I live with these affordability challenges every day. I rent, and like so many families, I've watched the cost of rent climb higher and higher. I spent many years in school to serve my community, and I still carry the education debt that came with it.
But the hardest part isn't what it's cost me—it's what it's cost the people I love. I've watched family and friends leave Hawaiʻi, one after another, because they simply couldn't afford to stay. Growing up, I felt the ache of being separated from my own cousins, who had to move to California to make ends meet. That ache never really goes away.
This crisis is tearing our families apart. And it's doing something else, too: it's severing the bond between our ʻāina and the very people who know it, care for it, and love it. When our people are forced to leave, our lands lose their caretakers, and our communities lose the relationships that hold them together.
So affordability challenges aren't abstract for me. Making Hawaiʻi affordable enough for local families to stay isn't just policy—it's about keeping our ʻohana whole, and keeping our people rooted in the places that made us who we are.
We restore optimism by giving people real reasons for it—a genuine path to build a good life here. That comes down to three things: affordability, good jobs, and great schools.
On affordability, it starts with housing. I'd focus on building permanently and truly affordable homes kept in the hands of residents, not investors, and creating a secondary market reserved for Hawaiʻi residents so local families can finally buy in. For young professionals especially, that means more low-cost rentals in walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. I'd also ease the everyday squeeze by removing the GET from essentials like groceries and medicine, and shifting more of the tax burden onto those who can afford it.
On jobs, we have to diversify beyond tourism. I'd invest where we'll always have need—food, healthcare, energy, resource management—which builds resilience and creates good local careers. I'd cut the red tape that makes it so hard to start a business here, and grow career and technical pathways so young people can train for good work and stay to do it.
On education, quality schools don't happen by accident. It takes real investment: paying and supporting our teachers so we recruit and keep great ones, modern facilities, and less bureaucracy slowing decisions and stifling improvement. Strong public schools are the foundation our economy and society both rest on.
Building a Hawaiʻi where no one has to leave to thrive—that's why I'm running.
The report gets it right: we can't cut our way to prosperity by lowering costs alone. The deeper problem is decades of stagnant wages and too little good, high-value opportunity. So we have to grow opportunity—and pay the true cost of the work our communities depend on.
That means diversifying beyond tourism into higher-wage sectors—healthcare, energy self-sufficiency, innovation, and the sciences where Hawaiʻi has real advantages—and backing the local entrepreneurs who will become tomorrow's employers.
It also means paying professionals what their work is actually worth, especially in the public and nonprofit sectors. Our teachers and healthcare workers are underpaid and stretched thin, and we can't recruit or keep them. I support the True Cost principle that the state must fund the real cost of the services and salaries our communities rely on—not rates frozen for a decade. And we should invest in growing our own: local pipelines that attract, train, and retain Hawaiʻi's own teachers, nurses, and care providers, so our young people can build good careers here.
We can fund this fairly. By asking more of those who can most afford it—non-residents, speculators, and the ultra-wealthy—we can raise the revenue to pay competitive salaries and strengthen these pipelines, without squeezing working families further. We won't reverse a thirty-year trend overnight. But if we invest in our people and pay the true cost of their work, families here can finally get ahead.
This is one of the most important challenges we face, and the Hawaiʻi Workforce Funders Collaborative has done great work addressing it. I've seen it first-hand, having been part of the Collaborative through my time at the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation. Two things have to happen at once: we need to create more living-wage jobs, and we need to connect our young people to them.
We grow living-wage work by diversifying our economy and supporting the local businesses that become tomorrow's employers. More good jobs is the foundation—without them, no amount of training solves the gap.
On pathways, I'd champion the approaches the evidence supports. First, paid work-based learning—internships and apprenticeships—so young people earn while they learn and get real exposure to careers early. Second, employer-driven training, where industry helps design programs so what we teach actually leads to jobs that exist. Third, clearer pathways from high school through college and credentialing, so students aren't left guessing how to reach a good career. And fourth, we have to close the neighbor-island gap, where training and job access are far more limited.
