 Mr. Think Tech Hawai'i, the community matters here. Good afternoon. Welcome to Think Tech Hawai'i's Movers, Shakers, and Reformers Politics in Hawai'i Series. I'm your host, Carl Campania. Today, I'm excited to announce, as I mentioned last week, we have Senator Stanley Chang, new senator, but he's not new to politics. He's been around for a little while. We're going to learn a little bit about him and we're going to talk about housing and homelessness here in Hawai'i and hopefully some ideas of what we're doing and what we're trying to accomplish in the future. So thank you for joining us again and let me welcome to the show Mr. Stanley Senator Stanley Chang. Well, thank you so much for having me, Carl. Absolutely, I'm glad you can make it. Before we go into housing and homelessness, start by telling us a bit about yourself. Your district nine, Senate District nine, where is that? What does that encompass? I want to learn that, but before we get to that, what else have you done? What have you been doing? I know you were city council for a while. Give us a bit of Stanley Chang history if you would. Sure. So the whole reason I wanted to get into politics in the first place goes back to my parents. They're both immigrants from China. My dad got here with nothing. He started out as a beach boy, but he was able to become a professor at UH to work hard, to buy a home, to put my brother and me through school, give us all these opportunities we literally could never have had anywhere else in the world. So he taught geography. Yeah. So, you know, fast forward to when I graduate from high school, about 90% of my class goes off to college on the mainland. Most have not come back. My brother, for instance, who was a year behind me, he moved to Dallas where he bought a house that's bigger, newer, nicer than our house here. And it was literally one fifth of the price. Yeah. And so that is my biggest concern as a young person in Hawaii, that we ensure that we have a good place to live where it is possible to work hard, have a family, to buy a home, to have a good life in this place that we all call home for every generation. In this place we call Paradise and many of us call home and try to find a way to have that even though it's Hawaii and we have to respect native Hawaiian values and cultures, that it is also an American dream that people are striving for. Absolutely. And we are having a hard time achieving. Absolutely. Yeah. And Hawaii is certainly not unique in that instance, but, you know, we do have a median home price now of 795,000, the highest of any state. And we have the highest percentage of both parents working in the country. We have the highest percentage of people working two or more jobs in the country. And we also wake up the earliest of any state in the country. And I think it's because a lot of people need to finish their first shift so that they can go to their second shift. Sure. Beat the traffic as well. So I was motivated to run for City Council in 2010. Well, I should back up. So I went to Waikahala Preschool, Kahala Elementary, Iolani for middle and high school, went to College and Law School of Harvard, came back and practiced law. Thank you for coming back, by the way. As you mentioned, not everybody comes back. Well, yeah, it's great to be back. I wish people would come back. The brain drain that we have here is a problem that's a whole different episode though. But anyway, go ahead. I'm sorry. So I practiced law here downtown at Cades Study, did some real estate law there, then went on the campaign trail in 2010 for the City Council District, District 4 that goes from Alamuana to Hawaii Kai, and knocked on 19,000 doors and won. And so represented these Tonlulu area from 2011 to 2015. At the end of that term, ran for Congress, the seat that was vacated when Colleen Honabusa vacated her seat to run for Senate. That's right. And unfortunately, didn't make it. But in 2016, ran for the State Senate, similar area from Diamond Head to Hawaii Kai, knocked on 16,000 doors. And here we are. And there you go. So veteran door knocker and highly experienced. So if you ever want to learn how to do that, join Senator Chang. I highly recommend that. Okay, so excellent. Well, all right, that's a very specific arc. Now, going back to just Harvard for a minute, what did you study in Harvard? What was your field? What was your area? Undergrad, I studied government and law school, obviously went to law school and had a great time there too. Was there a focus in law school, or was it just getting a law degree? Some people focus towards, you mentioned your work in real estate, others look at international law, others look at constitutional law. Was there an area of focus or was it just the next step was I need my I want my law degree because I want to then be able to do something with that. Well, I tried to get a broad kind of overview. And so I took a lot of courses that I thought would be useful no matter what. So for instance, I took tax law, which is not always the most insulating area of the law, but I people go to sleep in that class. You know, I have to say it was fascinating. And what I really learned is that the world goes around because the internal revenue code almost everything is the way it is, because our tax structures, you know, put in these huge incentives for, you know, things to happen the way they are. I would actually love to invite you back to another show to focus on that. I would like to learn more