 Our homes in Hawaii here on Community Matters with Senator Stanley Chang in the Hawaii State Senate. So Senator Chang represents the ninth district. Senator Chang has been devoted to housing. He is the chair of the housing committee in the Senate and he cares intensely about housing in Hawaii. And for that we have to admire him and support him. Stanley, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Jay. It's an honor and a pleasure. So we saw a program that you did on the 15th, only last week, a week ago. And I want to talk about that program. It was about Hawaii Homes for Everyone. And the first question is, why? Why did you do that program? Well, we have a very severe housing shortage here in Hawaii. It's lasted for years, for decades, for generations. And I think it's the biggest problem facing Hawaii today. My father was a state employee. He was a UH professor. And with one state job, he was able to buy a home, to buy investment properties, to put my brother and me through private school, to put me through private college and private graduate school, and to retire comfortably. Today, it is inconceivable that one state salary could support a family of four in that manner. For me to buy that same house that my father did in 1983 would take over 30 years of my entire salary in the state Senate. So the system is broken. And as a result, people are leaving. Well, that sounds like a disparity in income, doesn't it? It sounds like there's too many people to little land and a tremendous disparity in the income that people earn is against the cost of occupancy. And that's been going on since I got here, which was 1965. It was impossible even then for, say, a secretary in our law firm to buy a house. He always had to have help. And we really have to find a way out of that. We've been talking about it. We've been coming up with plans. We've been stressing about it. And we've been pointing out what you point out, that people are going to leave if they can't afford to live here. So it goes deep into the essential economy of the state, doesn't it? Oh, I totally agree with you. And so what we've proposed is a public option, essentially like public school except for housing. So currently, we have about 11,000 high school seniors graduating from our DOE public schools on average per year, not even counting our private schools. And every year, we build about 2,000 new homes on average. So it doesn't matter if all 11,000 graduates are billionaires. The housing simply does not exist to accommodate them. And as for the private sector developers who are building those 2,000 units, they're obviously going to be building for the richest 2,000, not for the poorest 2,000. And that's where I've proposed a program called Aloha Homes, Affordable Locally Owned Homes for All, where the state would step in and provide a mass option to house the bottom or the rest of the population. So let the private sector build for the top of the demographic. But we should have a public option, a mass option, a low cost option. A recent state study showed we could provide a 200, sorry, a two bedroom condo for $400,000, which is dramatically below market value for a new construction two bedroom, and is within the reach of much of the working class of Hawaii. Sounds like you've refined this to a certain extent and you have a significant amount of planning detail for the project. But you've been studying it for a long time. I know you went to Singapore with my friend Sandy Friedman and Sharon Moriwaki, and you studied that. And you have people in this program last week who are experts in this urban planning for the larger population. How long have you been studying it? What's the extent of your study, Stanley? Well, I became housing chair in 2018. And as housing chair, I decided, I didn't want to just put on a bunch of band-aids when the patient is in critical condition and needs a quadruple bypass operation. So, luckily housing is not an issue that is unique to Hawaii. Every city, every jurisdiction in the world needs housing to house its population. And so I wanted to look at successful examples of jurisdictions that had constraints, whether land or financial or otherwise, and nevertheless managed to house their populations. And so there are a number of jurisdictions that do have abundant, affordable, beautifully maintained and designed housing for all without rationing. Jurisdictions like Singapore and Vienna are among the most famous. And that's why I personally took it upon myself to travel to Singapore to study their program to Vienna as well. And why we're doing a virtual delegation this year to Singapore, Hong Kong, Vienna, and Houston for jurisdictions that have to one extent or another solve their housing shortages. I think we need to let experience be our only guide for reason may mislead us. We've been following a lot of unproductive and counterproductive policies for the last several decades that have only exacerbated our housing shortage. And that's why I wanted to focus on success stories, the jurisdictions that actually solved housing shortages successfully. What are the risks of doing this? You have the basic idea, and this may be unachievable, but 1,000 housing units per, what's an acre for a lot of housing. But what are the risks and challenges of trying to do that? There are a lot of challenges. So people in Hawaii tend to be used to growing up in single-family suburban communities. The problem is, if we build back to our 11,000 high school graduates, 11,000 homes using the four unit per acre suburban model, like the one that I live in, we would need to pave over 2,500 acres plus of agricultural conservation or otherwise undeveloped land every single year. And that is not something that I believe the people of Hawaii want. So if we're going to limit our footprint to the existing urban core to areas with existing transportation infrastructure, namely the rail project that's currently under construction, the state does own a significant portfolio of lands, such as Aloha Stadium, such as OCCC, such as UH West Oahu, HCC, LCC, near those rail transit stations. And if we limit ourselves to that footprint, we will need to develop at a very, very high