SUMMARY
Below is a compilation of newspaper articles that clearly display a propaganda blitzkrieg by the monopoly newspaper in Honolulu in collaboration with Pro-Publica, a leftwing online-only fake-news agency. The first salvo was a "news" report providing a twisted version of Hawaiian history designed to portray ethnic Hawaiians as poor, downtrodden victims of American imperialist oppression. According to this viewpoint, expressed in that first fake-news report and bolstered through repetition in later newspaper articles, America owes reparations to "Native Hawaiians" for the theft of "their" land resulting from an alleged American invasion which allegedly sealed the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and its subsequent annexation by the United States. America repented by establishing the Hawaiian Homelands in 1920-21 [and also apologizing to Native Hawaiians in 1993]. But although the Homelands make it theoretically possible for native Hawaiians (at least 50% native blood) to get a land lease for one dollar per year for a home or farm, relatively few leases have actually been granted and there's a long waiting list. A series of newspaper articles repeatedly recount this sad history, insisting that the people of Hawaii [not the U.S.!] owe it to native Hawaiians to fulfill the promise. The articles push the concept of passing legislation allowing a gambling casino on the Homelands to generate revenue to create roads and utilities enabling homes to be built. It's clear in hindsight that the series of articles was carefully planned in advance as propaganda for a plan that was kept hidden from the public and even from the Homelands commissioners. The casino proposal became visible only in a small detail of an agenda published a few days before a meeting where the proposal would be voted on; and the full text of the proposed legislation was given to the commissioners only one day before the vote -- all this turmoil happened a month after the first newspaper article was published that was filled with twisted history. Newspaper editors obviously knew about what was going to be proposed, but kept it hidden while "softening up" public opinion with stories of oppression, victimhood, lack of money, and promises unfulfilled for decades. The casino plan was intentionally kept secret and revealed to commissioners and the public only a day or two before a decision was needed, so that there would be great pressure to hurry up without time to think it over or consult the beneficiaries -- a typical tactic used by scammers and high-pressure salesmen. It's a secret who created the proposal and coordinated the propaganda -- probably some combination of OHA, Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement, Kamehameha Schools policy center, DHHL officials (and years ago would have been Senator Inouye). Some of the articles make clear that DHHL self-sufficiency is an element of self-determination and therefore political sovereignty for a Hawaiian tribe or nation (which Senators Schatz and Hirono, and Representatives Kahele and Case, will undoubtedly be pushing in Congress and the Department of Interior).
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Here is an internal search engine allowing you to find all pages on this website which discuss the topic you're interested in. There are more than a thousand webpages on this website. To avoid getting a list of many dozens or hundreds, choose a small number of narrowly tailored keywords to put into the search window. There are no footnotes or clickable links on this particular webpage because there are a very large number of terms which you might want to research, so instead of causing distraction by making links for them, use this internal search window to find all relevant webpages on this website. For example, 43CFR50 is a regulation enacted into law by unilateral proclamation by the Department of Interior through publication in the Federal Register -- very few people know about it, but it is just as important as the well-known Akaka bill as a way to create a Hawaiian tribe and get federal recognition for it. So if you see 43CFR50 mentioned and want to know what it is, simply copy/paste that item into the little search window and hit "enter."
TABLE OF CONTENTS (Scroll down to find these sections in the order listed)
1. HOW THE NEWSPAPER BLITZKRIEG UNFOLDED
2. BRIEF REVIEW OF HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: HAWAIIAN HOMELANDS; AKAKA BILL; DEPT OF INTERIOR REGULATION 43CFR50; PROCESS WHEREBY A GROUP OF UNELECTED DELEGATES WROTE A CONSTITUTION FOR A HAWAIIAN TRIBE OR NATION; PRESIDENT BIDEN APPOINTS INDIAN AS SECRETARY OF INTERIOR WHICH DOVETAILS WITH HAWAIIAN SOVEREIGNTY ZEALOTRY BY HAWAII CONGRESSIONAL DELEGATION; HONOLULU NEWSPAPER HAS PUSHED HAWAIIAN SOVEREIGNTY FOR 30 YEARS.
3. SOME INFORMATION SHOWING THE EXTREME HAWAIIAN SOVEREIGNTY ZEALOTRY OF U.S. SENATOR BRIAN SCHATZ, CONGRESSMAN-ELECT KAI KAHELE; AND THE NATURE OF PRO-PUBLICA AS A FAR-LEFT PROPAGANDA "NEWSROOM"
4. EXCERPTS FROM NEWSPAPER AND TV ARTICLES (verbatim quotes):
5. FULL TEXT OF ARTICLES EXCERPTED ABOVE
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1. HOW THE NEWSPAPER BLITZKRIEG UNFOLDED
On Saturday October 24, 2020 a very lengthy and strange article was published in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser about the troubles of the Department of Hawaiian Homelands (DHHL) in its century-long struggle to provide leasehold land, at rent of one dollar per year, for native Hawaiians (at least 50% native blood quantum required) to build a house or operate an agriculture business. DHHL is Hawaii's state government agency established to fulfill the terms of the U.S. government's Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920 that was incorporated into Hawaii's laws as part of the Statehood Act of 1959.
It turned out that this article was merely setting the stage for a blitzkrieg propaganda campaign a month later to push a proposal to build a gambling casino on DHHL land in Kapolei. The October 24 article might be compared to a bombing attack to soften up the enemy before launching a full-scale invasion -- reminiscent of the "shock and awe" bombing of Baghdad on March 21, 2003 (1700 bomber runs and 500 cruise missiles) ahead of a ground invasion from Kuwait leading to troops seizing the city on April 5 and declaration of victory on April 14.
One of the things that made the October 24 article weird was that the pro-Hawaiian-sovereignty twisted history described by primary author Rob Perez was opposite to his debunking of the "Perfect Title" scam by con artist Keanu Sai in a series of news reports in 1997-1998 Honolulu Star-Bulletin and a later report about the sale of a new issue of Hawaiian Kingdom bonds.
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/fraudperfecttitle.html
Another thing that made the October 24 article weird was that is was co-authored by a "reporter" from Pro-Publica, a leftwing non-profit donation-funded so-called "newsroom" which produces propaganda fake-news reports to help leftwing reporters on the staffs of numerous seemingly respectable newspapers throughout America. George Soros is among the funders of Pro-Publica through his "Open Society" foundation. Very few people in Hawaii know about Pro-Publica's political agenda; most readers probably assume it's a public-interest investigative news agency and that its name as co-author of a news report by local esteemed investigative reporter Rob Perez simply adds to the credibility of what's written.
Honolulu Star-Advertiser has fallen on hard times in recent years, with several waves of layoffs of reporters and production staff, and complete elimination of the Saturday print edition. The newspaper appears to have increased the number of opinion commentaries authored by readers who, of course, do not get paid by the newspaper for the content they provide. Perhaps the new partnership with Pro-Publica might include paying part of Rob Perez' salary, or providing Pro-Publica content to Star-Advertiser at no cost. The increasingly leftwing orientation of Star-Advertiser is clear from the huge number of fake-news articles about President Trump by the formerly respectable Associated Press, with ridiculous attention-grabbing headlines written by local editors.
Another thing that made the October 24 article weird was that it was published on a Saturday when there is no printed version of the newspaper, so this very lengthy major article appeared only online where it could be read only by fee-paying subscribers. Then it was also included in the print edition on Sunday, but not online. That same pattern was repeated for the next big article jointly by Rob Perez and Pro-Publica on December 19-20, setting off a blitz of several days of propaganda -- a gift to the tycoons of the Hawaii victimhood grievance industry just when Santa was loading up his sleigh with gifts for the ordinary folks.