about that. Because that I think is something that I don't think most people understand. We talk about the IRS and everyone's afraid of the IRS, although you don't need to be. And everybody is all worried about taxes and where their money goes and all that stuff. But having a different perspective on by the way, this is how and why everything works and how government applies it, I think would be an interesting topic. So anyway, so okay, so then so you came back. I worked for a while and yes, you've been you've not been a center through one session. And we're rolling into the next session. And I know you're doing prep work with all that, which includes a lot of bill review ideas and community outreach as well, I would imagine. One of the issues and what we're going to talk about for the rest of this show is going to be housing and homelessness. And I appreciate the opportunity to talk about that. It's a big concern. You'd already mentioned the median price of house is $700,000 or above $700,000. Nobody can afford that very few people can afford that. We hear all the time about and the number has varied over the past couple years. I've heard that we were 60,000 units short of housing. Now, what I've never quite understood is when we assess that, it's not just housing, because there's all these high rises going up. But were these high rises going up a $600,000 condo? What can you begin to introduce us into I know your thought process anyway, when it comes to our housing concerns, what can we do? What are some of the thoughts that have been rolling around in Senate that you're talking with your constituents about with regards to housing concerns, the cost of housing, the availability of housing, whether we're 60,000 units short or 30,000 units short? And what is that conversation people are having that you're having with people? Yeah, I think this is, like I said, the most important crisis facing us because we have the highest cost of living in the country, the largest single piece of that cost of living is the cost of housing here in Hawaii. Another fund statistic, it takes longer in Hawaii to save for the average down payment with the average wage than anywhere else in the country. It takes 29 years to save for the average down payment with the average wage here, which is more than San Francisco, New York, a lot of the places that we think of as really expensive. This is also the extent of a mortgage then. That's right. And so it should be no surprise that we're in the situation we're in because it's, you know, basically housing supply has been capped for several decades now through a variety of measures, direct and indirect, and demand keeps going up due to the natural increase in the population to immigration, the influx of, you know, people who want to buy vacation homes and so forth. And as a result, you know, the price goes up. Demand goes up, supply is capped, price goes up. That's economics 101. It is, exactly. It is to be expected. And it's actually very disappointing every quarter when I hear once again, oh, housing prices went up another some percentage every quarter. That's right. It just makes it harder and harder for anybody, whether you have a degree or not, whether you're a lawyer or not, it makes it harder and harder. Absolutely. Just to get by, I mean, yes, I absolutely agree. Housing is the first most expensive thing. But then you have issues like daycare. You have issues like education. Okay, public school is one, but not all public schools are equal. And they certainly are not equal to private schools. That's a whole separate topic. But as we're talking about going through the issues and concerns, housing is first. It follows other things. So, okay, so we have our housing first plan. Okay. What, can you tell us what are your thoughts about the housing first plan? What have you, because some of that started and there's been a huge conversation starting from city council that you're probably, you were probably involved in and now into the Senate. As far as housing first is concerned, what is your take on housing first? I can certainly give some thoughts of my own to like hear what your thoughts are with our housing first plan. Yeah. So, well, housing first is a strategy designed to combat homelessness, which is, you know, knocking on all those 16,000 doors. There were not a dozen issues. There were not five issues. There were not three issues. There was one issue that people cared about and it was homelessness. And so, you know, just a side note. I often think to myself, if other elected officials had to subject themselves every day, day in and day out to dozens, if not hundreds of people just, you know, getting on your case about homelessness, I also feel like, you know, it wouldn't just be one of many priorities in the state. It would be the top priority in the state. And so back to housing first, it's a national best practice. It's a way of combating homelessness by basically giving homeless people housing, you know, no questions asked, no rules and so forth. So that the people who are most vulnerable, the people who are often called the dual diagnosis people, those with both substance issues as well as mental health issues, that they can be brought off the street and into a stable place to live as quickly as possible. And the studies show that reduces the, you know, substance consumption that also dramatically reduces the amount of medical ER usage. Because there are people in Hawaii, the single