rate of density in order to supply housing for all the local people who need it. And so that's why we convene a conference on August 12th, titled 1,000 Homes Per Acre, which really showed several examples, whether in Vancouver, whether in Hong Kong and elsewhere, of communities where high density really does work. Well, that's a fabulous idea. But if you put your left foot out first and then your right foot, how do you get there? It won't happen overnight. Rome wasn't built in a day and I think we just need to start. I think we start with a pilot project on one of these sites that is near one of the rail stations that is in town, that is state owned and build a tower with 500 units and sell 99 year leases for those units at cost, approximately $400,000, according to a recent study and see what happens. I'm betting that thousands of people will line up for a handful of units and that will prove the market for those units because they are so far below market, they'd be as much as 50% below the going rate for a brand new two-bedroom unit in town, that I think that the state will have a lot of momentum to expand the program and to really maximize the use of its state lands all over the rail line. And if we build at a very high rate of density like 1,000 units breaker, we should have enough land for decades, generations, if not centuries of housing for all the future generations of local people. You know, 400,000 is relatively cheap and that's gonna, as you said, appeal to a certain sector of the demographic. The question I put to you is how do you avoid the Chicago project phenomenon where it deteriorates socially? I think there are three main ways that we can do that. Number one, it's not a subsidized program. So it's not going to rely on continued legislative appropriations. And that was one of the big problems with American public housing. Congress cut the funding and the local jurisdictions didn't step in. Number two, and this is a really critical aspect, maybe the single most controversial part of this plan, there will be absolutely no income restrictions whatsoever. Rich and poor can live side by side. Now, if I were to say to you, affordable housing is a limited resource, it should only go to those who need it. Most people would agree with that statement. Unfortunately, as intuitive as it may be, it is completely and 100% wrong. What you do is you concentrate poverty when you put income restrictions on housing. And that creates cyclical poverty, crime, drugs and many of the other social ills that we saw with the great society era, the post-war era of public housing in this country. What we should have is like public school for housing where if the public schools and the public housing is good enough for the homeless, it is also good enough for the billionaires. That is America. So that's the second big reason. The third big reason is a little bit more subtle, but let me give you some concrete illustrations. With high density and following, I think some very simple basic rules of urban planning, high density, narrow streets and sidewalks, no setbacks, which is the space between the sidewalk and the building where the building actually starts and ground floor retail, we will be able to create highly walkable, highly safe communities for people to live in. That's how all cities were basically built until the 20th century in the advent of the automobile. But if you've been to Ginza in Tokyo, if you've been to Greenwich Village in New York, if you've been to Kowloon in Hong Kong, these are the kinds of places that we're talking about, but you don't even have to go all the way across the ocean. If you look at a community like Waikiki right here in Hawaii, Waikiki is possibly the highest crime precinct in the entire state. And yet, if you are an elderly, retired woman from overseas who doesn't speak English, you nevertheless feel 100% safe walking down Calacao Avenue late at night because there is so much foot traffic. Anyone grabs your purse and you scream, 100 other people will hear it. And so even though there might be a very high crime rate technically in Waikiki or in a place like Chinatown, the fact that there is so much pedestrianism the fact that the urban planning creates so much pedestrianism means that they're very safe and really desirable communities that are some of the most successful in the world for residents and visitors alike. There's a fellow named Michael Kimmelman. Kimmelman is the New York Times architecture reporter and he also teaches that in Yale. And his thing is public spaces. And he takes it out of classical times when the Greeks and the Romans really perfected public spaces. And his argument, Kimmelman's argument is that you need that for the society. You need that to connect the rabble sleeve of social care, so to speak. You have to have a place for people to join together and enjoy themselves. And I think actually I appreciate that more now in the time of COVID that I did in the past. I really love to have social interaction these days outside my house. I was thinking about it the other day. So, Querri, what about that? What about public spaces? How do you build public spaces into this high density plan? Yeah, so I think public space is really critical. But there are a couple of different kinds of public space and I wanna focus on the organic public space of the streets. Jane Jacobs, the founder of Modern American Urban Planning lived in Greenwich Village in New York and she celebrated what she called the ballet of pedestrians on the streets. You had children playing. You had commuters getting to and from work. You had people walking to and from their daily shopping routines. You had in Hawaii, you might have tourists walking down the street. That is the public sphere in a successful community. We don't have to just have a park to create a public sphere. We can have that ballet in our streets and that interchange, I think that daily interchange. So, I'll give you a concrete example. So in Hong Kong, people shop for groceries not just once a week like we might in Hawaii going to Costco on a weekend, but they actually shop for their groceries for every meal. They might go out once in the morning to buy