One technique used by scammers and high-pressure salesmen is to tell you that you must act now, immediately, because if you wait to think about it you will lose the opportunity. That technique is on display in the way the casino proposal was managed, as can be seen in several of the newspaper articles compiled below -- see especially items 6,8,9. The first article on October 24, written jointly by Rob Perez and Pro-Publica, had the primary purpose of making Hawaii's people feel guilty for failure to deliver long-promised land leases to native Hawaiians as reparations for historic grievances. The authors obviously knew that a proposal for a casino on the Hawaiian Homelands would be made public sometime soon, and that they would be writing a series of articles propagandizing for it; but there was no mention of a casino. It was nearly a full month later when, all of a sudden, Homeland commissioners and the public found out that the casino would be on the agenda of a meeting to be held a couple days later, and the commissioners would be forced to decide whether to support the proposal. Hurry up! Text of the bill to be introduced in the legislature was given to the commissioners only one day before they had to vote on whether to approve it to be sent to the Governor for him to include in his package of bills for the legislative session that will begin in mid-January. Hurry up! Supporters of the proposal warned the commissioners that if you don't act right away you will lose the opportunity because if you wait a year for the next session of the legislature then mainland casino operators will have time to spend megabucks to lobby the legislature to keep their monopoly on casinos, so hurry up! Puppet-masters behind the scenes clearly knew about the casino proposal before the October 24 newspaper article, and probably had already written the bill they want the Governor to introduce; but they kept it all secret precisely to put huge pressure on the commissioners at the last minute to hurry up and make a decision without time to study the issues and without time to consult the beneficiaries. This is how scammers operate. Did Rob Perez and Pro-Publica know about the casino proposal at least a month ahead of time? Or did they simply obey orders to write a fake-news article lamenting historical grievances and the long delays in carrying out the leasing of land under the 1920 Hawaiian homes Commission Act? We will never know what they knew and when they knew it, unless they tell us (at risk of losing their jobs).
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2. BRIEF REVIEW OF HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: HAWAIIAN HOMELANDS; AKAKA BILL; DEPT OF INTERIOR REGULATION 43CFR50; PROCESS WHEREBY A GROUP OF UNELECTED DELEGATES WROTE A CONSTITUTION FOR A HAWAIIAN TRIBE OR NATION; PRESIDENT BIDEN APPOINTS INDIAN AS SECRETARY OF INTERIOR WHICH DOVETAILS WITH HAWAIIAN SOVEREIGNTY ZEALOTRY BY HAWAII CONGRESSIONAL DELEGATION; HONOLULU NEWSPAPER HAS PUSHED HAWAIIAN SOVEREIGNTY FOR 30 YEARS.
From October through December, 2020 there have been a series of political events and news reports that can be seen as elements of an underlying agenda related to establishing a Hawaiian tribe. A massive public relations campaign has been underway for several months to arouse public sympathy for the "theft" or "loss" of the Kingdom of Hawaii's government lands and crown lands following the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893 and annexation of Hawaii to the U.S. in 1898. Part of that campaign has been to emphasize the extremely slow process whereby "native Hawaiians" receive leases for the "Hawaiian Homelands" established under the U.S. Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920. Another part of the campaign has been to build public sympathy by emphasizing that the State of Hawaii Department of Hawaiian Homelands has very little money to develop roads and utilities to enable leases to be granted for beneficiaries to build houses. Another part of the campaign has been to update and push a proposal from 10-20 years ago to allow DHHL to build a gambling casino on its lands as a way to generate billions of dollars in revenue -- a federally recognized Hawaiian tribe could do that much more easily than a branch of a state government in a state where all forms of gambling are prohibited by law.
During the period 2000-2012 the Akaka bill was continuously active in Congress, whereby a Hawaiian tribe would be created and given federal recognition as a sovereign political entity thereby allowing the tribe to establish a casino on its tribal lands (i.e., DHHL and other lands that could be purchased or donated to it). The Akaka bill passed the U.S. House on three occasions, but always failed in the Senate due to Republican "holds" and filibusters. In December 2012 Senator Inouye died and Senator Akaka retired; and since then there has been no legislation in Congress to establish a Hawaiian tribe. However, the Obama administration Department of Interior spent the years 2013-2016 writing a "regulation" providing a pathway for a Hawaiian tribe to be created and receive federal recognition. A draft of the regulation was published, comments from the public were accepted, the draft was revised, more comments were accepted, etc., ending with enactment of 43CFR50 into law through unilateral proclamation in the Federal Register on October 14, 2016, during the final 3 months of Obama's Presidency. The November 2016 election of President Donald Trump, a Republican, caused Hawaiian tribalists to temporarily stop efforts at the federal level while they tried to hold an election of delegates to write a tribal constitution, paid for by OHA and a wholly-owned OHA subsidiary. But that racially exclusionary election was blocked by an injunction from the U.S. Supreme Court resulting from litigation filed by Judicial Watch in collaboration with the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii (Rice v. Cayetano, Supreme Court 2000, forbids racially exclusive elections sponsored by state government entities). OHA circumvented the Supreme Court injunction by vitiating the election of delegates and accepting all the candidates as though they had been elected; the group spent 4 weeks in February 2017 writing a race-based tribal constitution claiming sovereignty over all the lands and waters of Hawaii and also asserting the right to secede from the U.S. by making the entirety of Hawaii an independent nation under the rulership of ethnic Hawaiians.
Now that Democrat Joe Biden has defeated Trump in the election of 2020, and Biden has named an American Indian to be Secretary of Interior, it appears that efforts to create a Hawaiian tribe and get federal recognition for it will be re-invigorated. Action might occur either through implementation of the Dept. of Interior regulation 43CFR50 or through a new effort to pass an "Akaka bill" in Congress; or both. Hawaii Senators Schatz and Hirono are Democrats who have repeatedly trumpeted support for a Hawaiian tribe throughout their careers; and Schatz sits on the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. Hawaii has two representatives in the House, both Democrat. Ed Case was a Congressman pushing the Akaka bill very hard during his previous terms in the House, and now serves on the House committee which has jurisdiction over the Department of Interior and is a member of the subcommittee which oversees legislation related to Indian tribes. Newly elected Kai Kahele, a "Native Hawaiian" has already announced his intention to push federally funded racial entitlement programs and to support tribal legislation. As examples of his race-activism, even during November-December 2020 while in Washington for orientation before being sworn in, Kahele visited the statue of Kamehameha in the Capitol where he gave a highly publicized prayer and chant, he exchanged mutual congratulations through Twitter with DOI nominee Deb Haaland, and he published a tweet unequivocally asserting the total falsehood "In 1893 the Hawaiian language was banned for 100 years after the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom." (Hawaiian language was never banned, as we know from well-publicized ongoing projects digitizing Hawaiian language newspapers published continuously from 1836 to 1948); that assertion has been thoroughly debunked many times for many years and serves only to inflame race-hatred).
The Honolulu Star-Advertiser and both of its merged predecessors (Honolulu Advertiser and Honolulu Star-Bulletin) have consistently pushed during 30 years for creation of a Hawaiian tribe while also displaying support for Hawaiian independence and for racial entitlement programs by federal and state governments and private entities -- the newspaper does this by the way it chooses which news events to report, by the slanted writing of those reports, and by numerous explicit editorials. There are also "news reports" using statistical malpractice to portray ethnic Hawaiians as having the worst victimhood for just about every medical problem and social dysfunction. Such articles are intended to rouse public sympathy for allegedly poor, downtrodden "Native Hawaiians" and thereby to generate political support for racial entitlement programs and race-based political power. That agenda to celebrate victimhood lies behind the current public relations campaign focusing on the Hawaiian Homelands and a proposal to build a gambling casino.
From October through December 2020 there have been a series of political events and news reports that can be seen as elements of an underlying agenda related to establishing a Hawaiian tribe. The six dozen "Hawaiian Homelands" on several islands, administered by DHHL, would presumably be the nucleus of a tribal reservation. A casino would be a major source of income for building infrastructure and for funding to support political activity including propaganda, and election and appointment of "Native Hawaiians" to important state and local government positions.
