 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community Matters here. I'm Marcia Joyner and this is Community Matters. Think Tech Hawaii has started a series of meeting candidates from all over the island or all over the state, from South Point, on the Big Island, all the way up to Nihihau and everything in between. And so today we are going to visit with Ikaika Hase. And he represents district, or he's going to, he's running as a candidate, from district six in Honolulu City Council. District six is the most dynamic district in the entire state of Hawaii. Oh, thanks. Well, it is. It goes from Aya, down to Ala Moana. That includes Chinatown, the palace, the capital, Honolulu Hali, and Ala Moana Shopping Center and everything in between. So actually it actually goes all the way to Makiki? Yes. All the way to Makiki. And it doesn't actually include Ala Moana, but it doesn't include Kaka Ako and Chinatown. Yes. So it's the most diverse, most dynamic in the state. Yeah. It's a great district. It is a great district. So welcome Ikaika. Thank you, Mike. Thank you for coming. Thank you. This is a real pleasure to meet you and talk to you, even though I've known him forever. But at all of my audience notes, at least all of my audience knows that I only talk to dear friends. So tell us all about Ikaika. Okay. Well, I live in Kalihi Valley, and I've been, as you know, I've been very active in sort of in the background and sometimes in the foreground in local politics and community issues for about 20, 25 years. Most of my time has been spent trying to work on the question of how do we make our community better? How do we take care of deep problems in our society and our politics? And I've been trying to figure that out as a college student, as an activist, as a business owner, as a teacher, and as a dad. And running for City Council is just an extension of that. It's about how do we improve our community because every person matters. Well, now tell me about your business. Okay. So I publish, I run a small publishing company. We publish a magazine called Summit. The name Summit comes from the motto of Queen Kapiolani, the spouse of David Klokow, the king. And her motto was Strive for the Summit, Kulia Ikanu. And it was from a particular time in Hawaii's history where we had a sense of being very modern, cosmopolitan, and global, and it was just part of the themes here at Think Tech, which I really appreciate. And for a while I've been thinking how do we get back to this idea that Hawaii can really be at the cutting edge, how we can lead on, you know, in terms of how we see ourselves in the global community. So I created a magazine to encapsulate that idea, and it includes coverage on local fashion designers, artists, musicians, thinkers, business people, people who are really kind of pushing the envelope in terms of what Hawaii can achieve and do in this, you know, wonderful interconnected global community. And now you had a newspaper also, right? Yeah, that's right. We also published The Hawaii Independent, which is more of a progressive and does a lot more politics in terms of, you know, looking at social issues and political issues. Are both of those online, or do you have hard copy? Sure. The Summit magazine is both online and in print, and The Independent is online. So those are your, are there any other business, any other parts of your business other than those two? I used to own an ATM company. That was exciting. My friend and I, we had, I think, two ATM machines, and we had one at a pool hall in Kaka, which no longer exists, and the other one was, it moved around to a few different places, including my uncle's store in Liliha, and it was, it's the kind of business that only a young guy would do, because it was really dumb, like we would show up with bags of money, no, no, no, not bags, but, you know, $20, $20, you know, $20 bills in my jeans to fill up the machine at 11 p.m. at night, at a pool hall. Somebody's going to get you, yeah. Not very swift. Definitely something for a young man. Okay. So you learned that lesson. Yeah. You knew something safe. I like entrepreneurship. I actually think that there's a lot that we can, that we can learn. Thinking about things entrepreneurially, you know, trying to solve problems. It's all about problem-solving, yeah. So then, after that, you, well, tell us about your family. So my wife and I have three children. They are young, and thus, they keep us up at night, of course. Of course. How young? 11, 9, and 3. Oh, my. My theory is that the ages of the children accrued to me, so I feel like I've actually earned their ages on top of my own 40. So I'm tired. Having children, you know. Having children, yeah. Yes. It is. It's a job. But it's a wonderful thing. And the thing that I learned most from being a dad is that it's not about me. It's about other people. Having a child is a whole process of essentially de-centering. I'm no longer the most important person in my life. There are three people, plus my wife, so four people who are more important than me. And I think that's a really important lesson, actually, for a public servant. Because the whole job of being a public servant is really to put the public before the private. And if you look at our politics right now, so much of our problems originate from the prioritization of the private over the public. You know, if you want to have a talk about politics, you can get something that you can just as a president who is putting his own financial interests above the interests of the 400 million American citizens. But even more on a very basic level. We need to look at how do we create housing that serves the general public's benefit. We need to look at how do we improve our public parks and our roads such that they provide a basic foundational benefit for the entire