 Politics at land in Hawaii with Dennis Isaki on Think That Hawaii. Today we'll be speaking with Sterling Higa, Executive Director of Housing Hawaii's Future. Two years ago, Colbert Batsumora put us in touch to discuss housing and we met at Danny's restaurant on Kauai, which has since closed. Sterling is a former debate champion and coach, college lecturer at the Hawaii Pacific University and his coach at Punahou also, right, Sterling? Yep, back in the day. My experience with judging high school, speech and debate tournaments I felt inadequate. They even asked me if I wanted to change my answer when I judge. That was when my son was competing and also Senator Stanley Chang was in high school. Stanley is now in the legislature and pushing for affordable housing also. Among other things, Sterling is a hip hop rapper and was dominated to a Nahuca Hanoa Award with one of his albums. Perhaps we can listen to a clip if we have time. Sterling, welcome to Think That Hawaii. Awesome, thank you for having me, Dennis. Yeah, first, please tell us a little more about your background and why you're doing this. So I grew up in Honolulu and attended public schools graduating from Roosevelt. And every year, since my graduation, I've watched more and more of my classmates move to the mainland to pursue opportunity elsewhere. And one of the biggest reasons they leave is because they can't afford to buy a home here as they start their families. I would love to have a future in Hawaii for my own three children, my wife and I and three children with one more on the way. I want to have a future where my children, my grandchildren can afford to stay in Hawaii so that we no longer have people feeling like they have to leave. Okay, so how did you get started with this project? So I was approached by Colbert Matsumoto who put me in touch with two young men, Zachary Yamada and Evan Gates. Zach was a recent college graduate and Evan was a college student taking a gap year during COVID. And they had been working on the plans for Housing Hawaii's future, which is 501C3 nonprofit, whose goal is to build a movement of millennials and Gen Z to help end the workforce housing shortage. Zach and Evan had realized after talking with three dozen experts on housing, with expertise spanning back decades and they read a bunch of papers. What they realized was that young people had never been involved in the discussions around housing. And the concerns that young people have when they're starting their careers and families weren't being represented. And the people who needed starter homes to get a jump on life were just left out of the equation. So what they decided was if you could organize millennials and Gen Z, you would create these powerful advocates, not from the perspective of trying to get rich like developers or trade and industry groups, but from the perspective of the people who ultimately will live in the housing that's being built. And that that would lead us as a community to solve this problem once and for all so that young people can afford to stay here. Yeah, I understand you've been talking to a lot of people like Habitat for Humanity and some developers. Can you tell us, Samara, are you at liberty to mention who you're talking to? Yeah, well, we've talked to a lot of people and if anybody watching this wants to talk, I'm happy to discuss the approach so far has been to learn from as many people as we can. So we've talked with affordable housing developers like Stanford Car and Makani Maiva. We've talked to some of the community land trusts like Cassandra Abdul at Nahaleo Maui, the community land trust on Maui, the representatives from the Habitat for Humanity chapters. We've also talked with contractors, with building suppliers and with all the people along the chain of housing development down to the people who are either unable to afford homes because they've been priced out or the people who've been lucky enough to afford homes because they benefited from some of the home buyer education programs that are put on by Hawaiian community assets or the Hawaii Home Ownership Center. So by talking to all these stakeholders, we've tried to form a complete picture of what's going on in housing so that we can find a solution that works in the real world. Yeah, you mentioned Habitat for Humanity. They've been doing a lot of good work on the island of Kauai over here. I think that that model is pretty good and that the self-help housing, they've been doing a lot of good work too. Yeah, the self-help housing model is amazing. Having people contribute that sweat equity to build their homes really connects. It helps them to realize the value of a home and obviously because they're investing that sweat equity, you can reduce the cost of constructing the home, which ultimately makes it more affordable for that buyer. Okay, and in speaking with developers, I'm sure they've spoken of government regulations and red tape. What have you heard? So there was a great report that was released by the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization, U-Hero, about the Wharton Index, which found that Hawaii's counties are among the most regulated in the entire country. And there's agreement on everyone's part that regulation is a major source of the cost of housing. So addressing government regulation is going to be one of the pieces to bringing the cost of housing down to the price where a local family can afford it. Yeah, I think that's a large part of it, but it seems like politicians all talking about housing rate date. And at the same time, there's more and more regulation going on, you know. And as I say, they're cutting the red date, but they're cutting it land-wise. Speaking of land, this is another example to say, oh, you're not gonna be, you cannot be more than treat the land to width ratio, three to one. And if not, you gotta go to this land, the variance process, which I went through, and they're still, you know, taking months and months, and just to get a lot to be approved, that's more than three to one land to width. I mean, like, seem like, you know, on the verge of ridiculousness. They were talking about the Singapore model. Have you heard of that? Yeah, so Senator Stanley Chang has been the most vocal advocate in Hawaii for the Singapore model, which is basically the government serving as a developer, and then leasing out homes to customers or citizens, ultimately, on a leasehold model. So the people would not own the ground, but they would