Underneath it all, this requires coordination that outlasts any one administration—government, employers, educators, and communities aligned around a shared, long-term plan. I'd be a committed partner in building exactly that.
Lowering housing costs means fixing the broken systems that make building so slow and expensive in the first place. My priorities:
Fix the rules that inflate costs. Outdated building codes drive up the price of every project. I'd advance common-sense reforms—like allowing single-stair "point access block" buildings up to six stories, which cost less, fit smaller lots, and allow more family-sized units—and finish bringing this reform statewide.
Streamline permitting. Our slow, tangled permitting delays projects for years and adds cost that gets passed straight to families. Clear timelines and modern, predictable processes are essential to bringing costs down.
Plan with communities—and stick to the plan. Too often we draw community plans with residents, then a well-funded developer gets the lines redrawn, people lose faith, and we fight the same battles everywhere. I'd draw the lines fairly, with community and a realistic projection of where growth should go, rezone to match the plan, then make it genuinely hard to change those lines between planning cycles. Certainty is fairer to everyone.
Invest ahead of growth. Government should proactively build and upgrade the water, sewer, and roads that align with the community plans. When it doesn't, developers pass the cost to buyers—and when it does, we should secure assurances, like the deed restrictions I discuss next, that the homes go to local residents.
This is where we have to be bold. Our housing should serve the people who live and work here—not investors treating our ʻāina as an easy return. Two approaches work together:
Create a resident housing market. I'd champion deed-restriction tools, modeled on programs like Vail's InDEED, that permanently reserve homes for local residents. In exchange for public investment or incentives, a home is deed-restricted so it can only be sold or rented to someone who lives and works here. Over time, this builds a growing inventory of housing insulated from off-shore speculation—a secondary market where local families compete only with each other, not with off-shore buyers. Where government funds infrastructure, these restrictions should be the standard, not the exception.
Make speculation less attractive. I'd raise the capital-gains tax on non-resident real-estate sales and support higher county property taxes on second homes and vacant investment properties. These do two things at once: they raise real revenue to fund local housing, and they reduce the incentive for off-shore buyers to park money in our market and drive up prices.
Dedicating housing to residents isn't anti-anyone. It's simply putting our own families first in their own home—which is exactly what government should do.
We do need to build—and fast—for local families. The key is that government stops waiting for the market to solve this and takes the lead itself.
Build rental housing on public land. The State and counties own land that can be put to work now. I'd prioritize developing affordable rentals on it, through public agencies and trusted nonprofit and community partners. And as that public rental inventory grows, it becomes a tool to stabilize the whole market: when government is a major provider of fairly priced rentals, it puts downward pressure on rents everywhere. Public land is our fastest path to homes that don't answer to speculators.
Fund it to scale. Building quickly takes real, sustained capital. I'd protect and grow the state's housing funds and pair them with the fair-share revenue from taxing non-resident and investment property, so we're financing housing at the scale the crisis demands—not a few hundred units at a time.
Partner with those already doing the work. Community housing organizations, land trusts, and local nonprofit builders know how to deliver homes for our people. I'd empower and fund them as real partners.
No family in Hawaiʻi should have to skip meals, and yet too many do. We need both immediate relief and a real fix for why food costs so much here.
For immediate relief, I'd remove the GET from groceries and other essentials. Taxing food is regressive—it hits struggling families hardest—and lifting it puts money back in people's pockets right away. I'd also strengthen and protect food assistance, and support programs like DA BUX that stretch food dollars while keeping them in our local farm economy.
The deeper problem is that we import most of our food, which leaves us paying more and exposed to every disruption. So the lasting fix is growing more of our own. I'd invest in local agriculture and the tools that let it scale—protecting ag land and water, supporting our farmers and ranchers, and using the State's own purchasing power, so schools, hospitals, and public institutions buy local and give growers steady, reliable demand to build on.
We also have to fix how food moves. High interisland shipping costs, and too few places to process and aggregate what's grown, make food more expensive the farther you live from Honolulu—and hold farmers back, since a grower can only scale if they can affordably get product to market. Fixing this does double duty: it lowers grocery bills on the neighbor islands and unlocks real growth in local production.
