I've struggled to afford housing since I first moved out of my parents' home. In college, I lived in an illegal triplex in Kalihi, then a house in Kailua with 12 friends — I once had a friend living in my closet while two others shared the living room, separated by a pareu. My wife and I later spent eight years in a 700-square-foot yurt in Kapahi. All of those homes, including a few in between (like a house in Kahaluʻu with no ceilings), were illegal, because we've made it so hard to build housing in Hawaiʻi. But they were the only options we had.
I've also been co-owner of a small business building outrigger canoes since 2007. We're the last company still making them in Hawaiʻi. Rising costs over the last four years have pushed profitability out of reach, and we're carrying mounting debt. That daily stress — the financial insecurity, the uncertainty about whether we can even stay in Hawaiʻi — is something most of my generation and younger live with every day.
Those two experiences are what keep me hungry for change. The status quo is broken. Changing it will be hard. But if we don't, we will lose the communities that make Hawaiʻi, Hawaiʻi.
We can solve this crisis. For much of Hawaiʻi's history, working families could afford a home here, and other states and cities have brought housing costs down in recent years. We have real examples to learn from. I wouldn't be doing this job if I didn't believe we could solve it.
The root problem is that we don't have enough homes. Under the status quo, for one of my kids to buy a house here, someone essentially has to die or leave the state to free one up. That's not sustainable.
I know that to many, more homes sounds like less quality of life — because for fifty years, development has drifted away from jobs and community, and on Kauaʻi much of what's been built is luxury housing that eats up agricultural land, adds traffic, and stays out of reach for local families. It's like showing up to a party without bringing any food.
It doesn't have to be that way. Homes built in and around our town cores cost less, help local businesses, take cars off the road, and bring life back to our parks and public spaces. That's like showing up with two pounds of poke instead. Not only can we make our town cores vibrant and economically strong, but we can do it in a way that brings down the market price of housing.
Prices outpacing incomes isn't a law of nature — it's what happens when government makes it too hard to build. I'm now part of the system that created this crisis, and I'm determined to be part of the one that fixes it.
I don't think we can separate out the cost of living from the lack of opportunity. Housing is at the center of both issues. Young people can't take a risk on starting a business if they can't afford rent, and we're seeing dire worker shortages across many industries as the housing crisis pushes people to leave.
Wages are low partly because so many local businesses are barely staying afloat. Hawaiʻi's tax code and permitting process make it harder to run a business here than it should be — and that squeezes margins even further.
As both a legislator and a small business owner, I see both sides: my taxes fund infrastructure my business depends on — the harbors, roads, and beach parks that allow us to run a canoe business. But I also know firsthand how our tax code stacks costs on small businesses at every turn. My company competes directly with products made in China, and before I ever sell a canoe, I've already paid Hawaiʻi's use tax — 0.5% to 4.5% — on equipment and materials imported from the mainland, plus GE tax embedded in every local good and service I buy to run the business, from materials to marketing. That tax gets charged and re-charged at every step before my product reaches a customer. County permitting alone can add years before a business breaks ground. Too often, the system treats small businesses as something to be corralled, not the backbone of our economy.
Low wages and thin opportunity are two sides of the same coin. We need to streamline tax filings, give struggling businesses more flexibility, and stop stacking the use tax and the pyramided GE tax on the goods and services that go into building something here. That's how wages start to move.
That gap — 170,000 keiki entering the workforce, only 100,000 living-wage jobs waiting for them — isn't a shortage of jobs. It's that housing costs eat up so much of a paycheck that too few jobs function as a living wage once you try to actually live here. The state has little power to simply raise everyone's pay, but real power over the cost of housing. The goal is to make sure that a teacher working one job can afford a market-priced home. That's a fight we can win through government policy.
There's also not enough electricians, plumbers, and carpenters to build the homes we need. Expanding registered apprenticeship programs, especially ones that start in high school and lead directly into union training, gives young people a real path to a good-paying career without a four-year degree, while easing that labor bottleneck.
And for people already in critical-shortage fields — like teachers who need additional graduate credits or a master's degree to move up the salary schedule and earn a raise — the state should be subsidizing that path, not making people choose between advancing their career and paying rent.
We need policies that make it easier to build housing near jobs.
What I've already introduced and passed: legalized two ADUs per lot statewide, eliminated state impact fees, cut county fees for smaller units, simplified lot-splitting, reduced barriers to converting commercial buildings into housing, and created a $20K septic grant and a 2% property-tax set-aside for affordable housing on Kauaʻi.
Still needed:
Regulatory reform — legalize multifamily and manufactured housing and smaller lots, and cut the building code and zoning barriers blocking homes near jobs
Infrastructure financing — conveyance tax reform, plus allow counties to pay for new roads, water, and sewer by floating a bond based on the future property tax growth that new development generates, instead of raising rates on everyone
Construction financing — more low-interest financing for both low-income and mixed-income housing
Keeping homes local — deed restriction programs that commit homes to people domiciled in Hawaiʻi forever, and tax and zoning changes that reduce vacant homes and vacation rentals
None of this is a mystery. We just need to get it done.
I've spent the last two sessions working on this, with mixed success.
Last year, I introduced and championed — with the support and deep collaboration of Holomua — a bill that would have paid homeowners to put a perpetual deed restriction on their property, ensuring the home stays occupied by someone living and working in Hawaiʻi. Other municipalities have had success with similar strategies, creating a bifurcated market where locals-only housing sells for significantly less than housing on the open market. That bill didn't pass, largely over concerns about the program's cost to the state.
