Hawaiʻi Appleseed’s legislative priorities for the 2025 Hawaiʻi State Legislative Session.
Affordable Housing
Conveyance Tax Reform
Act 305 (2022) established a working group to identify barriers to affordable housing. The group identified inadequate infrastructure as the top challenge. Hawaiʻi currently upgrades infrastructure on a project-by-project basis, slowing affordable housing development and increasing costs as a result. The state and counties should take the lead in financing larger, regional infrastructure improvements, enabling faster and more efficient development. Increasing the conveyance tax on properties worth more than $4 million, as well as those owned by non-residents, could provide a vital funding source for these upgrades, advancing both affordability and equity.
Renter Stability
Hawaiʻi’s renters face significant housing challenges in their daily lives due to rising rent costs, limited housing options, and insufficient tenant protections. Current laws provide short eviction notice periods, lack requirements for just-cause evictions, and do not ensure tenants have legal representation. This leaves tenents vulnerable to displacement and instability. Implementing policies such as a right-to-counsel, just cause requirements, and anti-price gouging protections, and improving access to rental assistance, can reduce displacement, support our local workforce, and enhance community well-being across the state.
Food Equity
Universal Free School Meals
Research shows that access to nutritious meals at school significantly improves student attendance, academic performance and health. Many of Hawai‘i’s students don’t qualify for free school meals, yet their families struggle to put food on the table. This leaves a large number of students without access to the nutrition they need to succeed. UFSM fills that gap. Providing free meals to all keiki also eliminates the risk of social stigma experienced when meals are denied due to negative account balances.
Transportation
Freedom to Walk
Decriminalizing jaywalking would allow pedestrians to legally cross the street outside of marked crosswalks, or against the traffic signal, so long as they do not pose a threat of collision with vehicles. Pedestrians often have the best judgment in avoiding traffic injuries. Nearly 60 million Americans now live in places where jaywalking has been decriminalized.
Jaywalking tickets can lead to debt and court records, and unfairly impacts people who rely on walking to get around. Between 2018–2023, on average, more than 5,000 citations were given in Hawaiʻi for jaywalking per year, much higher than other places in the U.S. However, nearly 78 percent of jaywalking citation fees were not collected, making jaywalking enforcement a financial drain. Freedom to Walk encourages the state to shift from enforcement, towards investment in safe, accessible pedestrian infrastructure.
Safe Routes to School
In 2022, Hawaiʻi saw a record 117 traffic fatalities and 572 serious injuries on its roads. Many of these collisions occurred near schools, highlighting the need to prioritize the Safe Routes to School (SRTS) program. SRTS provides healthy transportation options for keiki by developing pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure within a one-mile radius of public schools. Despite the importance of this program, it is severely underfunded. Nearly 80 percent of high-priority pedestrian, bicycle, and multimodal projects across the state that are awaiting funding are located near schools. A dedicated, $15 million per year to the SRTS would target this development where it will do the most good.
The bill will also include other pedestrian safety measures, such as leading pedestrian intervals (LPIs), which give pedestrians and bicyclists a 3–7 second head start to cross the street before vehicles begin moving. LPIs have been found to reduce pedestrian-vehicle collisions by up to 60 percent.
Tax Reform
A Hawaiʻi Child Tax Credit
The federal child tax credit (CTC) provides financial assistance to low- and middle-income parents with children. The CTC reduced child poverty in the U.S. by 40 percent when the credit amounts were temporarily expanded in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Previously, the credit amount had been $2,000 for each child under the age of 18. This amount was boosted to $3,600 for each child aged 5 and under, and $3,000 for each child aged 6 to 17.
The expansion ended after 2021 and, in 2022, the national child poverty rate more than doubled from 5.2 percent to 12.4 percent. Hawaiʻi can fill the gap the end of the expansion left by creating its own, state-level CTC. The proposed Hawaiʻi CTC would be worth $650 for every child under 18, and would reach around 162,000 local families. This program would come at a cost of just $84 million per year.
Capital Gains Tax Reform
Hawaiʻi can better support low-income working families by changing how it taxes income from investments, called “capital gains.” Currently, Hawaiʻi taxes capital gains at a lower rate (7.25 percent) than regular income (up to 11 percent for the highest earners). This mostly benefits wealthy households that have a much larger share of income that comes from investments.
Taxing capital gains at the same progressive rates at which regular income is taxed could raise $88–132 million each year. This added money could be used to fund programs and tax credits that help families deal with the high cost of living, such as the state Child Tax Credit.