Affordable Hawaiʻi starts with housing

In its perusal of both reports, the Hawaiʻi Appleseed Center for Law & Economic Justice persuasively points to the supplemental measure as a more clear and accurate picture.

A comparison shows that while the community survey’s official poverty average from 2015-2017 makes Hawaiʻi look like an economic paradise with the 10th-lowest rate among the states, the supplemental measure flips that status, giving Hawaiʻi the 10th-highest rate.

The latter ranking certainly rings truer in a state where the median price for a single-family home on Oʻahu hit a record $810,000 in August. A chronic shortage of affordable housing stubbornly stands as Hawaiʻi’s most daunting cost-of-living challenge. And the hits to the wallet don’t stop there, of course. We have the hands-down highest electricity rates in the nation. And even the price for a gallon of milk is routinely double the national average.

Hawaiʻi Appleseed further notes that while the community survey pegged its 2017 official poverty threshold for a family with two adults and two children at nearly $24,860, the supplemental measure’s figure was just shy of $36,240 for the same family, renting their home in urban Honolulu. Again, the latter is a more realistic glimpse of the price tag tied to living in Hawaiʻi.