Working Hawaiians pitching tents on the beach

By JOE ALLEN

HOMELESSNESS IS not something that naturally comes to mind when we think of Hawaii. The Hawaiian Visitors and Convention Bureau promises tourists an earthly paradise: “Look around. There's no place on earth like Hawaii. We warmly invite you to explore our islands and discover your ideal travel experience.” The travel experience these days, however, will include the sight of hundreds, if not thousands, of Hawaiians living in tents on or near some of the most expensive beachfront property in the world because the cost of rental housing has skyrocketed.
Alice Greenwood and her six-year-old son are typical of the new homeless in Hawaii. When the home she rented for $300 a month for the last thirty years was sold, she joined nearly 1,000 people living in tents on the beaches along the Waianae Coast of Oahu. “There was no choice but to come on the beach,” Greenwood, who is disabled because of a work-related injury and lost her benefits a month before losing her home, told the New York Times last year. The Waianae Coast has a population of 40,000 out of Oahu's 900,000 people and is predominantly made up of poor, Native Hawaiians. Hawaii's political elite are promising action to deal with the growing homeless problem, but seem more concerned with removing the homeless from the eyesight of tourists rather than solving the crisis.

At the end of March, city workers began removing the last of 700 homeless people who have been camped at Maili Beach Park just west of downtown Oahu into a government-built shelter. Many are full-time workers in the hotel and tourist industries as well as in the construction industry. Tourists on Oahu, the home of the famous Waikiki beach, spend hundreds of dollars a night for hotel rooms, while a median-priced house can cost as much as $635,000. Oahu city workers carried out a similar operation a year ago clearing the beach park, but over the last year the housing crisis and the corresponding homelessness has gotten much worse.

The housing crisis in Hawaii is a product of two decades of greed and speculation by American and Japanese businessmen. One of the most notorious of these speculators is Genshiro Kawamoto, a billionaire Tokyo real estate investor, who recently made headlines by offering poor Native Hawaiian families eight of his mansions in Oahu rent-free for up to ten years. His mansions are worth up to $6 million and are located in Honolulu's Kahala neighborhood, Oahu's equivalent of Beverly Hills. This publicity stunt doesn't make up for the fact that Mr. Kawamoto has led the real estate frenzy that is responsible for the rise in homelessness.

Dorie-Ann Kahale, one of the beneficiaries of Kawamoto's publicity stunt, is typical of Hawaii's new homeless. She was living in a shelter with her five daughters in one room, where she slept on the floor while her daughters, six through twenty years of age, shared a double bed. Dorie-Ann Kahale, is not unemployed; she works as a customer service representative for a small Hawaiian phone and Internet company and makes $13 an hour. But she lost her apartment two years ago when her rent rose to $1,200 from $800. Like thousands of others she has been priced out of the rental market. After initially staying with relatives, she and her daughters spent five months on a beach before moving into a shelter.

The misery that has been imposed on Kahale and the growing numbers like her has brought immense riches to others like Kawamoto. In California and Hawaii, Kawamoto is known for buying up whole communities on a lark and serving eviction notices on short notice. Beginning in the mid-1980s, he bought up nearly 200 houses and apartments on Oahu while driving around in his limo and offering cash to owners on the spot. Later in 2002, he decided to take advantage of rising housing prices and served thirty-day eviction notices on tenants. Hawaii has some of the most expensive rental property in the U.S. because of this rampant speculation-a two-bedroom apartment goes for about $1,900. Homes on the Waianae Coast that rented for $200 or $300 a month just a few years ago are now renting for more than $1,000.

While the housing crisis has hit Hawaii's working class overall, it has been particularly devastating for Native Hawaiians, who have historically suffered discrimination in what was considered the most liberal of America's states. Last November, the Honolulu Star Bulletin reported that 15 percent of all Native Hawaiians live in poverty; 20 percent of Native Hawaiian families with children under eighteen fall below the poverty line; and 32 percent of Native Hawaiian families headed by single mothers are poverty-stricken. These sobering statistics are only the beginning of the problems that plague the Native Hawaiian population-suicide, substance abuse, and crime-which are similar to the problems that plague the Native American population on the mainland.
The rampant speculation that has produced Hawaii's housing crisis can only be solved by government imposed rent controls and a rollback of rents. Such a demand can only come out of a movement of the new homeless with Hawaii's historically militant trade-union movement centered around both the longshore and teachers unions. Hawaii's political elite, long dominated by the real estate and tourist industries, will strenuously resist such demands. “Being homless is not a crime, it is the fault of the government,” says Alice Greenwood. “I can understand when it's twenty, thirty people, but when it hits the thousands…”

Joe Allen, a socialist in Chicago, is a regular contributor to the ISR.