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3. SOME INFORMATION SHOWING THE EXTREME HAWAIIAN SOVEREIGNTY ZEALOTRY OF U.S. SENATOR BRIAN SCHATZ, CONGRESSMAN-ELECT KAI KAHELE; AND THE NATURE OF PRO-PUBLICA AS A FAR-LEFT PROPAGANDA "NEWSROOM"
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Regarding Senator Schatz:
On June 11, 2013 Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D,NV) said "Mr. President, I would ask the Chair at this time to recognize the Senator from Hawaii, Mr. Schatz, who replaced Senator Inouye. I understand he is going to give his maiden speech in the Senate today." (Page S4071 of the Congressional Record). That speech was entirely focused on urging the Senate to support legislation for creating and recognizing a Hawaiian tribe even though there was no such legislation in the Senate after 2012.
See webpage "Rebuttal to maiden speech by U.S. Senator Brian Schatz (D,HI) on June 11, 2013 pleading for federal recognition for a phony Akaka tribe" at
https://www.angelfire.com/big09/AkakaSchatzMaiden061113.html
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Regarding Congressman-elect Kahele: who will serve in the 117th Congress: Evidence of his super-zealous asserting of his Hawaiian-ness in the Capitol building in November 2020, two months before he takes office in January 2021. It is clear that Kahele's main priority in Congress will be Hawaiian racial entitlements and Hawaiian sovereignty, possibly indicating he will be less interested in representing the genuine needs and wishes of the other 80% of the people in his district.
Kai Kahele's Facebook 11/13/20 at 7:45 PM:
"Was honored to be asked by the Speaker to say the prayer for this evening’s freshman pick up dinner in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol. I decided it was time for ‘ōlelo Hawai’i to resonate again in the halls of congress so I did the Pule Mea’ai [standard Hawaiian-language prayer at start of meal] & Ho’onani. [Hawaiian-language 4-line "Doxology" Praise God from whom all blessings flow]"
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1228567990861663&id=100011254209175
Kai Kahele Facebook 2-minute video of himself conducting both prayers:
https://www.facebook.com/100011254209175/videos/pcb.1228567990861663/1228567420861720
Lyrics of the 2 prayers on Kahele's Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1228567614195034&set=pcb.1228567990861663
Kai Kahele Twitter comment with photo of himself in front of the Kamehameha statue in the Capitol: "Shared a quiet moment this morning with the only other native Hawaiian in Congress #imua"
https://twitter.com/kaikahele/status/1327323780797132800
November 27, 2020 Kai Kahele tweet of a total falsehood which has been thoroughly debunked many times, and serves only to stir up race-hatred:
"In 1893 the hawaiian language was banned for 100 years after the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. #NativeAmericanHeritageDay is an opportunity to not only celebrate our indigenous cultural heritage but the revitalization of our indigenous languages like ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi."
https://twitter.com/kaikahele/status/1332405823432126464
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Regarding Pro-Publica:
George Soros has given more than $32 billion of his personal fortune to fund the Open Society to influence news media regarding the stories they choose to report and the slanted leftwing bias in the way those stories are written.
Google as a single search item:
"George Soros" and "Open Society" and "Pro-Publica"
See the Pro-Publica website at
https://www.propublica.org
The "about" section says
"The Mission: To expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions, using the moral force of investigative journalism to spur reform through the sustained spotlighting of wrongdoing. ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force. We dig deep into important issues, shining a light on abuses of power and betrayals of public trust — and we stick with those issues as long as it takes to hold power to account."
On a typical day Wednesday December 23, a day when the Star-Advertiser/ProPublica blitzkrieg about Hawaiian Homelands and the Kapolei casino proposal was underway, here are some of the clickable featured "news report" headlines displayed on the front page of the Pro-Publica website:
Judges Are Locking Up Children for Noncriminal Offenses Like Repeatedly Disobeying Their Parents and Skipping School;
Inside Trump and Barr’s Last-Minute Killing Spree [Carrying out death sentences];
The Trump Administration Keeps Awarding Border Wall Contracts but Doesn’t Own the Land to Build On;
The Trump Administration’s Final Push to Make It Easier for Religious Employers to Discriminate: Last-minute policies on religious freedom clear the way for employers to hire on the basis of faith. Some of the changes won't be easy for Biden to undo.;
The Story Behind Jared Kushner’s Curious Acceptance Into Harvard
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4. EXCERPTS FROM NEWSPAPER AND TV ARTICLES (verbatim quotes):
Excerpts from news reports are listed first to display the pattern. Full text of each item is provided afterward, except for photographs and their captions. Articles written and published jointly with "Pro-Publica" [describes itself as "a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power"] are extremely lengthy, resulting in a need for lengthy excerpts.
(1)
Honolulu Star-Advertiser, jointly with Pro-Publica, Saturday October 24, 2020
To reclaim ancestral land, all Native Hawaiians need is a $300,000 mortgage and to wait in line for decades.
A 100-year-old program created to provide Native Hawaiians — especially poor ones — land to live on after the U.S. annexed the islands is failing. Thousands have died waiting in line and even more can’t afford the mortgages they’d need.
Today, Kamaile, 68, still doesn’t have a homestead. She’s about 3,500 applicants deep on a waitlist, 33 years after she first applied. She lives in a cramped rental apartment in a low-income housing project and serves as caregiver for a disabled family friend who lives with her. Kamaile’s mother died last year, 10 days shy of her 91st birthday.
Kamaile still regrets not being able to provide her with a homestead. “That was my one wish for her.”
...waitlist, now 23,000 people long, as Native Hawaiians struggle in one of the country’s most expensive housing markets.
In the meantime, more Hawaiians will continue to die waiting.
In 1893, the U.S. backed an illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, partly to protect U.S. sugar interests in the islands. A group representing U.S. and European sugar planters, financiers and missionary descendants, supported by U.S. naval forces, deposed the monarchy and proclaimed a provisional government. Five years later, the U.S. annexed the island chain, obtaining roughly 1.8 million acres of former kingdom land without compensating the Hawaiians. By then, the indigenous population was headed toward extinction as disease, poor living conditions and other factors contributed to their dwindling numbers. Many impoverished Hawaiians, who had been displaced from their lands, lived in slum-like tenements in urban Honolulu.
For turnkey houses, beneficiaries pay about half as much as they would for comparable homes off trust land. That’s because DHHL, not the buyer, covers land and infrastructure costs, builders say. In addition to the purchase price, beneficiaries pay only $1 annually for a land lease, which runs for 99 years.
Holding a lease comes with significant tax advantages. Homesteaders pay no property taxes for the first seven years following a lease award. After that, they still get a break, depending on location. On Oahu, homesteaders pay $300 annually, regardless of the value of the residence, potentially saving thousands of dollars a year.
DHHL says it offers a variety of programs aimed at helping low-income beneficiaries become homesteaders. The services range from homebuyer education classes and financial literacy training to more direct financial aid.
Much of the funding comes from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has provided more than $150 million to the state agency over the past two decades. But that help has reached just a fraction of waitlisters.
While the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that the state is constitutionally required to provide sufficient funding for the agency, the governor approved only about a fifth of the annual amounts DHHL has requested since then, department data shows.
The Star-Advertiser and ProPublica analysis found it would take DHHL nearly two centuries to meet existing demand if it continues to develop at the current rate.
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(2)
Honolulu Star-Advertiser, jointly with Pro-Publica, Saturday October 24, 2020
How we found low-income Hawaiians were left behind by the homesteading program
By Agnel Philip, ProPublica, and Rob Perez, Honolulu Star-Advertiser
ProPublica’s first-of-its-kind analysis showed that a Native Hawaiian housing program left behind much of the community it was supposed to help. Here’s how we did it.
A century ago, Congress created a homesteading program for Native Hawaiians with a singular goal: return Hawaiians — especially impoverished ones — to their native lands.
To date, the program has only 8,400 residential lessees, compared with a waitlist that’s grown to more than 23,000 applicants. In three of the past five years, the awards fell into the single digits.
A first-of-its-kind analysis of department data showed the program has benefited those with the means and knowledge to navigate the complex homesteading system while leaving behind much of the Native Hawaiian community it was primarily meant to help.