community. So let's talk about your community. You were running for Honolulu City Council. And the seat is held by someone that has been in politics forever. No. Oh, I met her, Carol Fuginaga, when she was running for the ConCon in 1978. Which I am a major beneficiary of. It's because of the ConCon in 1978 that made it possible for me to study the Hawaiian language, for instance, at the university. Oh, it did. Because when I was there, Hawaiian was taught in the foreign language department. Right. And, you know, the ConCon didn't create the Hawaiian language program, but it gave it a sort of sense of being okay. Well, that was before you were born. And in the 70s, when that was on the ballot, shall we have a constitutional convention, it was the renaissance of the Hawaiians, the music, the language, the culture, and all of the 70s was alive and there was such energy. And a lot of those, a lot of that advancement was codified in the 78 constitutional documents. And people like myself, you know, I was born in 78, we've, I've been, I've benefited tremendously from all the work of the grassroots folks like, you know, Uncle Walter and I campaigned for, I call him King John, John Wahe'e as a delegate to the convention. And at the time I was working in the Satellite City Hall and he was at Model Cities, which eventually morphed into Satellite City Hall. So we were out there just enjoying every minute of what could be. So let me give you a tangible example of how I've benefited from 78. Just this morning I was door knocking up in Liliha and I met an older gentleman, a Japanese, a local Japanese man, and he was not familiar with my first name. He had never, he had never met anyone with the first name Ikaika. By contrast, I'm 40 years old. In my high school class there were two other guys named Ikaika, I think it was two other guys. One of them is a very famous last name, Kahawano. Right. Kahawano. I think there's one more. And then, same age as me is, is Council Member Anderson on the City Council. Last evening I was reading about you and it said, Michael. And Ikaika's name is Michael. Is it really? Anderson. No, is it really? Yes. I thought- No, no, no, no, he's- One of his, one of his American names is Michael. Well, we're gonna have to talk with Council Member Anderson. Why- What, what, Michael, what Ikaika, because I thought Ikaika was a warrior. It means strong. Strong. It means in Ilocano, not Pigsaw, that's what I like to tell my constituents. Okay. So, you have Ilocano, Lardizabal- Yeah, I'm half Filipino, quarter Hawaiian, quarter Caucasian. Okay. But I love Lardizabal. Now, if you don't know, when you look at Lardizabal, it makes no sense. If you don't know that that's what the word is, when you see it in print, it's like, what? Yeah. Don't we have a picture of his family, I hope? Uh-oh. I hope we have a picture of Lardizabal. This is from our security cameras, right, Marsha? Geez. Anyway, so, here you are, Ikaika, running for office in this dynamic district. That of it is Chinatown. The oldest Chinatown in the United States. I love it, incidentally. So, but there are some issues. And I think that you're just the person, because you've known it all of your life, the area, the people. We want to make it exciting and interesting. And yet, there's no place to sit if you're a tourist, and you come down to see Chinatown, which incidentally is more Asian than Asia. When you come to Chinatown, there's no place to sit. And all of those restaurants, if you buy something on Fort Street Mall, there's no place to sit. And there are no public restrooms. How do you deal with that? How do you? What is your thought on that? So you know, the public restrooms is probably the easiest thing to do. There's, and I've actually had several of the business owners in Chinatown suggest specifically that we create public restrooms to service locals and tourists alike. And I think that's a great idea. What's the hold up? You know, a lot of things really are just political will. It's about us deciding that we're going to do something. And I think we need to make a decision at the council that we're going to make Chinatown more hospitable to our both folks who live here and also people who are visiting. Because I had, when I worked in Chinatown, one Asian man told me, oh, this is wonderful. This is more Asia than Asia. Because now they have shopping centers that are eight stories high and all this very modern and we still look like with the markets and the mamasans. I would go at six o'clock in the morning and I'm the only one speaking English. All the mamasans are out buying vegetables. I love it. So what we need to do is to create an environment where the tourists are welcome. They are welcome now, but again there's no place to sit. No place to, especially older people, to go to the restrooms. So if you are, when you are elected, you and the businessmen have to go to the council and say this is what we want. Because that's all it takes is if the community says we do. Everything starts with the community, I believe. And within Chinatown there's several different constituencies that we need to work with in a collaborative fashion. There's landowners that we need to work with. There's the business owners, the young entrepreneurs and the more established older businesses as well. And there's also the residents. And so it's a matter of balancing all these different interests. I think public restrooms make a lot of sense. I think also restoring funding to our state mental health services, which were defunded 10, 20 years ago, restoring funding to those will help alleviate a lot of the problems that we're experiencing with babies. We need to take a break and when we come back, let's talk some more about the other issues like homelessness and what have you. We'll be back in a minute. This is Think Tech Hawaii, Raising Public Awareness. You can be the greatest, you can be the best, you can be the king conveying all your chess. I'm Yukari Kunisue. I'm your host of New Japanese Language Show on Think Tech Hawaii, called Konnichiwa Hawaii, broadcasting live every other Monday at 2 p.m. Please join us where we discuss important and useful information for the Japanese language community in Hawaii. The show will be all in Japanese. Hope you can join us every other Monday at 2 p.m. