Civil Beat Op-Ed: “With Our High Cost Of Living, Plantation Days Don’t Seem So Long Ago”

“Dat’s why hard.”

This was one of my grandpa’s favorite lines when recounting his days growing up on the plantations in Lahaina. It was usually followed by tales of 11-hour workdays while making a little over 15 cents per week.

I have come to realize that in the 90 years since grandpa lived this life, we really haven’t come that far. Hawaii today still sees the everyday person working extraordinarily hard while making relatively little.

In a recent publication released by the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit organization focusing upon tax policy here in the United States, the relative value of the dollar was assessed for each state.

You may be surprised to learn that Hawaii was No. 1.

Hawaii’s high cost of living means many residents work as hard as their plantation-era ancestors.

Courtesy of Alexander & Baldwin

Oh, to clarify, we were No. 1 where the dollar holds the least value in the nation.

Whereas your money will go further in states such as Mississippi ($116.01), Alabama ($115.21), and Arkansas ($114.42), here in Hawaii, $100 is valued only at $84.18.

What does that mean? How does this affect us in our everyday lives?

It means that the cost of living is high, and our money doesn’t go very far.

Hawaii today still sees the everyday person working extraordinarily hard while making relatively little.

When we look at associated costs – rent, mortgage, food, etc. – we see there is indeed a gap between how much we earn and what it costs to live here.

Let’s look at some simple math.

For a single person to pay for all necessary living expenses on Maui, it costs roughly $31,137 per year. However, the average salary (per capita) for someone working full time here on island is approximately $31,612. Do you see the issue here? This leaves a person, living and working on the island of Maui with merely $474 of disposable income.

We deserve more.

Now is the time to look at progressive legislative action on such issues as basic income and affordable housing, and improved economic opportunities such as technology, agriculture and alternative energy.

Now is the time for us to come together, in unity, to demand more of our political system and those in office.

Now is the time to put an end to the “plantation daze” that we have been living in, so that we can one day say to our grandchildren: “Dat’s how we did ’um.”

Civil Beat Op-Ed: “Context Needed To Understand Kakaako Houselessness”

Denby Fawcett’s severe call to action, Give Us Back Our Parks, generated several well-reasoned responses. We share with Fawcett a sense of urgency — the reality of pervasive homelessness needs effective action.

What we wish to add to previous critiques of Fawcett’s essay is context. Understanding the historic, bureaucratic, fiscal, political and other contexts of houselessness in Kakaako is critical to understanding the problem we must face creatively and collectively.

The specific historical context of the unsheltered in Kakaako has been stunningly ignored.

Over a century before the area was branded “Kakaako Makai,” the productive fisheries of Kukuluaeo and Kaakaukukui were filled in with ash from waste incinerators, and then became a large native Hawaiians settlement, derisively called “Squattersville.” The area served as a refuge for Hawaiians and locals priced out of other areas, until it was forcibly cleared by the city in the 1920s.

Before the Oct. 8 sweep of Kakaako Waterfront Park. The region has a long history of evictions.

Anthony Quintano/Civil Beat

The 1920s eviction matches up with today’s sweeps, forming a pattern that belies Fawcett’s conclusion that “Now, it’s time for the state government to act.” Rather, now it is time to realize we are merely witnessing the latest part of a century of failed government action.

Time and again the government has tried to exploit the area for economic gain over the objections of those who assert residence there. The repetition would be comedic if it wasn’t interwoven with such deep cruelty.

Fawcett also avoids known disparities in public-land management with her suggestion we should rage against those “… who seem to believe they have a special right to commandeer public land.”

Across our coasts unregulated wedding photographers, yoga sessions and surf tours proliferate. Branches of the military lease thousands of acres for $1 per year. Water agreements for massive volumes from public land charge rates that have barely risen in decades.

In this light, the homeless’ “special right” is only wrong because it is unattended by political influence.

HCDA’s Misguided Outrage

Fawcett’s article described damage to the Waterfront Park that similarly obscured the government fiscal context.

Had that been provided, readers could more fully appreciate the irony involved when the Hawaii Community Development Authority points fingers. Since HCDA’s establishment to “address a lack of suitable affordable housing,” they have spent tens of millions of public dollars in Kakaako.

These efforts have resulted in some affordable units, but more so a proliferation of high-end luxury condos and a pervasive wafting smell of sewage. We are now asked by HCDA to be outraged at people who caused damage to electrical wiring and water lines as they sought to meet basic needs.

The specific historical context of the unsheltered in Kakaako has been stunningly ignored.

Finally, there is a political context that Fawcett invokes but does not examine. She pleads to give “us” “our” parks. But Kakaako’s houseless include local families and others with strong ties to Hawaii.

There is no bright line between recreational user and “hardcore homeless camper.” Some Panics surfers have gone through periods of homelessness due to the regular things that happen to regular people.

A parent dies, and the bank forecloses on a home that is home to several generations. One or more people in a household lose a job. Hospital bills come due after a wife’s death from cancer.

