One of the top lessons from creating the rent relief program is that future decision-making to address Hawaiʻi’s housing crisis should include people most impacted by the crisis.

Hawaiʻi faces its current problems, in large part, because those perspectives have been excluded from decision-making, Thornton says. The Hawaiʻi Appleseed Center executive says society often values traditional expertise over lived experience, and people tend to assign personal blame to folks struggling under the current system.

“The reality is yes, we do make choices that positively or adversely impact our individual lives,” he says. “But when you see that half of Hawaiʻi residents are struggling to make ends meet, to me that says pretty clearly this is not just about people’s bad personal choices. This is a systemic problem.”