New report on cycle of poverty in Hawaiʻi urges state lawmakers to find solutions

Will White, deputy director of Hawaiʻi Appleseed Center for Law & Economic Justice, says, “What we’re looking to do is really highlight the high prevalence of lower wage, lower opportunity jobs available here in Hawaiʻi and how those jobs just simply aren’t enough to keep up with our cost of living.”

The report says Hawaiʻi has the highest cost of living in America. Even though the minimum wage will be at $18 an hour by 2028, “$18 an hour is just not enough to make ends meet. For a single individual with no children, a living wage would be around $22 an hour,” White notes. 

And if you have one child, you need to make over $41 an hour. But there's not a lot of jobs in Hawaiʻi paying that, so “children who grow up in lower wage households have lower levels of educational attainment, they have lower health outcomes. And we even find they tend to make lower wages later on in life,” continues White.

White wants legislators to act now to ease the burden on working families “so they can afford to put food on the table and pay their rent at the end of the month—and hopefully not have to move to Vegas.”

The average Hawaiʻi household spends over 40 percent of its budget on housing. White says one solution is to invest in affordable housing. Another is to create a state level child tax credit. Doing that “recognizes the extremely high costs associated with raising a family.”