This year, in coordination with Holomua again, we pivoted. We passed HB1740, which significantly reduces fees and regulations for developers who deed-restrict 80% of a project's homes — ensuring those units are sold only to, and occupied by, someone domiciled in Hawaiʻi. Forever. It gets at the same goal as last year's bill, but without costing the state anything. I'm optimistic it will produce a significant number of deed-restricted units.
The state's own count is 64,490 additional units needed by 2027. This gigantic shortage is why costs keep climbing. The state can't build all of this alone; the private market has to build most of it, and we can't afford to subsidize construction to keep every unit below cost. So the job is to make it easier to build to reduce the market price of housing.
Much of a home's cost is baked into the cost of land, and Hawaiʻi's zoning often requires far more land per home than necessary, ensuring that there are nearly zero smaller starter homes available for families. Factory-built homes using union labor can be significantly cheaper than site-built ones, yet manufactured housing and financing to build it remain hard to access. Our building code treats a triplex the same as a 500-unit building, which is why triplexes and fourplexes almost never get built. There's marginal farmland near job centers that will never be viable for agriculture, but state zoning can take seven to ten years before you can break ground on a home there. And on Oʻahu, after roughly $10 billion spent on rail, the City and County still doesn't allow enough housing near the stations to meet demand for homes within walking distance.
Every one of these problems comes from state or county law, which means every one can be fixed by changing state or county law — and I've introduced legislation on each front. We know what we need to do. We just need to do it.
We have very little power to reduce grocery prices directly. Grocery margins are incredibly thin, and even as some places experiment with government-owned grocery stores, I'm not optimistic the state could run one better or more efficiently than the private sector.
That said, land use policy is the best tool we have to give people access to affordable, local produce. We need to build housing in and around our town cores instead of consuming agricultural land — because when housing competes with food crops for land, housing always wins, and the housing crisis is making it harder and harder for farmers to afford land at all.
The highest density of small farms on Kauaʻi is in Moloaʻa. Many of those farms are allowed zero house sites. That's not a coincidence. At the same time, we do need to give legitimate farmers more flexibility to build housing for themselves and their workers on their own land. It's a delicate balance to strike.
More farmers on more agricultural land means more local food, and more resilience against price spikes and shipping costs.
I struggled for years to find childcare on Kauaʻi. There simply aren't enough providers for the number of families who need one, and government can do more.
We've made it excessively hard to build multi-generational housing, so the three generations that used to live under one roof are now rare — and in many cases illegal. Making it easier to build accessory units fixes part of that. It won't work for every family, but for the many households with a willing grandparent, we just need to let them live together — and every family that does is one less family competing for scarce daycare.
We should keep cutting permitting red tape for childcare providers too, like requirements that daycares provide off-street parking — babies don't drive. The public sector can also do more directly: Kauaʻi County is trailblazing by offering child care for its own employees, and other state and county agencies should follow. And we need to keep building on the momentum of Ready Keiki until Hawaiʻi has truly universal, free pre-K for every family who wants it.
I have three:
First, eliminate the GE tax on rent. Taxing the cost of a roof over someone's head, on top of already-high rents, makes no sense.
Second, fix how we tax Hawaiʻi businesses buying what they need to operate. Right now, a business pays a use tax — 0.5% to 4.5% — just to import raw materials or equipment from the mainland, and pays GE tax again on the local materials, supplies, and services it buys here, before it's ever sold a single product. That's a direct tax on trying to run a business, and it gets passed straight on to consumers. Revenue lost from these two changes could be offset by asking the highest earners to pay a bit more.
Third, restructure the conveyance tax: cut it on 95% of home sales, eliminate it entirely on the first $600,000 of a home's value, and raise it on sales over $4 million — with that revenue dedicated to building homes for the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands and to housing infrastructure.
Costs here are always going to be higher than the mainland — that's the reality of shipping everything across the Pacific. But that's not why we rank near the bottom. Being unfriendly to business is a policy choice, not a law of nature.
As a small business owner myself, I feel it directly. My company competes with products made in China, where labor, rent, materials, and insurance are all far cheaper. We need more industrially zoned land to bring down the price of a warehouse, and tax policy that doesn't put us at an unfair disadvantage before we’ve built a single canoe. The use and GE tax on intermediary goods I cited above are costs that an overseas competitor never pays. County permitting can add years before a commercial project even breaks ground. And sometimes the hard-working people implementing our tax code treat small businesses as something to be managed and corralled, rather than the backbone of the local economy.
I'd fix this by eliminating the GE tax on rent and the layered taxes on business inputs — the use tax on what we import, and the pyramided GE tax on what we buy locally — while streamlining tax filing and land use permitting and giving struggling businesses more flexibility when they need it.
The vast majority of legislators I know are hardworking people trying to do right by their communities. And yet trust is at an all time low because of a handful of people who broke the law. That’s on each of us to fix.
I try to earn trust directly: regular social media updates, town halls, and being genuinely accessible to constituents. That means giving straight answers, even when the honest one is more complicated or controversial than a soundbite.
On policy, we passed first-in-the-nation legislation this year undoing Citizens United and getting corporate money out of Hawaiʻi elections, and we significantly strengthened public financing so candidates can run competitive campaigns without depending on large donors. Those things matter.
But while I love working on public policy, I'll be the first to admit that trust can't be rebuilt through policy alone. It's rebuilt by consistently doing what you say you'll do.