Hawaiʻi has made real progress here, and I'd build on it. Through Ready Keiki, the state has invested historically in preschool facilities and expanded subsidies so more 3- and 4-year-olds can attend. That's the right direction—and we have to finish the job and address the gaps.
First, pay our early educators. The biggest barrier isn't just classrooms—it's that we can't find and keep enough teachers, because early-childhood wages are too low. We've had subsidy money go unused simply because there weren't enough programs open to spend it in. Caring for young children is skilled, demanding work, but it pays so little that providers can't hold onto staff, and programs stay small or close. So I'd prioritize living wages for childcare workers, paired with real pathways to train and credential new ones. Without enough providers, no amount of subsidy reaches families.
Second, pass paid family leave. The countries that make early care affordable pair it with real leave—so parents can care for a newborn in that first year rather than rushing back to work because they can't afford not to. No parent should have to choose between a paycheck and caring for their infant. Yet Hawaiʻi is one of the states still without paid family leave. A bill to create it has moved at the Legislature but stalled—I'd champion finally getting it done.
Together, these give parents both the time and the affordable care they need to work, raise their keiki, and stay in Hawaiʻi.
I'd fix the regressivity at the heart of our tax system. Right now it's upside-down: our lowest-income families pay a bigger share of their income in state and local taxes than the wealthiest do. For working families already stretched thin, that's exactly backwards.
The single most effective change would be to put money directly back in working families' pockets through refundable tax credits—starting by making our state Earned Income Tax Credit refundable. Today it only reduces what a family owes down to zero, so the families who need it most can't capture its full value. Making it refundable means a working family actually gets that money back—cash that helps offset the GET they pay on nearly everything they buy.
I've felt this firsthand, working to start my own business—the cost, the paperwork, the sense that the system isn't built for the little guy. Hawaiʻi is hard on business because we have some of the highest costs in the nation and, by most measures, the most burdensome regulations and slowest permitting. For small and startup businesses especially, that's a wall.
So I'd focus on making it dramatically easier to start and run a small business. First, cut the red tape: streamline permitting and licensing, and adopt licensing reciprocity so qualified people aren't blocked from working here. Starting a business shouldn't require a maze of approvals.
Second, ease the tax burden on small and low-margin businesses. Our GET is especially hard because it taxes gross receipts—every dollar of sales, whether or not you profit. Unlike an income tax, it hits you even in a bad year when you're barely breaking even. I'd push for real GET relief—a lower rate or exemption below a reasonable revenue threshold—so we stop penalizing the smallest firms just for operating.
Third, bring our informal economy into the light. Hawaiʻi has enormous small-scale economic activity—people already working hard, just outside the formal system. I'd lower the on-ramp so they can formalize without being penalized: simple registration, minimal paperwork, and tax relief at the bottom. Make it easy to go legit, and more people will—growing our economy and their own futures.
Trust breaks when government feels closed, self-protective, and unaccountable. Rebuilding it takes real structural reform, not just good intentions. I'd focus on four things.
Transparency. Too much gets decided in the final days of session, behind closed doors. I'd fight to open that process—giving the public real notice and real time to weigh in before major votes, so people can see how decisions are actually made.
Accountability. When misconduct happens, accountability can't depend on lawmakers policing themselves. I support real ethics reform with independent enforcement, and I believe when citizens raise hard questions about their government, they deserve answers—not silence.
Efficiency and good stewardship. We vote on bills without even knowing what they'll cost. Hawaiʻi authorized an independent office to analyze that decades ago and simply never funded it—I'd finally stand it up, so we spend public money wisely and know the true cost of what we pass.
Opening the door. When the same seats stay filled for decades, government grows distant from the people. I'd champion term limits to keep public service circulating and bring in fresh perspective.
Government should be open, honest, and worthy of people's trust. That's the standard I'd hold myself to every day I serve.
Related Candidates
Kyle T. Yamashita
House District 12,No Response Received
Democrat