have the right to occupy the unit for, you know, to 99 years. And that's one model that's been proposed for how to deal with our cost of housing in Hawaii. Obviously, especially in urban Honolulu, for example, the cost of land is one of the major factors that prevents the development of new housing. So if the government steps in to provide that land to develop housing, that's one way to reduce the cost of housing. And a leasehold, which is somewhere between renting and owning something outright fee simple, is one way to reduce the cost of housing because the buyer doesn't have to pay for the cost of the underlying land value. That's interesting, I think I brought it up before, because in the past, there were some land, large landowners with homes, then the Hawaii State, the government, I don't know if you heard of the Land Reform Act, I think 70s, 80s, they forced this data to sell the interest in a land. They were forced to sell it. It's kind of going the opposite way. And now they're going to the leasehold. Yeah, I mean, the birth of Hawaii Kai in large part was, you know, leasehold lands ultimately being converted to fee simple when the Hawaii State Supreme Court forced a lot of those large landowners ultimately to sell those leasehold properties. I think leasehold is only one of many options that are sort of on the table for addressing the housing crisis. But at this point, we have to have an open mind and keep a lot of options available because there's no, I think, like silver bullet for addressing housing. It's going to take a lot of different elements. Yeah, you know, there's a lot of factors. But I think, you know, a lot of them stemming from that government red tape and all the developers have been saying that, you know, taking very long to do a project. And then the government comes in and says, oh, we're in the housing, we're going to do it now. And then we're going to impose more taxes, if you will, and everybody else will do that. They could developers do it with the tax credits. You know, that's how they fund these projects. And when developers kind of do a project, the government comes on and say, you got to pay X amount of dollars to fund these affordable housing projects. I think it was in the 80s and 90s. It was one, I think it was 60% had to be affordable. That's when the developers thought it was a little bit too much. What a big developers had a hard time. But then when HFDC was first formed, they started Kapolei and the big projects. They had a mix of market homes and low income. And as well as the Act 15, which expedited review, that really helped the projects and the profits, if you will, from the market homes, helped subsidize the other one. So I think it was a good way to do housing. And that they, when different administration came in after why they went out of that, and later on they came in. They started HFDC, but they're not doing anything that they were doing before doing the Waihe'i plan. You know anything about that? Yeah, well, the Waihe'i administration was one of the golden eras for housing construction in Hawaii. One of the keys that Governor Waihe'i told me about when we had a conversation was he had an agency, the Office of State Planning, which was tasked with helping to get all of the ducks in a row in the administration. So oftentimes development gets slowed down because different departments and agencies don't work with each other at the state level and they don't work well with the counties. But what Governor Waihe'i recognized, and I think he was correct to do this, was if you were able to coordinate the government better, you could speed things up, which ultimately reduces the cost of constructing housing. And that's an approach that I think any future governor, including the incoming Governor Green, would do well to consider is coordinating the state departments and agencies to make sure that they're all driving toward housing. Yeah, like I said, all the politicians talking about housing and Governor-elect Green mentioned his project he was involved in. I think there were like 36 homes or something, but the need is like thousands, right? So, you know, we got a long way to go. So what have you heard from the developers? What else you heard from the developers that you've spoken to? So a big concern among developers is the uncertainty regarding approvals, especially discretionary approvals by, say, the county council. Oftentimes, developers have to go through two processes. For example, the Kobayashi Group, which is developing Kuala Place on Kapilani Boulevard in Honolulu, has to go to HHFDC for one 201H approval to get exemptions from certain density and height requirements and to apply for funding. And then they have to go to the county council for a similar approval to get it passed by the county council. One of the things that 201H was intended to do was to help to reduce the burden of having to get discretionary approvals at the county council level. But ultimately, the developers still have to go through both processes. Sometimes the discretionary approval at the county council ends up destroying a project entirely, which was the case with Makani Mayeva's project in Kailua, where the county council initially was supportive of the project. And then after a small bit of community opposition, the county council sort of caved and ended up opposing the project and denying Makani Mayeva the exemptions that she needed to complete the project. That's the kind of issue that developers really get uneasy about, because if you invest hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in your pre-construction planning, and then you're not able to actually complete the project, that's money that's all gone. So one of the proposals that developers will talk about is by right development, which means if a project meets these certain criteria, like it has such a number of affordable units and it's in locations where we want affordable units, etc., then the project would automatically be granted approval. That's one of the ways to take the politics out of development. Obviously politicians are reluctant to adopt by right approvals because that's one of the ways that they gain power and influence. You're more likely to be able to go to developers for campaign donations if you're the one who gets to decide whether or not they can build their project at the end of the day. So I think there's a contest that we have to address where who should be making the final decision about what gets built? Is