their lunch groceries and then once in the afternoon to buy their evening groceries. Through that process, they will develop a relationship to the vegetable vendor, the meat vendor. They will see the same folks on a daily basis. Oh, how are you doing, Mr. Fidel? How are you doing, Mrs. Chang? And they will build a sense of community with their neighbors while also consuming produce and food that is much fresher, much less reliant on preservatives and freezing and other artificial methods and really develop that sense of dense urban fabric. If you live in a suburban community like many of us do in Hawaii, the reality is a lot of us don't even know who our next door neighbors are, their names. And that is what is caused when you have people in individual cars doing everything they need through driving. And so what I think is the ideal type of public space is where people are walking on a daily basis seeing the same faces, building that sense of community and also just enjoying a better quality of life, eating fresher food, for example. Yeah, you're right in terms of the fact that rehab made huge and continuing mistakes in our urban planning in Oahu and maybe in the neighbor islands as well. And this isn't going to be easy. And it isn't going to be ubiquitous either. In other words, you can't remake Oahu in one shot. You've got to put your toe in the water and you've got to try it out, maybe refine it. And then if it works or to the extent it works, you go and you find some more land and do the same thing, but maybe a little more carefully. And after a while, you begin growing the idea around the island and changing the island. But you know, the problem with a badly designed condo is it's got a useful life of like 200 years, a badly designed neighborhood, the same thing. How do you make it ubiquitous? How do you go from one project to many projects? How do you change our society, change our urban structure? Jay, you really hit the nail on the head because what I've seen after years in the city council and also in the state legislature is that we in Hawaii are passionate about preserving our conservation land, our agricultural land or undeveloped land, but also our existing communities. Every time we hear about an affordable housing project going up in a place like Kailua, for example, we hear an outcry of people saying, you know, this is not in character, in conformity with how our community actually is. And so what I would say is, you know, those folks are right in some way. A four story building in, you know, an area of single family homes does change the character of that community. And so what I would want to promise with high density development is that we would never touch, not one inch of existing agricultural or conservation or otherwise undeveloped land and not one inch of any existing residential neighborhood. These state-owned parcels that we're talking about, parcels like Aloha Stadium, we would never have to displace one single resident. We would never have to demolish a single home. We would confine these communities to very, very small pieces of the island. So if you like your existing residential community of Mililani or Hawaii Kai or Nanakuli or Ka'a'ava, rest assured that it will never change, that we can rest assured that it will never have to change for even centuries as long as we're able to concentrate really high density housing on those few small parcels that we've identified, those state-owned parcels near the rail line. And so we would not have to worry about the pressures of additional development in existing residential communities. What about your community? What about District 9? What kind of feedback are you getting from people there? Are they on board with this? What about feedback from other members of your committee and other members of the legislature? What kind of feedback are you getting there? Because obviously you need to have a certain amount of what you want to call it, public and legislative support for this. Oh, definitely. You know, the housing shortage is not confined to any single part of our state. District 9 has the most expensive housing of all the Senate districts in the state. And I'm feeling it particularly, I just recently got married, we're in the process of buying a home now and I can tell you the market is extremely hot in District 9. But actually, one thing that we've seen during the pandemic is that three out of the four, all four counties of Hawaii have experienced record home prices during this pandemic. And now three of the four counties of Hawaii have prices, median prices over $1 million. Actually, Oahu is only number three out of the four. Both Maui County and Kauai County have had higher housing prices today than Oahu County. And so it's really a statewide issue. The housing shortage is not limited to any individual place, which is why the urgency is there for every single community. Now, what I would say for the neighbor, you know, I'm from Oahu, I was born and raised here. I would not presume to tell the neighbor islands how to solve their housing shortages. But one thing I do know is that if we're able to build and accommodate Oahu's population on Oahu, on these state-owned sites near the rail stations in urban Honolulu, that we will reduce a lot of the pressure on the housing market on the neighbor islands. Because as one of my colleagues recently told me in his district on the big island, at least half the population are economic refugees from Oahu. And so if Oahu were able to take care of our own housing problem and our own housing shortage, we would no longer be creating such pressure on the neighbor islands and their housing markets as well. You know, I don't really think that people understand the sub-silentio process that's going on with the out migration in Hawaii and the effect of that on the future of the state. You know, we struggle not to be a backwater. We struggle to be akamai, to be connected, to be intelligent government, intelligent lives. And I don't think people understand what it means when a given high school or college graduate takes off and is not likely to come back. What's the demographic on that? And what is the social effect? I'm sure you've