highest user of emergency medical services in Hawaii is a homeless gentleman who used something like $1.2 million worth of emergency services in just one year of all of our tax dollars. And $1.2 million, we could have bought him a really nice house at that point. So it's designed to save everybody, everybody wins with housing first, you know, the homeless person gets off the street, their mental health and substance issues are ameliorated. The taxpayer wins because it's much cheaper to offer this place to live than it is to treat them through the emergency system. And all of us get the advantage of a community that does not have as much homelessness. Yeah, and that's one of the, one of the things. Now, sorry if it seemed like I sort of jumped into two different areas, but housing and homelessness are very much, I guess you cannot extract one from the other. Yes, we have a huge problem depending upon who you talk to is how many homeless people we have in any given moment in time in a year. Homelessness is an issue, but part of the reason homelessness is an issue is the number of people who are homeless and why they're homeless. We recently, at my neighborhood board, we had Mark Alexander come and give us some thoughts on the housing first program as well, saying that looking good that we're on track is what he thinks. Okay, well, being on track and but looking at the statistics, we're seeing that there actually are more homeless people. They're just being moved around. That's right. So what I want to better understand from the perspective of things cost too much, there aren't enough people, there's not enough housing for all of the people, the housing that is there costs too much. We have people who have jobs but don't earn enough money to have a house, who have jobs but have been out of a house for so long no one will rent them a house. We have situations and yet and the numbers are the statistics show that we have an increased number, but we're on track. I want to better understand that. I don't imagine for a minute you have all the answers on this, but we need to start finding some solutions for this. And one of the things that whether it's my neighborhood board or whether it's me walking through my community and talking with my neighbors, it also comes up, but the issue that comes up is not so much that, yeah, I want to make sure that these people have a better life. It's I don't want to see these people. I don't have to see these people when I drive to work every day. I don't want to have to fear that they're going to steal something from me or my neighbor. That seems to be a concern more so. And I guess coming from a political perspective, whatever it is that drives enough of a, I guess, political base to say, yes, we are going to make this happen. Okay, fine. We can move something forward, but we have to take a quick break. And when we come back, I want to see if we can dig into that a bit more and see what we can try to understand more about what's happening and what initiatives we might be able to take going forward. And anything I can do to ever help. But anyway, again, thank you. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for coming to the show. Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers of Politics in Hawaii series. Thanks again, my guest, Senator Stanley Chang. We'll be back in one minute where we're going to talk more about housing homelessness. Thank you. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Freedom. Is it a feeling? Is it a place? Is it an idea? At Dive Heart, we believe freedom is all of these and more regardless of your ability. Dive Heart wants to help you escape the bonds of this world and defy gravity. Since 2001, Dive Heart has helped children, adults and veterans of all abilities go where they have never gone before. Dive Heart has helped them transition to their new normal. Search DiveHeart.org and share our mission with others and in the process help people of all abilities imagine the possibilities in there. Welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers Politics in Hawaii series. I'm joined today by my guest, Senator Stanley Chang. We're talking about housing and homelessness here in Hawaii. It's a big issue, a big concern. Thank you again for joining us. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me. So, okay, digging in a bit. As far as housing and homelessness, you'd mentioned many of the factors that we've got. We've got non-local investors that come in and whether they're coming in to buy some, I guess, vacation home or some rental property through the REIT program or some other means. They're coming in someone who's not local buying housing way above and help driving up the cost. Number one. Number two, we've got low wages here compared to what the costs of living are being housing, primarily being what that is because it just continues to go up. We have a housing first initiative to try to address homelessness. We have high rises being built from Kakaako outward trying to make sure that we have more housing in more areas. Well, I think there's disconnect in some of that as far as how we get some of these people who are looking for a house into some of these homes and so forth. I guess I want to dig in more and I want to find out from where we are, from what you've heard, from your session in Senate and from the halls of that building that's behind me, what are some initiatives that we might be able to take going forward? One of the