To investigate who benefited from the homesteading program, the news organizations analyzed the award recipients’ addresses found in the database. We used the Google Maps geocoding API to look up the addresses’ locations ... then aggregated those addresses into census tracts to determine areas’ Native Hawaiian population and median income ... We chose to limit this analysis to Oahu, where residential demand is greatest, because the other islands included more remote, sparsely populated areas that had less reliable address and income data.
The data showed Oahu’s higher-income census tracts had more lease awards per Native Hawaiian household than lower income tracts. In fact, 60% of residential lease awards went to people living in census tracts with median household incomes greater than $75,000 ... compare the date a person submitted an application and their position on the waitlist to the date the lease started. Finally, the department has recorded the deaths of at least 2,000 applicants who never received a lease from 1995 to January 2020.
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(3)
Hawaii News Now [3 TV stations in Hawaii], December 16, 2020; then CENSORED to remove mention of hoodlum who developed DHHL land next to proposed casino; and revised article replaced original on December 17.
Plan to build casino on Hawaiian Home Lands in Kapolei a big gamble, critics say
A proposal to build a stand-alone casino resort on property owned by the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands is facing heavy opposition from community leaders and lawmakers.
“With gambling, and specifically a casino, you see an increase in addiction to gambling, which leads to more poverty, substance abuse and it has an overall negative impact on families,” said state Sen. Mike Gabbard, who represents the Kapolei area.
Community activist and longtime Makakilo resident Kioni Dudley says a casino will hurt working-class residents in West Oahu.
Even before the pandemic, the DHHL said the state wasn’t providing it with enough funding to fulfill its mission. It hopes that legalizing gambling will help it build more homes for Hawaiians.
The casino measure still needs to be approved by the Hawaiian Homes Commission next week before it can be introduced to the Legislature.
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(4)
Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Wednesday December 16, 2020
Hawaiian Home Lands considers proposal to build casino in Kapolei
The Department of Hawaiian Home Lands dropped a bombshell on its website late Tuesday, floating the idea of building a casino on trust land in Kapolei.
The nine-member commission that oversees the agency and a 203,000-acre land trust for Native Hawaiians will be asked next week to consider a proposed bill that would authorize the development of a casino in a resort in the growing West Oahu community.
The proposed bill became public when the department posted its agenda for its two days of meetings Monday and Tuesday. There was a brief reference to what would be presented to the panel
The department would not release details of what would be discussed.
A spokeswoman for [Governor] Ige declined comment.
About 28,000 Hawaiians are on a wait-list seeking homesteads. Some have languished there for decades.
If a casino were built on trust land, it would have a unique status. Unlike Native Americans and Alaskans, Native Hawaiians have no government-to-government relationship with the U.S., so a Hawaii casino would be different from those on tribal lands throughout the mainland.
That would raise questions of oversight, and it’s unclear how a casino on trust land would get around the state law prohibiting gambling.
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(5)
Honolulu Star-Advertiser, jointly with Pro-Publica, Saturday December 19, 2020
[This newspaper publishes only online on Saturdays; and both online and in print on the other 6 days. This major article appeared Saturday online, and also in print on Sunday but not online.]
Promised Land: The government promised to return ancestral Hawaiian land, then never finished the job
Twenty-five years ago, the state of Hawaii and the U.S. government promised Native Hawaiians to correct a historic wrong.
Public agencies had occupied thousands of acres intended to return Native people to their ancestral lands, paying little or no compensation for decades as the sites were used for military bases, game preserves, schools and other purposes. In 1995, state and federal legislation pledged to provide reparations.
But as 2020 draws to a close, Native Hawaiians are still waiting for all of what was promised.
“Justice delayed is justice denied,” said former Gov. John Waihee, the only Native Hawaiian to hold that office and whose administration was instrumental in negotiating the Act 14 bill.
Some members of Hawaii’s congressional delegation are calling for federal action.
“It’s long past time to settle old debts to the beneficiaries,” U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, said in a statement.
The problem is compounded by a growing waitlist and the department’s chronic money woes, shortfalls that prompt the agency to lease some of its Oahu lands to commercial interests.
In 29 of the 61 years since statehood, the department received no operating funds from the state, according to DHHL data. In 2012, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that the state is obligated to sufficiently fund the department, and it has fared much better since then. Still, it has received far less than what it deemed sufficient.
Over the past five years, for instance, DHHL has requested about $50 million for land acquisitions, according to the department, an average of $10 million annually. It got just about $7 million in total.
...even under the most optimistic settlement scenario, DHHL will be short of the lands it needs to accommodate the growing waitlist.
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(6)
Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Tuesday December 22, 2020
Kapolei casino seen as key to land trust’s future
Given the severe budget deficits expected by the state over the next several years, a plan to develop a West Oahu casino is key to avoiding the prospect of more Native Hawaiians waiting decades for homesteads and thousands dying without getting onto the land, according to an executive with the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands.
... a proposed resort casino on trust lands in Kapolei would generate desperately needed revenue for the trust to develop homestead lots at a quicker pace and acquire land ... “THIS BILL IS THE SINGLE GREATEST OPPORTUNITY WE HAVE TO PUT OURSELVES IN THE DOMINION OF EXERCISING ECONOMIC SELF-SUFFICIENCY ... SELF-SUFFICIENCY IS SELF-DETERMINATION. SELF-RELIANCE IS AN ACT OF SOVEREIGNTY.” ... cited findings from a Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica investigation published in October ... said a conservative estimate on the low end on how much a single Hawaii casino would generate is $30 million annually, but he also added that there are billion-dollar operations on the mainland. ... If the bill makes it to the Legislature, Gomes said he expects to see millions of dollars spent on lobbying from out of state to keep gambling out of Hawaii. The state provides a steady stream of visitors to Las Vegas to gamble in the casinos there.
But DHHL doesn’t intend to sit idly by if mainland interests try to exert their lobbying muscle. If the bill is introduced, the department is looking to tap consultants and lobbyists to help promote the bill, according to Gomes. “That’s not a detail we’ve ignored.”
Gomes cautioned commissioners against waiting until 2022 to seek the introduction of the legislation. Now that the idea has been floated publicly, the mainland interests who oppose the proposal would have a year to lobby against passage and “essentially buy its failure,” Gomes said.
“A year from now we will lose on this at the Legislature,” he said. “Guaranteed.”
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(7)
Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Tuesday December 22, 2020 Updated 11:11 pm
Department of Hawaiian Home Lands to help with down payments
Unable to keep pace with the soaring demand for housing, the state agency that manages a homesteading program for Native Hawaiians is taking a radical step in a new direction.
... provide a limited number of Hawaiians on an Oahu wait-list with down payment assistance to purchase fee-simple homes — you own the land — that are not within established homesteading communities on the island.
Those getting the help would then be removed from the wait-list, which now numbers 11,000 on Oahu.
Until now the main way for applicants to get off the list was to wait, sometimes decades, for their names to be called and then be awarded 99-year leases for land on which they would build or buy a home.
But DHHL’s pace of developing homestead lots has failed to keep pace with demand, partly because of chronic funding shortfalls for construction.
... the trust would be repaid its down payment contribution if the home eventually is sold. The department also would have the right to purchase the home, and that property would be added to DHHL’s inventory of available homesteading lands.
Owning a home fee-simple would provide beneficiaries more flexibility, allowing them to pass on their homes to their children or others who don’t have the required blood requirements under the homesteading program.
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Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Tuesday December 22, 2020 breaking news Updated 1:15 PM
Hawaiian Homes Commission OKs plan to pursue development of casino resort in Kapolei
By a 5-4 vote, the commission intends to forward to Gov. David Ige a proposed bill
If Ige approves it, the measure would be introduced as part of the governor’s package of bills submitted to the Legislature.
Chairman William J. Aila Jr. said any delay beyond the coming legislative session likely would doom the proposal.