thought about it. You're absolutely right. Because a lot of the outflow in population is not from, you know, the existing homeowner population, which tends to be a little older, a little wealthier. It's from the young people. And of course, that's not a new phenomenon either. Back in the 80s and 90s, there was a large exodus to places like Las Vegas. But, you know, I went to, you know, out of my high school class, 90% of us went to college on the mainland. Most have not returned. And that population is really accelerating. I once spoke at a public event and one of the folks, you know, said that they like their way of life. They're single family homes. They don't want to see Oahu covered with really high density forests of towers. And my response is, because it was a slightly older woman, I asked her where her kids lived, and she said the mainland. And where her grandkids lived, again, the mainland. And so I said, well, you know, if you want to live a life where you see your kids and your grandkids maybe once, maybe twice a year, and you don't get to see them for their birthdays, you don't get to go to their sports events, you don't get to participate in their PTA conferences and their school plays. You know, that's not how I would want to live, but that is the choice that we are forcing upon the entire community. Is that you have no choice, but to see your kids and your grandkids just once or twice a year. And as for our young people, we are telling them, once they become adults, you have to leave. You cannot stay here. You can never come back because we have made the decision never to build a home for you here. And you are not welcome here any longer. And I think that is a far, far worse outcome than, you know, the possibility of having small clusters of very high density development on one island of the state. Sure. I mean, socially it's tragic to separate families. And you know, another scenario is that the parents go to the mainland and join the kids. So you have a whole family is leaving. That's also a social tragedy. But what about the economics? You know, the macroeconomics of having a lot of people do that year after year after year. What does that do to our future? It's very sad. I mean, I don't even know if we can quantify the loss of the brain drain, the talent, the local people who could be paying taxes, who could be creating jobs, who could be starting businesses here in Hawaii. As you know, a lot of these folks are the best and brightest who are leaving and some are doing so by choice, but a lot of people are not doing so by choice. There's a huge economic impact. There's also a huge cultural impact because we have an outflow of local people who really deeply understand the cultural values of this very special place. And the influx of people that we're seeing tend to be wealthier folks who can afford the median home price of $1 million or more. And that cultural replacement of population is very troubling. It should trouble all of us. Those of us who have spent years here who have grown up here, we understand what it means to make Hawaii special and we understand what it means when those folks are leaving. And we don't wanna just be the Western most suburb of Los Angeles. There's something very unique about it and there's something that is lost when local people are replaced by mainlanders. That's why so many of us are here for that exquisite quality. In your program, one neighborhood keeps popping up and that's Alawai. Can you talk about the plan, the possibilities, the prospects for development along these lines in Alawai? We had a gentleman named Sanford Marata who's a longtime real estate industry veteran here in Hawaii present on our webinar last week. And he had a really innovative and maybe even startling idea for the Alawai. So as you may or may not know, the Alawai is important because it's a flood basin. And if there are floods from the valleys of Manoa and Maoka areas of Waikiki, you need the Alawai golf course to detain that floodwater before it completely swamps the rest of Waikiki. And so what Sanford was proposing was to reserve, to redevelop the golf course, two thirds of it for a so-called sponge city, which would have a lot of engineering features to detain floodwaters and which is going to become even more important with rising sea levels and climate change. But to have the other one third developed to be inexpensive public housing of the kind that we've been talking about. And so we can really have our cake and eat it too. We can have our housing in a prime location in the middle of the city where people will not have to drive cars at all. And we can also increase the capacity of urban Honolulu to absorb floodwaters and stormwaters. And it's a big idea, but I think that we can go for it. We have to do something with Alawai right now. It's underutilized and it's a shame. There have been various plans. I remember one of the guys in the tourism industry wanted to make it a tourist sports mecca, for example. So, but this is the problem Stanley and I would like to raise this with you. There are a million ideas out there. One of the things you've said in your video introduction to these programs is that we entertain all possibilities. We're in a dynamic conversation. We want to hear what people have to say. But the problem is if you put a hundred people in a room, you might very well get a hundred ideas. So how do you deal with that? I know you're open-minded, this is to your credit. This is to the credit of the people around you. But how do you deal with multiple ideas that may not be consistent? Well, we got to start somewhere. What we do know is that the current system is broken. And so we need to bring all of our ideas to the table. So, I've been very publicly identified with the Singapore model of public housing development but our recent housing delegation, virtual housing delegation, we're not just visiting Singapore. We're also visiting Hong Kong, Vienna and Houston. And Houston is a really interesting example because in some ways it's the exact opposite of what we do in Hawaii and what they do in Singapore, which is they don't have zoning. So anyone can build anything anywhere, anytime in