonest term for locals forced to sell and move after a major disaster
- Bostonian 3y agoIf people are forced to sell for financial reasons, not letting them sell does not solve their financial problems. Instead the state of Hawaii could provide loans and grants to affected people so that they are not forced to sell.
- MerelyMortal 3y agoAs someone who used to live in Hawaii, I'm not going to be buying land there anytime soon, so... "forced to sell", how exactly?
- FireBeyond 3y agoOh, I'm sure the insurance company will cut them a check tomorrow for the full replacement value of their home, and the day after that it will be fully constructed and ready for move-in, and people won't be paying for hotel stays long after emergency funds run out. I guess they're not "forced to sell" if they have a 12-18 month safety net sufficient to cover alternative accommodation with very little demand. No, nobody put a gun to their head. But this is a little black and white, no?
- s1artibartfast 3y agoA blanket moratorium with strip locals of their freedoms, rights, and agency. If the state of Hawaii wants to do something to help, they should help the victims by giving them better alternatives. Stripping away their options is not that. There are plenty of options that don't leave the impacted victims worse off. The state might provide emergency financing for individuals so they don't want to sell. The state might Place competitive bids for land that would be sold to other parties.
- MerelyMortal 3y agoI think it was unwarranted that your comment was flagged and that your civil discourse is being downvoted. Am I missing something, or was it by people who just had different opinions than you?
- slantedview 3y agoSomething can be voluntary _and_ exploitative. The latter is the problem.
- ryaneager 3y agoIt almost as if housing is a human right and not an investment opportunity for the wealthy to exploit.
- rednerrus 3y agoHow is it a human right? How does that work?
- throwaway655368 3y agoEvery human has a right to enslave three other humans and force them to build a house. When a house is finished they have to be released though to prevent infringing of their own human rights.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Sohcahtoa82 3y agoI refuse to believe that you actually believe that's how "rights" work when it comes to rights that require the labor of others to provide. Nobody can actually believe this in good faith. Children have the right to a K-12 education. Do you consider the entire public school system to purely be slaves? If I go to an emergency room, I have the right to life-saving treatments even if I can't pay. Are the doctors slaves? No, of course not. They all get paid. They're all free to quit their jobs at any time.
- johngladtj 3y agoThe prison-school complex is not the example you think it is Buddy
- gottorf 3y ago> Nobody can actually believe this in good faith. Let's steelman GP's argument, which obviously was hyperbolic. But it's true that positive rights (or entitlements) are always paid for by the labor of others. K-12 public schools are generally majority paid for by local property taxes, and we all know what happens if you stop paying property taxes. The average American worker already pays close to quarter of their earnings in labor-related taxes[0], which doesn't include property tax, sales tax, or any other kind of tax that people pay. I think we can safely estimate that at least a third of everyone's labor is already spoken for by various layers of government; this lines up with the pre-Covid US government expenditure as a percent of GDP, which was around ~35%[1]. Of course, all of that spending was decided by a democratically-elected government and people more or less buy in to the idea that it is for the common good of the country. But as that spending increases monotonically over time, and as people share fewer things in common with each other (I mean, try putting a 22-year-old college graduate working at a nonprofit in Brooklyn and a 22-year-old journeyman electrician in Iowa City in the same room), it gets harder and harder to believe in that common good, and you start to wonder why a third of your productive output goes to things you had no direct choice over, and why the people who make those decisions get richer and richer. Half of the top ten richest counties in the country[2] are suburbs of Washington, D.C. Does that make you feel good? And guess what happens if you try to keep more of your productive output? You go to jail. That's what people mean by "slavery". Or at any rate, this is my attempt at steelmanning that argument. [0]: https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/taxing-wages-united-states.pdf https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/taxing-wages-united-stat... [1]: https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_counties_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie...
- morkalork 3y agoIt's become a philosophical kind of question, eh? What is Hawaii, what should Hawaii be in the future. One vision is that it stays the way it is forever, becoming a "nature preserve" of a human settlement. Another vision which I suspect they're trying to avoid is "a limited resource monopolized entirely by the rich". The 2nd vision may well have happened over a longer time scale as families slowly get priced out and sell their land one by one. People would've noticed and grumbled about it, but it would've happened organically. Now with a big disaster, there's the potential it could happen suddenly all at once and that is unpalatable. So what's the problem, the process or the end result?
- dddssddd 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pixl97 3y agoThe particular problem with the rich is they tend to like high land values, it allows them to sell their purchases for profit and keeps those they view as undesirable out But this comes with catch-22 for said rich people. They don't want to pay the poor working class they employ so they can't actually afford to live at these places and all forms of service suffer. You see this in the big expensive cities that the government and civil workers have typically have long commutes to cheaper places as their salaries are typically capped. This becomes very problematic on islands where the the amount of habitable land is low and the demand high.
- lr1970 3y agoI am really curious whether the current governor of Hawaii should take responsibility for the failures and resign. Out of all 50 states Hawaii is supposed to have the most advanced early warning system and yet, the reality check went disastrously wrong. There will be no real improvement if accountability at the top level is not enforced.