The action was sought in response to a recent Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica investigation that identified a status quo that is leaving thousands of low-income Native Hawaiians behind, and because of the expected budget cuts facing state government due to the coronavirus pandemic.
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Honolulu Star-Advertiser Wednesday December 23, 2020
Proposed Kapolei casino survives narrow vote to move forward
By a 5-4 margin, the commission approved a measure that asks the Legislature to adopt a bill
The bill ran into resistance because the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, manager of the 203,000-acre homesteading trust, abruptly floated the measure last week without vetting it first through trust beneficiaries
After DHHL unveiled the draft measure a week ago, the panel was briefed for the first time Monday and was asked to vote on it the next day.
William J. Aila Jr., citing a variety of circumstances, warned the commission that a delay beyond next month’s legislative session likely would doom the proposal
“If we wait, it’s going to be next to impossible,” Aila said. “This is the time — or there’ll be no time.”
Postponing the matter for a year would allow the Las Vegas casino industry to mount a sustained lobbying campaign to kill the measure
Aila’s deputy, Tyler Gomes, justified taking such a bold step on short notice by citing the October findings of a Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica investigation
One legislator said he intends to introduce a similar bill even if Ige opts not to submit the DHHL one ... said Sen. Jarrett Keohokalole, whose father is a beneficiary.
House Speaker Scott Saiki told the Star-Advertiser on Tuesday that he has reservations about the proposal. Saiki said he is concerned that allowing casino gaming in Kapolei might trigger the federal law that would allow Indian tribes to open gambling operations in Hawaii.
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Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Wednesday December 23, 2020
Group rallies against casino proposal before Department of Hawaiian Home Lands headquarters.
Approximately 25 protesters from Waimanalo to Laie held a prayer, then marched around the corner to wave Hawaiian flags and signs along Kapolei Parkway at Kinoiki Street that said, “No future in a casino,” “Family before profit” and “Delayed justice is no justice,” which elicited honks from drivers passing by.
The proposal goes to Gov. David Ige and, if he approves it, would be included in his package of bills for the state Legislature to consider.
Favella said a better solution is to just give Hawaiians their deed. “Let them build their own home on their own land that was given to them by Prince Kuhio and the rest of our alii,” he said. “That’s it. That’s a simple fix. Give the people their land, not leases.”
“For me, self-determination shouldn’t be at an executive or administrative level,” said Iwalani Laybon- McBrayer ... “It should be at the grassroots level of the beneficiaries.”
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Hawaii News Now [3 TV stations in Hawaii] Wednesday December 23, 2020
20-minute interview of Governor Ige by Sunrise News Anchor Grace Lee
Q by Grace Lee: The Hawaiian Homes Commission has voted to move forward with a plan to build a casino resort in Kapolei. Do you support this?
A by Gov Ige: I don’t support gambling. I really don’t believe that it’s appropriate for our community. I appreciate the Hawaiian Homes Commission, looking at ways to get additional resources. We have developing homestead lands for revenue purposes.
I do think the Ka Makana Alii shopping center out in Kapolei has been a good start and we need to look at other ways to generate revenues and income for the Hawaiian Homes program. But I don’t support casino gambling. The costs to our community is high and really, it would be changing the nature of our hospitality industry here in the islands.
Q by Grace Lee: Does that mean the plan is effectively dead?
A by Gov Ige: I’m certain as in past that anyone can introduce bills and I’m certain that someone would introduce the measure and it would be presented to the Legislature. The difference, primarily, would be whether it would be a proposal that’s fully supported by the administration or not, and clearly, I do not support casino gambling here in the islands.
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Honolulu Star-Advertiser, jointly with Pro-Publica, Saturday December 19, 2020
Casino plan underscores worsening problems with homesteading program
The Star-Advertiser and ProPublica had reported in October that DHHL was failing to meet a crushing demand for housing. If DHHL continued at the same pace, it would take 182 years to accommodate the so-called waitlisters, some of whom have waited for decades, the news organizations reported.
On Monday, at a meeting of the Hawaiian Homes Commission, he [Gomes, Deputy head of DHHL] outlined their proposal: a resort-casino on Native Hawaiian land.
On Tuesday the commission narrowly approved the measure by a 5-4 vote.
“If we wait, it’s going to be next to impossible” to get a bill passed, said commission Chairman William J. Aila Jr. “This is the time — or they’ll be no time.”
On Tuesday, approximately 25 protesters demonstrated outside the headquarters of the Hawaiian Homes Commission.
The department received more than 100 written testimonies to the casino proposal, and over 90% opposed the measure.
But commissioners who approved the proposal this week said DHHL has few options left to fulfill its mission.
Even commissioners who opposed the casino measure acknowledged that DHHL cannot expect anyone else to bail it out.
In a dramatic departure from the current model, DHHL will launch a $1.5 million pilot program to provide down-payment assistance to help eligible Hawaiians purchase housing on Oahu on the open market, not on land specifically set aside for homesteading. ... the trust would be repaid its contribution if the home is sold. The department also would have the right to purchase the home, and that property would be added to DHHL’s inventory of available homesteading lands. “It would allow us to grow the trust over time, one parcel at a time,” said Jobie Masagatani, a DHHL executive. “I think this is an excellent idea,” said state Sen. Maile Shimabukuro, who heads the Senate Committee on Hawaiian Affairs.
Help us investigate - ProPublica and the Honolulu Star-Advertiser are spending the year investigating the homesteading program for Native Hawaiians. [Contact info provided]
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Editorial: Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Saturday December 26, 2020 [Saturdays online only, no print edition]
Alternative from Department of Hawaiian Home Lands
... this homesteading program now has 8,400 residential lessees, its wait-list includes some 23,000 eligible beneficiaries. As the state agency tasked with managing the program, DHHL clearly is failing to develop homestead lots at a pace that meets demand. So, a new plan to start offering financial help to beneficiaries — those who are at least 50% Hawaiian — seeking to buy housing situated outside of homesteading acreage, seems a sensible move ... by providing them with some down-payment assistance to purchase fee-simple homes (the buyer owns the land) on Oahu ... Should these properties be sold, DHHL would have the right to purchase the homes, and the properties would be added to DHHL’s too-tight inventory. ... It creates an immediate opportunity for DHHL to further chip away at the obstacles that prevent it from fully realizing its mission: to manage the Hawaiian Home Lands trust effectively and to develop and deliver lands to Native Hawaiians.
** Ken Conklin's online comment:
1. Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920 was unconstitutional violation of 14th Amendment back then and still today. Lawsuits to abolish it were dismissed on technicalities of standing and political question, but never adjudicated on merits.
2. DHHL racial ghettos are bad enough; this editorial supports helping them metastasize like a spreading cancer -- person with 50% native blood gets DHHL help to buy fee simple house outside the ghetto, then when sold DHHL gets first dibs to buy it and make it DHHL property leasehold with racial restriction adding new land to ghetto.
3. Editorial distracts attention from main item in DHHL proposal: casino in Kapolei.
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5. FULL TEXT OF ARTICLES EXCERPTED ABOVE
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Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Saturday October 24, 2020
[This newspaper publishes only online on Saturdays; and both online and in print on the other 6 days. This major article appeared Saturday online, and also in print on Sunday but not online.]
https://www.staradvertiser.com/2020/10/24/hawaii-news/to-reclaim-ancestral-land-all-native-hawaiians-need-is-a-300000-mortgage-and-to-wait-in-line-for-decades/
To reclaim ancestral land, all Native Hawaiians need is a $300,000 mortgage and to wait in line for decades [sarcasm to evoke sympathy for oppressed natives]
By Rob Perez, Honolulu Star-Advertiser, and Agnel Philip, ProPublica Oct. 24, 2020
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive ProPublica’s biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
This story was co-published with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.
Rob Perez is an investigative reporter at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. He has worked at newspapers in Florida, California, Hawaii and Guam, where he’s from.
Agnel Philip is a data reporter for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.
A 100-year-old program created to provide Native Hawaiians — especially poor ones — land to live on after the U.S. annexed the islands is failing. Thousands have died waiting in line and even more can’t afford the mortgages they’d need.