Houston. You can tear down your house. You can build an office building. You can build an oil refinery. No one is gonna stop you. And that is very shocking to a lot of people in Hawaii. I don't think most people in Hawaii would want that but it is possible. Houston has not been destroyed by thunderbolts from heaven. It exists and there are a lot of problems in Houston but it is able to offer below US median housing prices even though it's been the fastest growing city in America for close to 20 years. And so we need to expand our minds. We need to expand the range of possibilities and solutions that we have here in Hawaii because what we currently have has failed so dramatically that we need to be open to all ideas on the table. Yes, and you don't have to limit yourself to only one of them. You can have multiple possibilities and test them out and then learn from that, no? Absolutely. And when we all come together as a community to have these discussions, I think we're all better off for it. Sure, well that's a big, this is a big thing to get people together but the other part is the big thing and this is my last area of inquiry with you is how you get it done, how you get the lawmakers to facilitate this, to make this happen financially and in terms of the land and in terms of whatever legal support you need. May I say legislative support you need. The legislature hasn't done much on this in the past, what do I wanna say, 40 or 50 years. The city hasn't done much on it either I would say. So how do you get these organizations to get behind it, to get excited about it, to take action points and make it happen now? Well, we gotta start somewhere. Right now a lot of the efforts, the oxygen in the room is taken up by pandemic relief but one thing that has surprised me and would have greatly surprised all of us 18 months ago at the beginning of the pandemic, if we had said that with the greatest economic crisis in Hawaii's history and the highest unemployment rate in the United States that the price of housing would not stabilize, would not go down but would in fact hit record highs in every single county to breach the $1 million mark in three of the four counties of Hawaii, that would have been, you would have laughed me out of the room but what it really, the fact that it has happened reminds us that this problem is not going away. I'm confident that if even these economic conditions could not slow the rate of housing cost growth in Hawaii then nothing will. And in that sense, time is on our side because the problem will only continue to get worse and at some point we will have to do something and when that something happens, I hope it is an equitable high density solution like the one that I've proposed but even more so I hope that future generations of local people will have the chance to call local people home, whatever the model like you and I have Jay and to no longer force our young people to leave that is my sincerest hope. And that will have a profound effect on the economy. I recall that in OG was in the early 2000s we had a lot of people who come from the mainland, computer programmers if you will and act 221 helped them come here as the supported tech companies. And when that ended, there was really no support for them and they couldn't afford, they were not making as much money they could not afford to buy a house or even rent a house they like and they left. I remember meeting so many of them that said, I'm going now, I'm leaving. And so dreams of diversification into that area our dreams of bringing talent from the mainland you know, to give us a robust additional sector really evaporated. And I suggest to you that if we make housing affordable if we make housing easy to get we will bring those people back and we will be able to diversify the economy in a way that we haven't been up to this point and that will be an enormous benefit going forward. You agree with that analysis? Oh, I totally agree. I, you know, act 221 was very much a top down sort of government led approach but I would say even from a bottom up perspective if we guarantee our young people the ability to live here for a very modest price like $400,000 for a two bedroom condo I trust that the ingenuity, the entrepreneurship the talent of our young people somewhere out there is a Bill Gates is a Mark Zuckerberg, I know it. I've met many of the young people in both public and private schools across Hawaii the talent is immense. And they will, I don't know I don't even know what that is. Maybe it's in biomedical science maybe it's in genomic engineering. Who knows what that next sector is but I believe that if they are given a chance to live here and to thrive here and to start businesses and to create jobs here that somewhere out there is the next great pillar of Hawaii's economic growth. Stanley, we're thankfully out of time but I wanna offer you the opportunity of telling people where else they can read up and watch the videos and the discussions that have been had cause we need this to get out we need everyone to be informed about it. So if right now I wanted to learn more about what you have done the programs you've organized the experts you've brought in, where would I go? Well, like UJ we're on all of the social media we're on Facebook, we're on Twitter, we're on YouTube where all of our recordings are archived in which you can watch at your leisure. You can also visit our website at senatorchang.com which has links to sign up for our monthly newsletters our housing newsletters and to view past editions of them. Please reach out to me at any time. My email is senchang at capital with an O.Hawaii.gov that's senchang at capital.Hawaii.gov can also call our office at 808-586-8420 we'd love to be in touch and really we need all the help that we can get when it comes to housing so I really appreciate this opportunity Jay. Thank you Stanley. I know that this is something you do for altruistic reasons and I am so impressed and I admire your work, I admire your passion, I admire your consistency on the issue. So all the best Stanley and I hope we all get what you're looking for. This is the future of Hawaii. Stanley Chang, District 9, State Senate, Aloha.