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Marcia Joyner. We are visiting with Ikai Ka Hase, who is a candidate for Honolulu City Council District 6. That's right. Which is the most dynamic district in all of Hawaii, you know, from Chinatown, residential, business, commercial, and the palace. I think our friends in Kaua are going to be upset when you say that we're better than them. I didn't say that. That's the most dynamic. I didn't say better. It just encapsulates all of the various— Right, it's incredibly diverse. It is. Wonderful. Yeah. However, one of the biggest problems—well, it's not just your problem, but it's all over the state. And that's homeless. It's our problem. It's homelessness. Sure. How do you deal with homelessness? So I just want to say I'm old enough to remember when it wasn't this big a problem. Yes. You know, it is very much a recent phenomenon. And for me, when I rewind, it seems to me that it got really bad under the administration of Mayor Hanuman. And I think it might have just been that the symptoms were more visible because he began the process of expelling homeless people from the public parks. And at the time, myself and a good friend, Andre Perez, we did some community organizing around supporting the homeless folks who were being kicked out of the parks. And you know, I think if we were to look at why things are as bad as they are, there's a few kind of antecedents, a few root problems. One is the defunding of many of our state's mental health services. Another is our drug problem. And for that, we need to invest in enforcement and support the work that HPD is already doing in that regard. But the third one is also, for me, it's actually number three, number four. It's affordable housing because the fourth group that I think a lot about when I think about the homeless or the houseless is that is all of the people, local people, who are one paycheck away from being homeless themselves, you know, within the Hawaiian community, for instance, there are many people that I know personally who they don't really have an address. Mm-hmm. They move between families, between family members' houses. And it's because of the... The cost. If you're making $10 an hour, you can't pay $1,800 a month for rent. It's cost, but it's also the fact that we have, thankfully, still some strong extended families, such that it's possible for people to stay with the families who still own property or have, you know, stable rentals. What about these monster houses? You have them in your district? Sure. Sure. Yeah. What about them? I mean, they serve a purpose, but it seems to me that it has just grown without any thought to it. I know they serve a purpose. Right. Because they're filling some market requests for housing. However. However, you know, if they're breaking our laws, then we need to have the mechanism and the city needs to have the tools to adequately enforce our laws. They also create real obstacles for their neighbors in terms of depleting sewer capacity and depleting parking. Oh, nice. Yes. So, my campaign is developing or we've published a proposal for better parking management on our on-street parking. And a corollary to that is a plan that would allow for existing parking inventory that is unused. So, for instance, our shopping centers at night are empty. Most of our churches are empty six days a week. Our parks are empty. Schools are empty in terms of their parking lots. If we have a system in a very kind of systematic way through permits or leases to enforce on-street parking, but make it easy for people to lease on-street parking, I think we could make our communities, especially our older communities in places like Luleha or Nualuanua or Pahua or Fort Manageable. Yeah, where I live, we have three and a half monster houses and the streets are that narrow. And I don't know where they're going to park because there's nothing close, like you said, a church or park or anything. Nothing close to them. So I love your idea. Thanks. I don't represent Hawaii, though, unfortunately. But listen, there's a long-term trend, though, that we need to do with our island, which is finding ways to densify urban Honolulu and allow for our older neighborhoods to be less dense and for our ag lands to stay in ag. We really need to do a better job of balancing the city and the country. And I think the best way to protect our country is to make sure that the city is a really good, dense, walkable, pedestrian-first car, third or fourth city. And to me, that's the real trick, is how do we build more affordable housing in our urban core? What about Kakaako? Because that was supposed to be affordable and now it's out of sight. What about Kakaako? Yeah, what about Kakaako? So, you know, there's good things that are happening in terms of the urban design in Kakaako. You know, the new Whole Foods, for instance, is one of my favorite places to sign with because there's just lots of people. It feels very vibrant. Yes. The problem, though, is that a lot of the condos that are being constructed aren't for us. No, they're not. They're not. That is exactly why I said, what about Kakaako? Where do our people go? And so I think we need to do a better job at the council of really holding the line. And this is, again, where it becomes a political decision. It is. We need to make the