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Housing is limited for two reasons: First, because it's expensive and slow to build new housing, second, because people make it slower and more expensive becaus
by LeifCarrotson 3y ago
Housing is limited for two reasons: First, because it's expensive and slow to build new housing, second, because people make it slower and more expensive because they don't want more neighbors, and third, because society really doesn't want to evict people from their homes when they can't afford them anymore.
Housing - especially sustainable, long-lasting, quality housing - is genuinely expensive. Not as expensive as the real estate market might make you think, but it is expensive. Especially when you're shipping materials from a different continent to the middle of the Pacific!
There are limited lots in Hawaii. It's an island! Winter here in the northern continental US is a gray and terrible thing. I'd love to move to an identical 2-acre lot in Hawaii to what I have here, and have it within walking distance of my work and my son's school and shopping. But there are only so many 2-acre lots to build, and I've got one of the biggest in my neighborhood (most are half-acre), and lots of people want that.
And most importantly, you're eventually asking an elderly native Hawaiian, living on a fixed income, who just wants to live in the house they inherited from their parents, to compete financially for ownership of a limited resource with an out-of-state engineer or business owner.
Economics says that if the native who owns a house outright can't pay as much as a millionaire from the continent can, the millionaire should come to own it, and if a developer can turn that one lot into four sublots that are worth more to 4 someone (or make them duplexes, and split to 8, or make it an apartment complex) than the millionaire's valuation of the one lot with the SFH, it should be developed. But that's only the naive case.
- foobarian 3y agoThere are places in this world that are just outstandingly amazing and desirable. Why is it anybody's duty to enable additional people to immigrate into such places? How many more people should they provision for? At the end of the day it is not the Hawaiian government's job to enable the whole world to come and live there. Being too hands off may lead to unfairness in some ways, i.e. gentrification, but at least discouraging investors seems a step in a direction of helping the less wealthy.
- axpy 3y ago2-acre lot in a walkable neighborhood? How on earth are you expecting to sustain commerces, schools and or anything with a density of 250 house/km2. Your dream hawaian neighborhood is another ridiculous american suburb where only a few chosen live close enough to walk to a car dependent commercial street with ungodly amount of wasted space on parking. If you want walkable neighborhood, you will have to accept to live way closer to your neighbors. As a comparison, I am about to build a house on a .15 acre plot close to a small village with walkable access to parks, public transit, school, nature preserves, ski station... You can't build that if your plots are 2 acres, you need to densify.
- LeifCarrotson 3y agoMy point is it's not sustainable or universal. There will be winners and losers. If you want to go first come first serve, that's fine, if you want to go on pure economics and push out locals that's going to be unpopular with the locals.
- axpy 3y agoYou need a healthy turnover for community to sustain itself. You can't be too biased towards locals because you will end up with a stagnating community with a whole lot more problems with your schools/hospitals/insfrastructure/...