Zalei Kamaile dreamed of owning a home. The professional ukulele player worked long hours entertaining tourists on Oahu and saved her tips in a cookie jar. The money went into a modest house fund for her and her mother, but she knew that wouldn’t be enough. So in 1987, Kamaile, then 35, took the one step she considered her best shot at homeownership. She applied to a homesteading program for Native Hawaiians. Created by Congress in 1921, the program had a singular goal: return Hawaiians — especially impoverished ones — to their native lands.
Over the next two decades, Kamaile received more than a dozen letters offering her an opportunity to get a homestead. The land, part of a 203,000-acre trust, would be virtually free under a long-term lease. But there was a catch: An applicant either had to build their own home or purchase one from a developer. At least five of Kamaile’s offers were for new subdivisions in Kapolei, a growing bedroom community in West Oahu. Amid a soaring real estate market, the homes were a bargain, costing about half the price of similar housing elsewhere.
Kamaile, however, couldn’t qualify for a mortgage.
During that period, she lost her job, declared bankruptcy and spent two years homeless, part of it living in a tent on the beach. Kamaile passed on each offering, tossing the letters in the garbage. “I cried an awful lot,” she said.
Today, Kamaile, 68, still doesn’t have a homestead. She’s about 3,500 applicants deep on a waitlist, 33 years after she first applied. She lives in a cramped rental apartment in a low-income housing project and serves as caregiver for a disabled family friend who lives with her. Kamaile’s mother died last year, 10 days shy of her 91st birthday. Kamaile still regrets not being able to provide her with a homestead. “That was my one wish for her.”
The Honolulu woman’s story reflects what has been a decadeslong failure of the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands to fulfill its mission.
Under state law, anyone who is at least half Hawaiian and 18 or older is considered a beneficiary of the land trust and entitled to get a homestead in a “prompt and efficient manner.” Qualifying for financing is not listed as a requirement, but that has essentially become one because of the way the program is run. As a result, Hawaiians with the financial means and knowledge to navigate the complicated system are able to get homesteads with relative ease while thousands of others continue a generations-long wait for the land that is their birthright, an investigation by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica has found.
Over the past 25 years, the department, known as DHHL, has largely invested in building sprawling subdivisions. Intended to satisfy a crushing demand for housing, the remedy has exacerbated the problem, as the homes have proved too expensive for many applicants.
The result has been an ever-lengthening waitlist, now 23,000 people long, as Native Hawaiians struggle in one of the country’s most expensive housing markets. At the average rate the department has developed residential lots since 1995, it would take 182 years to meet demand — before figuring in expected waitlist growth.
State and federal watchdogs have long criticized the department for its failure to deliver homesteads in a timely fashion, and this year, the Hawaii Supreme Court concluded that “the state of Hawaii has done little to address the ever-lengthening waitlist” over the past 30 years.
Under the current model, the department often goes thousands deep to find interested and qualified buyers, effectively bypassing low-income Hawaiians who have been waiting longer.
Since 1995, for example, DHHL has awarded about 2,200 residential leases to Oahu residents. Sixty percent of them went to beneficiaries who came from census tracts with median household incomes higher than $75,000, the two news organizations found through an unprecedented analysis of tens of thousands of lease transactions, waitlist records and other documents.
Jade Miyazaki was one of them. A hotel marketer, she already owned a small townhouse, but she applied for the homesteading program hoping to get more space for her family of five.
She got a home in 2010 in Kanehili, one of the subdivisions that Kamaile, the ukulele player, passed on. Miyazaki had waited only a quarter of the time even though she was more than 2,000 places deeper on the waitlist. But unlike Kamaile, Miyazaki could afford the mortgage.
She was among the last of the so-called waitlisters to be awarded land leases in the 375-home subdivision, where home prices at the time averaged about $345,000 in today’s dollars.
Today, the median household income for Kanehili and two other nearby homestead subdivisions is about $100,000. That is nearly double the approximately $55,000 median income for waitlister households, according to a 2017 federal study on Native Hawaiian housing.
“This program creates a division among Hawaiians,” said Vanessa Garcia Phillips, a beneficiary leader who has been on the waitlist a relatively short three years. “You have the haves and the have-nots.”
In the meantime, more Hawaiians will continue to die waiting. Analyzing trust records, the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica found that more than 2,000 beneficiaries already have died while on the waitlist without receiving homesteads — a number that has not been previously reported but that many agree is a severe undercount. The department records the death of a beneficiary only if the family provides a death certificate.
The investigation by the news organizations marks the first time DHHL’s subdivision strategy has been extensively examined, and many of the findings are new — even to DHHL. The agency said it didn’t have the staff or tools to replicate the analysis, but it acknowledged its model produced housing prices beyond the reach of many waitlisters.
Still, officials defended the approach, saying they were doing what they could to deliver on what waitlisters consistently rank in surveys as their top choice: single-family homes. When the department built duplexes about two decades ago, it got a lackluster response from beneficiaries, some of whom believe the law promises them land, not just housing.
About 8,400 residential leases have been awarded since 1921, said William J. Aila Jr., who serves as department director and chairman of the Hawaiian Homes Commission, which oversees the agency and the land trust. To address the affordability problem, he said, the department has provided a greater number of less-costly lease options, such as empty lots where beneficiaries can build their own homes. It also offers services like financial literacy classes to help low-income beneficiaries.
“It’s not a complete success. But it’s not a complete failure,” said Aila, who lives on a homestead.
Many beneficiary advocates and political leaders disagree. They say the agency needs to overhaul its approach and to focus more on housing that waitlisters actually can afford.
“It’s not working for anybody,” said former Gov. John Waihee, the only Native Hawaiian to serve in that office — his term ran from 1986 to 1994 — and whose father died while on the waitlist. “It’s not working for the community. It’s not working for the state of Hawaii. If the program were doing what it should, we would have less of a housing crisis than we have now.”
A PRINCE’S VISION
In 1893, the U.S. backed an illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, partly to protect U.S. sugar interests in the islands. A group representing U.S. and European sugar planters, financiers and missionary descendants, supported by U.S. naval forces, deposed the monarchy and proclaimed a provisional government. Five years later, the U.S. annexed the island chain, obtaining roughly 1.8 million acres of former kingdom land without compensating the Hawaiians. By then, the indigenous population was headed toward extinction as disease, poor living conditions and other factors contributed to their dwindling numbers. Many impoverished Hawaiians, who had been displaced from their lands, lived in slum-like tenements in urban Honolulu.
Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalaniana’ole, considered the father of the Hawaiian Homes program and Hawaii’s then-nonvoting delegate to Congress, around 1918 envisioned using some of the former kingdom lands to create a land trust to uplift Native Hawaiians. Kuhio’s idea was to return them to their native lands so they could become self-sufficient, maintain the culture and reverse the population decline. “This rehabilitation bill is the first opportunity given the poor man to go on the land with funds to help him make a living,” Kuhio said in Honolulu in 1920 as he lobbied to build public support.
The Hawaiian Homes Commission Act was signed into law in 1921. But the program, run by Hawaii’s territorial government under U.S. supervision, was seriously hampered from the start.
Much of the land was remote and ill suited for homesteading, lacking water and other basics. And the federal government provided little funding and inadequate oversight. In the first 38 years, only about 1,700 homesteads were awarded. The poor conditions persisted after the state took over management as a requirement of statehood in 1959.
State and federal reports going back decades have identified many faults, including the state’s inability to deliver homesteads in a timely manner.
Stung by the decadeslong criticism over the waitlist problem, DHHL in the early 1990s switched from so-called pocket development — constructing homes in small numbers — to building large subdivisions. The change enabled the agency to offer dozens and sometimes hundreds of so-called turnkey homes in batches.
The Waihee administration was instrumental in advancing that strategy. The governor and his team secured from the state a $600 million settlement to compensate DHHL for misuse of trust lands in the years following statehood. The state paid the agency $30 million annually for 20 years starting in 1995, and much of that money went to infrastructure work for new subdivisions.