thoughts I had and I'll get your thought on this because I don't want to give you a big open ended question. One of the thoughts I had was what about a rent control? What about creating a housing program that is rent controlled? Is that something that has been part of the discussion? Can it be part of the discussion? You touched on a huge variety of different issues. Which then I tried to narrow it into one thought and we'll go from there. But we have a housing crisis and so should we look at programs like rent control? I think we should look at everything because we are not in a position to rule anything out at this point. We have the highest cost of housing in the country. We have the highest percentage of renters versus owners in the country. We have the lowest percentage of owners in the country. Especially local owners. That's right. So it's very important that we are not allowing rent increases to result in increased homelessness. But that is just one facet of a very, very broad, you know, a very, very broad set of measures that I think we should look at. First of all and most basically we do need to increase the housing supply. We just do. And how do we do that? It's not just building more high rises. It's how do we create more public private partnerships or how do we work more with OHA or DHHL to try to say, okay, there's land and we don't want to respect the land, but we also want to make sure there's more housing opportunity. Can we do that? What are the thoughts? I just want to know what is being talked about? What can we do? Yeah. Well, you answered your own question, Carl. We do need way more high density growth here on Oahu. I was in Atlanta recently. I looked down from a tall building and as far as I could see, it was just forest. And I was like, wow, are there homes down there or is it just forest? And no, they told me, no, no, they're homes, but the lots are half an acre, three quarters of an acre, one acre. And there's so many, you know, relatively small houses on huge lots. I don't think that should be the model for Hawaii. We should not have more urban sprawl just across the landscape, taking up all of our agricultural, all of our conservation land. That is the least sustainable way that any society has ever learned how to live. And that's why we do need more high density, smart growth around transit corridors. That's what all the major cities of the world do. And we should talk about ways that we can facilitate that. Now, it's not easy because, well, for a number of different reasons. But that is, I think, the only realistic solution to getting the number of housing units we need at, you know, an environmentally sustainable manner. I know I agree with that. And I think that that brings it around to that's the whole purpose or one of perhaps the primary purposes of the rail. Right. And it's one of the pieces that we don't really hear a whole lot. People talk about, oh, TOD, TOD, okay. What does TOD mean? It means transit, transit-oriented development. Now, what does that mean? That means, as we get to a rail station, and correct me wherever I'm wrong here, but as we get to a rail station, what you're going to end up having is businesses and housing that's around it because that's what helps make it more convenient to utilize that station. Now, where we're putting at the moment where we have all of these 21 stations currently lined out, many of them are currently in the middle of nowhere, currently in the middle of a field. Maybe it used to be some ag field and it isn't being used by that anymore, or maybe it still is. But that's the purpose. That's one of the purposes. So I guess that's coming back around to the idea of, okay, how do we help address this problem? Now, when we talk about when Mark Alexander, or when anybody else talks about, well, we're on a path to create this housing, is that what is really being considered? Or is that additional? Is that transit-oriented development part of what the plan is today? Or is that, well, we're not going to have that for 15 years. So we're trying to do stuff the next five years and that'll be additional. Yeah, I think these are going to be more long-term initiatives. Transit-oriented development is a 20, 50, even 100-year time horizon that we're looking at here. So these are not quick fixes. Some of those empty fields that you're talking about would be where Ho'opili would be created, for instance. I'm not saying that Ho'opili is a good project or a bad project, but it has been tied up in court. It's taken, I think, 20 or 30 years to bring even to this stage, which is still a ways out from the actual people moving in. And it is not marketed towards mainland investors or outside investors. It is marketed towards local families. So that's an example of how difficult it is to build anything anywhere. And so I would have liked to see that Ho'opili would be higher density to get that mix of businesses, shops, housing all within walking distance of a transit center so that you don't need a car at all or a two-car family can go down to a one-car family. That's been a very successful model in virtually all of the major cities of the world. And at this point, I don't think we have the option to continue to do the one person in one car down a long, congested highway. But you only have one road in that or maybe two roads in that. Exactly. That's not a sustainable model of future growth. And that's all it goes back to. There wasn't a grand plan originally. It's just