Now that Honolulu’s insanely expensive, low-capacity rail line is under construction (and over budget), Oahu land-use advocates are upset that the city wants to rezone 1,289 acres of farms for residential development. At least some members of the city council claim to have been shocked to learn that just 17 percent of the island is still suitable for farming while 27 percent has been urbanized.
Sadly, efforts to protect farmlands in Hawai’i are something of a joke considering that Hawai’i’s land-use laws–the strictest in the nation–were supposedly passed to protect farmlands and yet in fact are responsible for destroying Hawai’i’s agricultural industry. The land-use laws made Hawai’ian housing so unaffordable that farmers can’t pay workers enough for them to be able to live there. As a result, the state has lost most of its pineapple, sugar cane, and other crop production to other Pacific islands such as Fiji.
Comparing a map of Oahu land-use designations with the route of the rail line reveals that the rail line will cross only a few tiny areas of land zoned for farming. In fact, a lot of the land around Kapolei that is zoned urban hasn’t yet been developed and could still be used for farming, but why bother if you can’t afford to grow crops?
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At the same time, building homes on 1,289 acres isn’t going to have much impact on housing affordability. What Hawai’i really needs to do is rezone a lot of the “conservation” land for housing. Most of this land is simply hills that are considered too steep for farming, but–judging from the number of homes build in the hills above downtown Honolulu–would be eminently suited for housing.
The Census Bureau says the population density of urban Honolulu is about 4,300 people per square mile. As the Antiplanner has noted before, almost all urban areas with densities lower than 3,000 people per square mile have affordable housing markets. Increasing the area of development from its current 27 percent to about 43 percent would make Oahu once again affordable.
This isn’t likely to happen because, regardless of what officials say, their real goal isn’t to make housing affordable or improve transportation. Instead, as shown in the book, Land and Power in Hawaii, it is to get campaign contributions and other rewards from developers of the few areas that the state opens to development. If one-sixth of the island were suddenly made available for development, developers would no longer have a reason to offer financial support to elected officials. So don’t count on Oahu becoming affordable any time soon or on officials saving farm land at the expense of stopping developments along the rail line.
Recent reports indicate that the Chinese and various Hawaiian groups are getting together to take over Hawaii.
In return for reasonable compensation (like waiving a few trillion of US bonded debt), I say let them do it.
Then the land-use people and developers and train builders can deal with a government with a lot of experience in resolving such problems.
That’s OK, corrupt contractors get their gigantic, useless boondoggle to keep them busy for the next couple years, politicians get their union payoffs, people like msetty get payoffs for shilling for this boondoggle, planners get to gloat and jerk off to their new fantasy choo choo train.
What’s not to cheer about in la-la land?
There may be some other aspects I’m missing, but it seems like to claim that the land use policies drove up housing costs which lead to farmers unable to find the workers along with farm industry output that they need we should be able to chart that fairly easy. We just need land prices over time along with farm industry workers over time. Do we have that?
Of course we’d have to control over the drop in workers due to productivity gains in the sector. Total output would help us account for that. I’m just not sure how much this is to blame versus bad immigration / foreign worker policy vs different employment.
I think we should also take into account the history of farming in Hawaii and productivity of the land. We should assume just because they’re tropical islands that they’re just as good at growing bananas as Fiji. And a large part of the agriculture sector was sugar which lead to large plantations and large, low-skilled, low-paid work forces that had a lot of hot, dirty work to do.
I would also be curious how the Jones Act may be negatively affecting the farming industry in Hawaii by driving up shipping costs. Even if they’re just as good at growing bananas as Fiji, the cost of transporting them to US markets is going to be much higher than even a further trip like Fiji.