Some waitlisters were thrilled. The benefits of getting a homestead are substantial in a state with soaring real estate markets; the median price for a previously owned single-family home on Oahu, for instance, hit $789,000 in 2019.
For turnkey houses, beneficiaries pay about half as much as they would for comparable homes off trust land. That’s because DHHL, not the buyer, covers land and infrastructure costs, builders say. In addition to the purchase price, beneficiaries pay only $1 annually for a land lease, which runs for 99 years.
Holding a lease comes with significant tax advantages. Homesteaders pay no property taxes for the first seven years following a lease award. After that, they still get a break, depending on location. On Oahu, homesteaders pay $300 annually, regardless of the value of the residence, potentially saving thousands of dollars a year.
But when the department started construction on its first master-planned subdivision in 1994, officials soon ran into a problem: a lack of qualified buyers.
Winona Kauhane, a former loan officer for a private lender working with DHHL on the project, recalled reviewing waitlist applications to fill the 271 new homes in Princess Kahanu Estates along Oahu’s Waianae Coast. The development was aimed at providing housing for the working poor — typically two-income families who couldn’t afford to buy elsewhere. Sifting through several thousand files, though, Kauhane realized that most applicants couldn’t qualify for the mortgages needed to purchase the houses, which averaged about $208,000 in today’s dollars.
Motivated to get Hawaiians onto the land, Kauhane helped craft a legal workaround that involved recruiting a waitlister’s family member who could finance the deal. The lease would be awarded to the applicant, who served as a pass-through and simultaneously transferred it to the family member bankrolling the purchase. Depending on the circumstances, the applicant still could live in the home. “That was the only way we could get these people or their families into a home,” Kauhane said. “They deserved that opportunity.”
There were more than 100 of these simultaneous transactions following lease awards in the past 25 years, according to the analysis. Even with the workarounds, though, the department still had to go more than 4,000 deep into the waitlist to get enough buyers for the 271 homes in Princess Kahanu Estates — an indication to some critics that the subdivision model was problematic from the start.
“THEY EXCLUDE PEOPLE LIKE MYSELF”
Over the years, Native Hawaiians have increasingly turned to the homesteading program for relief as Hawaii grapples with a severe shortage of affordable housing and the nation’s second-worst homelessness crisis. The statewide residential waitlist has grown by over 50% since 1995.
While DHHL does not track income in a systematic way, there are indications that many applicants are struggling financially. A federal study found that about 20% of households on the waitlist received public cash assistance — nearly three times the rate of Native Hawaiians and more than six times that of the general population. According to a separate 2014 survey conducted by DHHL, only about a quarter of waitlisters said they could afford the 10% down payment on a mortgage for a $150,000 home. Many turnkey properties now cost at least double that. In Kapolei on Oahu’s west side, where Kanehili was developed and where much of the island’s residential growth is happening, prices in new homestead neighborhoods are approaching $400,000.
“When you do all turnkey development, and the average price for a house is somewhere around $300,000 to $400,000, what happens is you start skimming the cream of the waitlist, only those who can qualify for those homes,” Aila, the DHHL director, acknowledged. “So you miss a lot of people.”
Robin Danner, a beneficiary leader from Kauai, said DHHL needs to rethink its financial requirements and give beneficiaries more flexibility to build their own housing. “Their duty is not to check my credit,” she said. “Their duty is to issue me my land.”
Aila acknowledged that the law does not require a beneficiary to qualify for a mortgage to get a homestead. But any structure built on trust land must meet county building and zoning codes, according to the state administrative rules the department uses, and that prohibits substandard construction. “We can’t let you live in a tent because that’s substandard living,” Aila said.
Critics, however, say DHHL, with its focus on subdivisions, has strayed too far from the intent of the 1921 homesteading law. “The program is really turned on its head,” said attorney Tom Grande, who represents 2,700 plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against DHHL that received the favorable Supreme Court ruling this year. “It’s serving Native Hawaiians who are middle class or upper middle class. It does nothing for Hawaiians who are working poor or homeless.”
Native Hawaiians are overrepresented in the homeless population. In a survey earlier this year of roughly 1,200 unsheltered homeless on Oahu, 1 in 5 was eligible for the homesteading program and 7% were on the waitlist.
Louisa Keawe, 60, applied for the homesteading program in 2010. Today, she lives in a tent at Waimanalo Beach Park on Oahu’s windward side. The former janitor says she has been homeless off and on for about seven years and hasn’t worked for about a decade because of a disability. She survives on about $800 in monthly Social Security benefits and food stamps, and she recently purchased a new tent with her federal stimulus check.
Keawe said she has received several offering notices but didn’t pursue them, believing she was unable to qualify for a mortgage. The system, she lamented, favors those with wealth.
“People doing well on the high level, the first level, they can pursue a place on Hawaiian Homes. The second level? Average. They will pursue. But for my case, I cannot pursue nothing,” Keawe said. “They exclude people like myself.”
Age can also be a limiting factor. The Star-Advertiser and ProPublica found that more than half of all waitlisters are over 60, an age when taking on a new mortgage could be a stretch. The news organizations interviewed more than a dozen people who applied decades ago and are now approaching retirement age.
Oahu resident Gregory Ah Yat has been a renter all his adult life. He applied for the homesteading program 33 years ago but, like Keawe, passed on several lease offerings, either because he couldn’t afford them or he didn’t like the location. A longtime tour bus driver, he lost his job when the coronavirus pandemic shut down Hawaii’s tourism industry in March.
Now 68, Ah Yat has little hope of getting a homestead. “I’m going to die before that happens,” he said. “I’ll never be able to make the payments, not even in 30 years.”
“HANDOUT” OR HAND UP?
DHHL says it offers a variety of programs aimed at helping low-income beneficiaries become homesteaders. The services range from homebuyer education classes and financial literacy training to more direct financial aid.
Much of the funding comes from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has provided more than $150 million to the state agency over the past two decades. But that help has reached just a fraction of waitlisters.
Since 2002, more than 2,000 individuals and families have received homebuyer training and other assistance, according to Ryan Okahara, director of HUD’s Honolulu field office. In addition, about 600 waitlisters got financial aid to purchase — or build — homes on trust land.
Those making 80% or less of an area’s median income are eligible to tap the federal funds to obtain a zero-interest loan or down-payment assistance. On Oahu, that income limit translates to $67,500 for an individual and $96,400 for a family of four.
Shannon Chow applied for financial help several years ago. As an airline employee supporting a family of four, she qualified for a zero-interest loan from DHHL. The agency approved $267,000, which the 49-year-old Chow used to build a home on a vacant lot in Waimanalo, a historically Native Hawaiian community.
But, in a sign of how slow the homesteading process works, she didn’t get her lease based on her position on the waitlist, which was more than 4,500 from the top. She inherited it in 2018 when her mother, Cecilia Chow, died at age 70 that year. Cecilia had waited more than 30 years before getting her lease.
With the loan from DHHL, as well as assistance from Honolulu Habitat for Humanity, Shannon Chow constructed a 1,200-square-foot, four-bedroom, two-bathroom house on the site.
At the July ceremony in which she received the keys to her new residence, Habitat for Humanity placed an empty chair with a lei draped over it as a tribute to her late mother. Chow dabbed back tears as she glanced at the empty chair next to her, wishing her mother was there. “We’re always thinking of her,” Chow said after the ceremony. “It’s because of her we got this house.”
Blossom Feiteira, a Maui beneficiary who heads a waitlister group and used to teach financial literacy classes, said even homeless applicants can become homesteaders if they take advantage of the services and are willing to do what is necessary, such as improve their credit standing, to prepare for homeownership. “This is not supposed to be a handout,” she said. “It’s supposed to be a hand up.”
