At the latest count, 93 people died in the Maui fire that also burned most of the town of Lahaina. The blame for this fire can be traced directly to Hawaii’s 62-year-old land-use law, which was written to protect Hawaii’s agricultural industry but had the opposite result.
The land-use law divided the state into urban and rural zones and heavily restricted development of the rural areas. As the state’s population grew, Maui’s median home prices rose from about 3 times median family incomes in 1969 to 7.9 times median family incomes in 2021. Any prices above 5 times median incomes are unaffordable since banks won’t approve a mortgage for a home that costs that much more than a family’s income.
The stated goal of the land-use law was to protect Hawaii’s agricultural industry from urban sprawl. But high housing prices made it impossible for Hawaiian farmers to hire the help they needed as people earning farmworker pay couldn’t afford to live in Hawaii. As a result, most Hawaiian farms went out of business. Between 1982 and 2017, according to USDA’s 2017 Natural Resources Inventory, the number of acres in Hawaiian crop production declined by 72 percent as sugar cane, pineapple, and other crops moved to other tropical countries that didn’t have self-inflicted housing crises.
Hawaiian native vegetation is fairly fire resistant. Farm crops are also fire resistant, partly because farmers burned their fields every year or so. But when the farms were abandoned, the vegetation that replaced them wasn’t native vegetation but invasive grasses. These non-native grasses had been introduced as cattle feed when farming was still active, and when the farms went out of business, they took over the former crop and pasture lands.
The above video also blames the fire on drought and winds. But drought and winds have been a fact of life in Hawaii for centuries. What’s new is the hundreds of thousands of acres of rural lands that were once resistant to fires but now are highly flammable.
Many press reports point to the non-native grasses in ex-farms as the problem — but they don’t go the next step and ask why the farms shut down in the first place, allowing the non-native grasses to take over. This was solely because of the land-use law that was supposed to save the farms.
Once the land-use law was written, it became impossible to change it even when some people realized that it was killing, rather than saving, the agricultural industry. Too many people benefited from the law, whether it was property owners in the cities who saw the values of their land skyrocket or people who considered themselves environmentalists who were convinced that sprawl was evil and open space should be protected at any cost. Just as a U.S. Army officer supposedly once said in Viet Nam, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,” many Hawaiian environmentalists still believe they had to destroy Hawaii’s farms in order to save them.
Since the media rarely, if ever, pointed out that the land-use law was the reason why farms were going out of business, people persuaded themselves that other factors were at work. If Hawaiians knew that the reason Lahaina was destroyed and at least 93 people are dead was the land-use law that backfired, would they demand changes to the law? Repealing that state law (and subsequent amendments) and repealing the federal Jones Act (that makes shipping from the mainland U.S. to Hawaii inordinately expensive) are the two most important things the state and nation can do to help Maui recover and prevent such disasters in the future.
Land use laws aside, Hawaii had no incentive to restore native vegetation that would have went up anyway.
Farming is difficult because Hawaii doesn’t have a “Mexico” to import cheap labor and even if they imported say Filipinos to do it with little recourse to house them; would fail.
Where did the invasive grasses come from?
For record Macadamia nuts, Pineapples and Chocolate are not indigenous to Hawaii either, they too would have burned. The fire was caused by a wind swept downed power line. Combined with hilly terrain it’s difficult to get fire fighting equipment up there to battle it.
Despite Hawaii reputation as a tropical paradise, Hawaii occupies more subtropical regions and almost 1/3 of the state is desert or xeric. Only coasts are “rainforest” or routinely wet and rest is monsoon seasonal with periodic dry seasons. Its hard to farm seasonal dry regions without Irrigation which Maui doesn’t have much of.
On a similar note, it would be interesting to see the overall effect of land use laws on rural populations and their respective industries. If you look at county-level census data many rural areas are depopulating even in in-demand states like Oregon, Washington, or California. My guess is that the elite-driven pastoral view of what the countryside should look like did not work well for those who live there and don’t have massive wealth to support them.
It’s a shame that urban planners never consider the common-sense measures that would prevent these kind of tragedies: widening every road on the island to eight lanes in each direction and paving over the rest into parking lots.
Reductio ad absurdum.
You resorted to that because you can’t think of an any valid criticisms of the writer’s points.