Moreover, referring to the housed as “law abiding citizens” fails to recall that for at least Hawaiians and Micronesians (who comprise some of the houseless), U.S. citizenship and state control were impositions by the United States for military and economic ends. The U.S. went to Micronesia and that brought them to Hawaii. Hawaii did not move to the U.S. — the U.S. came to Hawaii.

Kakaako skyline Honolulu city view. view looking up Diamond Head on King Street.

Besides many homeless people, Kakaako is also home to more and more luxury high rises.

Cory Lum/Civil Beat

Bringing in these contexts highlight some of the absurdities and ironies in coverage of the houseless and current government actions. We must also together examine the much larger national contexts that have lead to pervasive homelessness across the U.S. — including decades of dismantling of the social safety net, post-industrial economic dislocation and failed federal housing policies.

We need a conversation where we recognize that an economy which can readily produce $1 million condos but can not produce attainable housing is part of the problem. We need to look at all these factors, because they all lead to people living in parks, and we need to immediately see how many factors are outside county or state control.

What we can control is how we define the problem and where we spend limited local resources. The move to create a new unit in the Sheriff’s Division dedicated solely to enforcing a new criminal trespass law on state land seems, in these contexts, doomed to failure.

Defining a complex problem as only having one cause (the houseless) and therefore one solution (their forced removal) will not identify the collective actions needed to help all people live in basic safety and dignity.

Op-ed Column: “Maui needs farmers and to grow what we have the capacity to grow”

Maui needs farmers and to grow what we have the capacity to grow

According to the state Department of Agriculture’s “Statewide Agricultural Land Use Baseline” study, released back in 2015, prior to the sugar cane industry shutting down Maui had 44,360 acres in total area of crops being grown. This included seed production, commercial forestry, sugar cane, bananas, tropical fruits, pineapple, flowers, taro, macadamia nuts, coffee and other diversified crops.

As you can imagine, most of those crops consisted of sugar cane, some 36,000 acres out of the 44,360.

Alexander & Baldwin has been looking at different crops to replace sugar. In the meantime, the County of Maui has received a $5 million appropriation from the state with a $1 million match from the county to expand the Kula Ag Park onto former plantation land.

Currently, the Kula Ag Park consists of 445 acres and supports 26 farmers off of Pulehu Road. There are a multitude of crops grown in the ag park now, including Kula onions and other vegetables, turf grass, flowers, bananas, dry-land taro and landscaping nursery products.

We are hoping that the expansion to these lands will at least double the size of our ag park. Understandably, some people pointed out to me that even this addition would be a small drop in the bucket out of the 36,000 acres.

I don’t disagree, but it is a start. And quite frankly, finding the solution of which crop to grow next in our central plain is not simple.

Soil, climate, elevation and access to water all play a part in what a farmer decides to grow in his or her field. By all accounts, Central Maui is a desert. The only reason sugar cane grew so well there is because it is a flexible, adaptable crop.

Look at all the advantages of growing sugar cane: It’s a crop that didn’t need to be harvested every 90 days or even a year, but every two years, which cost less for Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co.; it was adaptable and grew in different soils and at different elevations; you could irrigate sugar cane with fresh and brackish water and it didn’t significantly affect the crop; it could even go without water for a week or two, an important advantage in a challenging area with little rain, lots of wind and desert-like conditions.

This is why we’ve seen a multipronged approach from A&B. A map that it released in April showed where it thought different crops would grow in different areas: coffee crops makai of Omaopio, cattle ranching near Hamakuapoko, biogas feedstock crops in Spreckelsville, etc.

This is a good, diversified plan, but in response I keep hearing quips from people saying that they don’t want the land to feed cattle, that we should only be growing “food” and that it has to be “organic” or nothing at all.

This is a needlessly self-destructive overreaction to what is our agricultural industry’s reality on Maui. We have to grow what we have the capacity to grow. It’s that simple.

Look at it this way: On any given day on Maui we have roughly 200,000 people on island (165,000 residents plus tourists). To feed them, we would need around 3 pounds of food per person per day.

That’s 600,000 pounds of food. Even if we farmed all 36,000 acres of A&B land, we could not produce that much. On the Mainland that’s just a small farm in Texas.

And yes, there are all kinds of farming techniques that we can and should look into, including composting, greenhouses, aeroponics, hydroponics, aquaponics and vertical crops, just to name a few. We are considering everything. If people are serious, come to the Kula Ag Park and apply, we welcome both old and new farmers.

We want more community farming. More importantly, we need the next generation of farmers. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average age of farmers has gone from 50 to 58 over the last 30 years.

We need to cultivate the next generation of farmers, just as we would cultivate any crop.

What we don’t need are people who have no intention of farming telling the farmers what to grow and how to grow it. That doesn’t add anything to this important conversation.

* “Our County,” a column from Maui County Mayor Alan Arakawa, is about county issues and activities of county government. The column usually appears on the first and third Fridays of the month.