Housing is limited for two reasons: First, because it's expensive and slow to build new housing, second, because people make it slower and more expensive because they don't want more neighbors, and third, because society really doesn't want to evict people from their homes when they can't afford them anymore.
Housing - especially sustainable, long-lasting, quality housing - is genuinely expensive. Not as expensive as the real estate market might make you think, but it is expensive. Especially when you're shipping materials from a different continent to the middle of the Pacific!
There are limited lots in Hawaii. It's an island! Winter here in the northern continental US is a gray and terrible thing. I'd love to move to an identical 2-acre lot in Hawaii to what I have here, and have it within walking distance of my work and my son's school and shopping. But there are only so many 2-acre lots to build, and I've got one of the biggest in my neighborhood (most are half-acre), and lots of people want that.
And most importantly, you're eventually asking an elderly native Hawaiian, living on a fixed income, who just wants to live in the house they inherited from their parents, to compete financially for ownership of a limited resource with an out-of-state engineer or business owner.
Economics says that if the native who owns a house outright can't pay as much as a millionaire from the continent can, the millionaire should come to own it, and if a developer can turn that one lot into four sublots that are worth more to 4 someone (or make them duplexes, and split to 8, or make it an apartment complex) than the millionaire's valuation of the one lot with the SFH, it should be developed. But that's only the naive case.
Housing - especially sustainable, long-lasting, quality housing - is genuinely expensive. Not as expensive as the real estate market might make you think, but it is expensive. Especially when you're shipping materials from a different continent to the middle of the Pacific!
There are limited lots in Hawaii. It's an island! Winter here in the northern continental US is a gray and terrible thing. I'd love to move to an identical 2-acre lot in Hawaii to what I have here, and have it within walking distance of my work and my son's school and shopping. But there are only so many 2-acre lots to build, and I've got one of the biggest in my neighborhood (most are half-acre), and lots of people want that.
And most importantly, you're eventually asking an elderly native Hawaiian, living on a fixed income, who just wants to live in the house they inherited from their parents, to compete financially for ownership of a limited resource with an out-of-state engineer or business owner.
Economics says that if the native who owns a house outright can't pay as much as a millionaire from the continent can, the millionaire should come to own it, and if a developer can turn that one lot into four sublots that are worth more to 4 someone (or make them duplexes, and split to 8, or make it an apartment complex) than the millionaire's valuation of the one lot with the SFH, it should be developed. But that's only the naive case.