• Kaua‘i’s lack of affordable housing Kaua‘i’s lack of affordable housing The good news for Kaua‘i’s people is that our island is one of the most desired places to live in the world. The bad news is that we are
• Kaua‘i’s lack of affordable housing
Kaua‘i’s lack of affordable housing
The good news for Kaua‘i’s people is that our island is one of the most desired places to live in the world.
The bad news is that we are facing social problems that Aspen, Malibu, Nantucket, Carmel and other favored areas have been facing for years.
The main problem is lack of affordable housing. From this problem drips down a wealth of social problems.
Just about any piece of real estate on Kaua‘i – from beachfront homes to the tiniest tract house – is wanted by someone who is willing to pay a lot more than an average worker can afford to pay each month in paying off a mortgage, even with record low interest rates. What would be called a beginner home, or a fixer upper, in a normal real estate market, is going for $300,000 and up.
Some say that property values on Kaua‘i are finally catching up to where they should be after two decades of being held back by recoveries from two major hurricanes. Others compare the cost of real estate on Kaua’i to areas of coastal California and say our real estate is a bargain, which it apparently is to those with money who are shifting their wealth from a weak stock market to real estate.
Market forces are realities, and ones we need to face. We live in a free society, not a socialist one, and the value of ones possessions should be fairly determined. Many families on Kaua‘i are being rewarded by this rise in property values following decades of work to pay off a home, they now have a very valuable asset.
The problem is that on an island one can’t easily commute to work from an area where home prices are lower. If you want to work on Kaua‘i, you need to pay the price. The other side of the coin is the arrival of executives and business owners who are using the Internet and occasional Mainland or foreign trips to run businesses located elsewhere; this wave of digital technology is changing the face of work across the globe.
The social problems due to a lack of affordable housing are well known: Families living together in tight conditions to make ends meet; the abuse of drugs and alcohol due to hopelessness about a future where a 40-hour-week service industry job won’t pay most rent bills, let alone payments on a house; the churn from the dislocation of Native Hawaiian and other long-time residents to Las Vegas and other Mainland cities, which in turn is ending long standing cultural traditions, possibly for good; a widening gap between the haves and the have nots due to the influx of those who can afford luxury living, which in turn has driven up the costs of real estate.
Though it’s easy to look back and say government should have planned for this change, we instead need to look forward as the Contractors Association of Kauai is doing and say what can we do?
Reform and streamlining of the county permitting and planning process is needed, and suggestions were made at the CAK meeting last week on how to do just that. The cost of developing land here is so high that even organizations like Habitat for Humanity, which builds homes at a very low cost, can’t afford to develop much-needed affordable housing at the level that’s really needed. Private companies are weary of building affordable housing, and with the market the way it is who can blame them when they target more affluent buyers with aims at making up for the lost years following Hurricane ‘Iniki.
If the lack of affordable housing is allowed to continue, we can foresee a much different Kaua‘i than the one we’ve known, and a cost to society, and government, in paying for the end product of the social problems the mainstream of people on Kaua‘i are going through, and will be going through. Prevention is much cheaper than a cure.