been how growth and development naturally and organically happens. All of a sudden, things build up. There was a time that Kalihi was on the outskirts of town, was far away. The reason they put OCCC out there was way out there. Nobody lived out there. Well, that's clearly not true anymore. So as this unplanned organic growth happens, how do we address it? Well, I think we do need more planning. And Kapolei is actually a good example of that because Kapolei was planned. And Kapolei was unfortunately planned for that model of the one person and the one automobile. And that I think will be the last sort of example of that in Hawaii because it is so unsustainable. And Kapolei is so unfriendly for walking as a result. It's not a vibrant, highly dense community with a lot of options for transit the way that we would like our future communities to be. Right. The train now is going to start out there. And hopefully that will facilitate that process. Yeah. So that's what we need in the future in Hawaii. And it's not a quick fix. And so when we are looking at the quick fixes, we are looking at, the legislature has put a lot of resources behind low-income and workforce housing, bonds, and so forth, designed to expand the supply. And those are all great initiatives. We definitely need more of that. But, you know, even those are not quick fixes because to build anything in Hawaii is, you know, a year's long time frame, not a month's or even like a couple of years. I mean, we're talking several years. Yeah. And so is there any quick fix? I mean, frankly, not really, you know? Quick fixes are always problematic anyway. I don't think that, I don't think, I think we need a combination of short-term and long-term. Having a short-term process that can help, I guess, some of the challenges, but having it all build toward the longer-term goal. And that's one of the things that I think that as the public, we're hoping that that's what our legislators are doing and our planners are doing and all of our agencies are trying to work together towards, by the way, we're recognizing that the population is growing. We're recognizing these challenges. So we're trying to address that for the future and down the road. And it seems like it is, but it always seems a little disconnected. And it's always fine to have political differences of opinion. But sometimes that those differences of opinion impact the people negatively. And I know that we have less of a problem in some ways here, but I won't go into that too much. But okay, so housing is being worked on. There's issues. There are planning is going on. Is the planning happening? Can you, from what you have seen, whether it's city and county or from the legislature side, is there planning happening such that people can start to understand and begin, and when will we begin to really see it more than high-rises? Because that's what everyone sees is high-rises, high-rises, high-rises that I can't afford anyway. I'm not moving my family into that. But when can we begin to see, and these are the problems, and some of this I'm just, I'm handing to you saying, please look into this. Please consider this. Please come back and let us know what is happening and what we can begin to expect to see and when we can begin to expect to see some changes in that line. Yeah. And the short answer is these are all very long-term horizons. The truth is there have been a lot of construction cranes that are very visible. There are high-rises being built, but there are fewer new housing units being constructed or even permitted at this time than any time since World War II. If you look at one of those new buildings, you might see 500 units. Hawaii Kai, you know, we're talking 10,000 units. But my problem with that is, and I'm sorry, I don't mean to interrupt my problem with that, is we see that and we all know that it's three to six hundred thousand dollars and someone making minimum wage here can't afford that and will never be able to afford that. And that's the gap that we need to fix. So we are unfortunately out of time. So thank you for joining us. This is Tink Tech Hawaii's Movershakers Reformer, Politics and Hawaii Series. I'm your host, Carl Campania. We have Senator Stanley Chang with us. As we go out, we have the rail issue coming up in the next week or so. There's going to be potentially a special session. I don't know if there's going to be a special session. It's talked about. We've had informational hearings. Can you lead us out with, I don't know, your take, your impression, or some thoughts on the rail? Yeah. Well, we're in a tough spot. There are a lot of hard questions that are going to have to be asked. There's clearly a lot of accountability that needs to be there that's not there right now. But at the same time, I haven't heard anyone say we should just abandon the project, tear down what's already been built, and start, you know, I guess from ground zero again. So I am committed and I think I hope our colleagues are also committed to bringing this project to a successful completion in the most cost-effective manner possible. Yes. Thank you. You brought that all in. So thank you. Appreciate that. And thank you for coming on the show. Appreciate it. You're welcome to come back really anytime. Let's talk about other issues. Let's dig in as much as we can. So again, thank you. And thank you for joining us. We'll see you next week when we're going to talk about our parole system next week. So see you then.