political decision that when a permit comes across our desk and it's not building truly affordable housing that we're going to use as a home. We're going to call names, but when you look at our council people person that gets so much money from the developers and then approves these things, that just seems so wrong. Yeah. You know, and recently I've been thinking a lot about this problem of how do we build a lot of housing and also how do we balance the interests of, like, the development community, our labor unions, and our general public interest of the general public need for affordable housing. And I think we need to reconsider the decision that the city and the state made a few years ago to not build, you know, city and state-controlled public housing. Because we've gotten to a particular model, you know, where we have to work with developers and sort of control the developers to do the housing that we want for the public, I don't think there's a reason why we can't have the public just do the housing that we need for the public. And I would like to at least, you know, have a serious public conversation about that. I think you're right. I would hope you're right in any way on that. So what I've been thinking about a lot, Marcia, is public housing in some cities is really awesome. Yes. Like in Vienna, for instance, I've been reading online that the social housing, they call it social housing in Vienna, is really, it's the favored housing for all social classes, both the rich and middle class and the working class. And that's really interesting because here in Honolulu, that's not the case. I would love for us to invest in our public assets, like housing or transportation, such that those become the default. They become the desired solution for people thinking about housing or transportation. You know, if you look at a really vibrant city like New York or London, everyone rides the tube, everyone rides the train. And that to me is a sign of a really good city that invests in its public. Because I live exactly 17 miles from this building. And in order to get here early in the morning, I have to leave before 619 because the window closes at 619. Wow, it's very specific. It is. It is when your life is controlled by the, and then it takes, then I can get here in 20 minutes. Okay, after that, it's a half hour to 40 minutes because of sheer volume. And from Y and I, two hours to town. So the idea under Fawcett, when they said the second city, was for people to work out there as well as live, that hasn't happened. The working out there, and when I moved to where we are, everybody says, why do you want to go out there? And so far, the pig farms, why do you want to go to Tulane Highway? And now it has grown up so that here's this traffic is issued. So we have a great transit system, we could make it better. So the more people would ride, put more people on there. We have what, I just learned this term a few days ago from someone. Apologize, I can't remember who it was. I'll talk to a lot of people. Yeah, of course you do. The term was dense sprawl. And I hadn't heard this before and said, yeah, that we have density, you know, like I live in Kaliki Valley, it's incredibly dense, but it's still sprawling, you know, it's, you still have to get into a car to get milk. Yes. And to me, that's, there's planning, there's zoning, transportation design that we need to rethink in order to make our city more habitable, more livable. One last thing, you live and work in a neighborhood, well, several neighborhoods in that area that were the original neighborhoods of Honolulu. And when you have people that have grown generations and generations in those houses, that they've owned that land forever, people now are aging and living alone. And some of them, the property tax is going to eat them up. How do you protect those people? How do you, what is your vision of protecting those people? Because there's lots and lots of them. Yes, and I meet them every day, you know, when I go door to door. There's a very specific thing that I think we need to do regarding property taxes, which is to limit, cap the increase that the city can, you know, the increase in the assessments. Cap it at a number that is comfortable and commensurate with things like social security, you know, which, so my understanding is that Congress can increase social security by 1.5 or 2% per year. I think that that should be the natural cap for increases in our property taxes. There's a gentleman in Honolulu, Mr. Sarikaku, who, his idea is you have a cap, but then you also allow for the city to maintain on its books the higher market-based assessment, assessed value. And you keep that value only in the books. And if the property is sold, you treat it as a lien. And at the time of sale, the city collects that higher value. Great idea. It's an interesting idea, Mr. There's a few people. So I feel like I'm having like this really slow, well, conversation in the community, because people who don't like that idea, but... But what I need you to do, this is just for you. I need you to look into the camera and tell us why we should vote for you. This is your ad now. Okay. So my name is Ikaika Hussie, and I think you should vote for me because I've dedicated my entire life to our community and there's a lot of work that needs to be done to make the lives of our local families better. The people of our community matter to me, and that's why I'm running for city council. Well, thank you. And I approve this ad. And just to remind everybody, in Hawaii, the primary election is the most important. I know the rest of the country seems like what? The primary is August 11th. Early voting has already started. So remember Ikaika Hussie, Honolulu City Council District 6. Aloha. Thank you, Marsha. Thank you. And we'll see you next time.