Archive
Honolulu minimum wage is lowest among 15 most expensive U.S. cities
With such high prices and low wages, it’s no wonder that Honolulu has a homelessness crisis.
Hawai‘i has the highest portion of multigenerational and crowded households in the nation. What does that mean for reopening our schools?
Hawaiʻi students go home to households that are more than twice as likely to be multigenerational and crowded than the national average.
6 in 10 Hawaiʻi adults now live in a household in which at least one person has lost income
The urgency with which families need relief cannot be exaggerated, and state lawmakers must move quickly to provide assistance to needy families.
Honolulu just moved to the forefront of vacation rental regulation
Once signed into law, Honolulu's Bill 89 will be the most progressive and comprehensive vacation rental regulation in the United States.
A tax on vacant units could provide housing crisis relief, if done right
On any given day, hundreds of Hawaiʻi residents struggling with homelessness can be found hanging on as best they can under the lengthy pall of Kakaʻako's modern day ivory towers.
Enforcement of vacation rental regulations would restore balance
The Honolulu City Council is set to take up the short term rentals (STRs) issue again tomorrow with new drafts of Bills 85 and 89. Whichever bill ends up being prefered, it is imperative that the council include strong enforcement mechanism in any city ordinance it chooses to pass. This post covers what those regulations should look like, and why they're so critical.
Honolulu’s proposal to regulate short-term rentals needs serious help
Addressing the rampant proliferation of short-term vacation rentals in Hawaiʻi is critical to solving our housing crisis, but it’s imperative that we do it the right way: here’s how.
Hawai‘i has a serious problem: not enough roofs to shelter all our people. And the problem is only getting worse. Between 2011-2014, our state increased its housing stock by 8,458 but, at this pace, we will not be able to generate the additional 24,551 units we need by the…
Official poverty data obscures the reality faced by many Hawaii residents
We feel the high cost of living here in Hawaiʻi every day, whether we’re deciding whether or not we can afford the price for a gallon of milk, or we’re trying to wrap our brains around how the median cost of a single-family home on Oʻahu has skyrocketed to $810,000. We talk about how our wages, when adjusted to consider the high cost of living here, are the lowest in the nation. So, in examining the newly released census…