it something we want to leave in the hands of elected officials who oftentimes will respond to the most vocal, not my backyard or NIMBY opposition groups? Or is it something where we want to determine a process for how we approve projects and allow people who meet those criteria to automatically be able to build the housing that they want to? Going back to the 80s, I think it was the 80s and 90s, there was the Act 15 that HFTC had that could just grant permits to proceed some of the county zoning and construction issues. But then the county came and said, okay, we're not going to inspect it and we're not going to accept the road. So they got to have coordination over there. I think HFTC is still paying for some of the things that they did long time ago because of that. Let's talk about doing away with the land use commission. What do you think about that? So the controversy with the land use commission is that if you have a parcel of land, you have to have it allocated to a certain land use, like say urban land use at the land use commission, and then you have to go to a separate county level for zoning. And what ends up happening is this adds a long step. Land use commission proceedings very often are, they can be contested case proceedings where an intervener can enter in and cause legal challenges that ultimately make the land use commission decision take years potentially. I don't know what the best answer is. One of the solutions that was proposed last legislative session by Representative Hashimoto from Maui is changing the requirement of going to the land use commission when you're dealing with parcels below a certain threshold. So only having to go through land use commission approvals if you're dealing with a very large development, but allowing things to go much quicker through the county level if you're dealing with a small amount of land. This is based on a principle called home rule, which says the counties can make more of the decisions regarding land. And that's one of the options to reduce the amount of decisions that have to go through the land use commission. I believe as of now, the current point is 15 acres. So if it's smaller than that, I believe we just go to the county or city level. Right. And I think the proposal from Hashimoto was to increase that threshold to 50 acres. It didn't get through a session last time, but I think it's a bill that's worthy of reconsideration, whether the threshold should be 15 or 50 or somewhere in between is a matter, I think, that the public can debate. But it does seem that at least right now, the fact of having to go through LUC and then through the county zoning is definitely adding a layer, which then adds the time and the uncertainty because each of those decisions, LUC and the county, are both then discretionary decisions where someone can say no and deny you what you're asking for. Yeah, it might take years for all that permitting with the entitlements. In fact, sometimes it's hard to dispute or get away from it. In fact, now they're imposing more cultural evaluations, like the Kapakai analysis. I guess it was in the books for a while there, but they clamping down on that when some of the people bring up more old cultural things, look at the rules, you gotta go back to the original time of the Mahaley and takes a lot of things, even on pieces that were instead developed but wrecked on and all throughout the years, 100 years, but you still gotta go back and look at the report. Have you heard anything about that? Well, generally, there are kind of two classes of challenges to land use that come up often. The cultural challenges are coming from native Hawaiians. Sometimes developments are slated for areas where there are iwi kupuna or buried ancestors or sacred sites like Heiaos. In either of those cases, I think we have to be careful to preserve the culture that is there, and then you have the environmental challenges where they don't want the development to occur if it threatens endangered species. Obviously, there are some concerns about development occurring in the sea level rise area. I think both of these concerns, the cultural and the environmental concerns, are both legitimate. One of the issues at the state level though is these concerns are handled by different agencies. Those agencies don't always work in an efficient coordinated manner, so if you're a developer, you have to go through, say, the state historic preservation division to get your approvals for all of the cultural issues and then another division to deal with the concerns about sea level rise. Every delay in each of these departments is something that adds, again, that time, uncertainty, risk, and the cost to development. I understand it has to be a sensitive issue with the cultural, sacred sites, environmental, but it's not cut and dry. It seems like it's arbitrary, you know, so you don't get a clear cut answer on that. Unless you go through the whole process, years, sometimes even the vicinity of some cultural thing, they're talking about something that's mild as a way, and then the people doing the commissioners, they're kind of confused. They think you're talking about this project when some other issues, environmental or something, is not exactly on the project, so it kind of messes up things. Yeah, and that's where I think we need transparent criteria for what would be approved or disapproved, and these have to be a matter of robust public debate. I don't think the best solution is allowing a few bureaucrats in an office somewhere or a few non-elected commissioners to make decisions that have such a huge impact on housing. Yeah, well, luck in trying to change that, so have you been working with some of the elected officials also? So, Housing Hawaii's future, we often meet with both elected officials and some of the civil servants that work in the county and state administrations to ask for their advice on things. Our hope is ultimately that the young people who are getting involved can help motivate some of these what we call decision makers, these important stakeholders to move in the same direction. The most gratifying and encouraging thing so far is all of the elected officials and civil servants we've spoken to, they want to address the housing issue and they want to help improve the situation for young people, and I think part of what Housing Hawaii's future and other housing organizations can do is help to reflect back the way that their decisions are actually impacting housing. So, making sure that their good intentions are backed up by the right kinds of actions that are moving us toward housing. Yeah, I mean, you say they're getting motivated, but I think they should be motivated if they're an officer right here. Well, we hear a lot of talk in the past months prior to the election, everybody talking about housing, right? You see any changes coming up? Or I guess it'll be a prediction, but I think I mean, there are encouraging signs. Governor-elect Green made campaign promises to take decisive action on housing. It was the number one issue he said in a lot of public forums on Maui in the race for mayor. Mayor-elect Judge Bissen made housing a key element of his campaign and said that he would also take decisive action to address housing. So, at least in Maui County in this next year and at the state level, you have executive leaders who have made this a priority. The thing now for members of the public to do is to help hold these executives accountable and to make sure that they deliver on the promises that they made during the campaign. That's easier said than done. True. Yeah, and another thing about housing is homelessness. You got any thoughts on that? So, homelessness and housing are definitely related. Homelessness does mix in a couple of other big issues, which is treatments for drug addiction and also for mental health. So, oftentimes, homelessness is caused by one or a combination of drug addiction or mental health, mental illness, and so addressing homelessness is not just a matter of providing housing. Oftentimes, you need to wrap around services that will help somebody get the medication they need or the mental health treatment they need so that they can progress toward being a fully functional member of society, being able to work and support themselves and be responsible for themselves and to care for others as well. What housing Hawaii's future tends to focus on, though, is housing in the sort of middle-class range, what is called the GAP group, which for people who are familiar with area median income is typically from like 80 to 140 percent area median income. These are people who are employed and are working. They're your teachers, your firefighters, your police officers. They earn a decent wage at work, but they're priced out of the housing market because there are no starter homes available for them. So, at Housing Hawaii's future, we support the work of all of the groups that deal with homelessness issues, and I think that the work that they do is important, although our focus remains on this middle-class GAP housing group because these are the civil servants we need to help Hawaii progress, and it's also the people that we're losing often when they leave Hawaii to pursue opportunity elsewhere, and we want to sort of plug the holes in the bucket so that those people can stay here. Yeah, I understand that certain issues that associated the homeless test in a drug and lots, but there are some, I guess, some people called houseless. They're not in the middle class. They just had so they could pile up into three families in one house or even live in the cars. I heard a little bit about some legislators talking about the Finnish solution for homelessness from Finland or something. Have you heard anything about that? So, my understanding, and I'm not an expert on the Finnish model, is that it is a lot of these social supports. So, your mental health care, all of the other things besides housing that are necessary for someone to have a well-integrated life, and that's something that we can definitely improve in Hawaii in terms of dealing with the homelessness issue. So, where to go to Finland to get the solution? Well, I think it's valuable. Hawaii often sends delegations. They've sent a delegation to Singapore, to Vienna, to Finland to learn from some of these models. Now, there's a danger, which is we are not Singapore or Vienna or Finland, although there are certain elements that we can take from this. It's kind of like a grab bag or a potluck where we can take a little bit from each of these and combine it into something that works for Hawaii. I'm definitely cautious. People will often get really excited about a certain model of housing and they'll wonder why we can't do it here, and usually there's a good reason why we can't do it here. For example, Singapore had an incredible executive leader who basically ruled like an autocrat for decades, who was able to implement their housing program. We don't have that system. We have a more democratic system with checks and balances. Even somebody who wanted to do a radical action like the Singapore housing model wouldn't be able to do that in Hawaii without resistance. So, I think the best thing for us is to figure out what our problems are in Hawaii, to clearly identify them. And then once we have identified the problem, to figure out is there somebody who has part of the solution to this problem, and can we take a piece of that to implement here? Have you reached out to University of Hawaii, DERP, Urban and Regional Planning, guys like Carl Kim? So, I have had a conversation with Carl Kim not about housing, but about something else. McKenna Kaufman at DERP is a great expert on terms of energy and transportation. And so, yeah, when we need to talk about urban planning, we talk to people from DERP. They're the experts. Okay, we're running out of time. You have time for a rap song or a rap pop? Unfortunately, no time for a rap song, but I hope that, you know, viewers will get engaged with Housing Hawaii's Future. We're at hawaisfuture.org and also on all of the social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, you can find us at hawaisfuture. Yeah, thanks a lot. So, what are your song, your rap, if you want to look it up? If people want to look it up, the album is called Shorelines and the producer that I collaborated with is a wonderful producer named Scott Bottoro, so we recorded an album called Shorelines together and that's available on all of the streaming platforms, Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify, etc. Yeah, thanks. Good luck with that too and good luck with your organization and helping people. Thanks. We're running out of time. Thank you to our guests, Sterling Higa. Mahalo to our viewers on Think Tech Hawaii. If you like the Think Tech Hawaii free media shows, please help support this non-profit platform in the nation. Aloha, Mahalo. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.