But other advocates say the programs are of little use to many struggling waitlisters. For example, those who receive the opportunity to get a lease with a turnkey home typically have to prequalify for a mortgage within 45 days. That isn’t enough time for most low-income waitlisters to get their finances in order, said Jeff Gilbreath, director of lending for the nonprofit Hawaii Community Lending, which serves beneficiaries. Vacant lots that the beneficiary builds on — like Chow did — can be an alternative, but they come with their own challenges, including securing a construction loan and managing contractors, he said.
Gilbreath estimates that even with federal and state assistance, it can take up to a year and a half for low-income beneficiaries working with his nonprofit to address credit issues and build the savings necessary to buy a homestead. And the assistance programs are severely underfunded.
Gilbreath said low-income waitlisters can seek mortgage assistance from a federal program, known as the Section 502 Direct Loan program, but applicants are competing against other people every year. In some cases, the program’s annual congressional allocation runs out before the end of the year, causing delays in aid. Beneficiaries who attempt to navigate the convoluted system can get discouraged and give up, Gilbreath said.
Success stories, he added, are “more the exception than the rule.”
FUNDING SHORTFALLS, SLOWED CONSTRUCTION
Aila acknowledged that his agency is not delivering homesteads in a prompt and efficient manner. The fundamental reason, he said, is inadequate funding. “Everybody agrees that is the problem. The Legislature agrees, the federal government agrees, we agree, the beneficiaries agree.”
The pace of construction started to slow substantially in the late 2000s as the agency battled allegations of mismanagement and dealt with funding shortfalls. To maintain operations, officials diverted money from construction to administrative costs. That resulted in fewer new lots produced and awards offered. In three of the past five years, residential awards fell into the single digits, according to the news organizations’ analysis. In 2018, only six such leases were awarded.
While the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that the state is constitutionally required to provide sufficient funding for the agency, the governor approved only about a fifth of the annual amounts DHHL has requested since then, department data shows.
Gov. David Ige did not respond to interview requests for this story, but he provided a written statement. While he did not directly address DHHL funding, he said budget requests submitted to his office from state agencies are based on what they believe to be sufficient funding. Still, they often “are three to four times or more than the resources available to us. As governor, I must prioritize and balance budget requests with available resources.”
State Rep. Sylvia Luke, who heads the House Finance Committee, noted that the Legislature over the past eight years appropriated close to what the governor sought for the homesteading agency. Even though the amounts were less than what the department requested, they still were substantially more than what it had received historically.
“It’s so convenient just to blame it on funding,” she said.
Construction has picked up in recent years, and DHHL expects to offer hundreds of residential leases in subdivisions across three islands over the next few years. In December, the agency plans to hold a virtual meeting for 37 new turnkey homes in Kapolei. Prices range between $246,000 and $384,000.
But no subsidized assistance is available to help low-income waitlisters purchase the homes; instead, the agency is focusing on providing assistance for home construction on vacant lots, an option typically more affordable to those with fewer resources. Beneficiaries selected for the Kapolei houses would have to get financing through a conventional lender.
SCRAPPING THE MODEL
Some beneficiaries, advocates and political leaders say DHHL needs to scrap the subdivision model and craft a new one better in tune with the needs of waitlisters.
“The situation with DHHL I don’t think is a consequence of incompetence or skullduggery or indifference or even mediocrity,” said former Gov. Neil Abercrombie, who served from 2010 to 2014. “There’s elements of that in everything, no question. But principally it is that the model simply doesn’t serve the purpose. It was difficult right from the beginning, and it’s become impossible now.”
The Star-Advertiser and ProPublica analysis found it would take DHHL nearly two centuries to meet existing demand if it continues to develop at the current rate. “Good grief,” said U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono, a Democrat from Hawaii, in response to the findings. “That’s why they can’t keep using that model.” She believes state legislators should hold hearings to probe the homesteading program.
On Oahu, where residential demand is greatest, the focus should be more on condominiums and other housing more affordable to waitlisters, critics say.
“Otherwise, the 100 years of failure will continue,” said Iwalani Laybon-McBrayer, a Kapolei homesteader and chair of the beneficiary-owned Homestead Housing Authority, a nonprofit that advocates for construction projects on trust land.
But not all beneficiaries agree. Homesteaders like Miyazaki are happy with the program. This year marks the 10th anniversary of her lease award for a two-bedroom house in Kapolei. “I love it, considering my mortgage is less than most people’s rent,” said Miyazaki, whose payments are $1,200 a month. “It feels really good to own a house.”
Aila says DHHL is dedicated to its current housing model, particularly given the surveys conducted by the department showing most waitlisters still want single-family homes on standard lots, which are around 5,000 square feet.
When DHHL developed duplexes in the early 2000s near Papakolea, a homestead community just minutes from downtown Oahu, it had to go deep into the waitlist to find 86 buyers, including some who had applied less than two years earlier. The units sold for an average price, adjusted for inflation, of about $291,000.
That said, DHHL officials say they are responding to the calls for more affordable options for waitlisters. Since 2014, in reaction to beneficiary demands, the agency has revised its rules to allow for a wider array of housing choices, including tiny homes and multifamily dwellings.
Over the next five years, the department expects to develop a minimum of 1,300 lots — double the average rate over the past 25 years — for a variety of uses, including farming. About half will be for single-family homes, with most of the offerings in new subdivisions. The department also recently announced the selection of a developer for its first high-rise project, a 23-story building with 270 rental units in urban Honolulu. The units aren’t expected to come on line until mid-2024.
Older waitlisters say the changes, while welcomed, come too late for them. And critics say the moves are not nearly enough for low-income Hawaiians because the agency still relies too much on single-family turnkey housing — a model that’s at odds with the intent of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act.
Carl Varady has seen the harm. As an attorney, he has worked with Grande representing 2,700 plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit against DHHL. After 21 years and a string of legal victories, the beneficiaries are still waiting for compensation. About 400 have died since the suit was filed in 1999.
“Without people really looking at the purpose of this statute and living up to the fiduciary obligation,” Varady said, “there will be another generation of Hawaiians marginalized, living on the beach, and waiting for something they should have gotten decades ago.”
Rob Perez is an investigative reporter at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. He has worked at newspapers in Florida, California, Hawaii and Guam, where he’s from.
Agnel Philip is a data reporter for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.
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Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Saturday October 24, 2020
[This newspaper publishes only online on Saturdays; and both online and in print on the other 6 days. This major article appeared Saturday online, and also in print on Sunday but not online.]
https://www.staradvertiser.com/2020/10/24/hawaii-news/how-we-found-low-income-hawaiians-were-left-behind-by-the-homesteading-program/
How we found low-income Hawaiians were left behind by the homesteading program
By Agnel Philip, ProPublica, and Rob Perez, Honolulu Star-Advertiser
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive ProPublica’s biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
This story was co-published with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.
Rob Perez is an investigative reporter at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. He has worked at newspapers in Florida, California, Hawaii and Guam, where he’s from.
Agnel Philip is a data reporter for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.
ProPublica’s first-of-its-kind analysis showed that a Native Hawaiian housing program left behind much of the community it was supposed to help. Here’s how we did it.
A century ago, Congress created a homesteading program for Native Hawaiians with a singular goal: return Hawaiians — especially impoverished ones — to their native lands.
For decades, though, community members and lawmakers have decried the slow rate at which homesteads have been awarded.
To date, the program has only 8,400 residential lessees, compared with a waitlist that’s grown to more than 23,000 applicants. In three of the past five years, the awards fell into the single digits.
But no one, not even the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, the state agency that oversees the initiative, fully understood how far the program has strayed from its original intent. A first-of-its-kind analysis by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica of department data showed the program has benefited those with the means and knowledge to navigate the complex homesteading system while leaving behind much of the Native Hawaiian community it was primarily meant to help.
Much of this analysis was based on the department’s database of applicants, lessees and transactions from 1995, when it began using its current system, to January 2020. The Star-Advertiser and ProPublica presented the findings and methods outlined here to DHHL, but officials said the department doesn’t have the capacity to evaluate them.
To investigate who benefited from the homesteading program, the news organizations analyzed the award recipients’ addresses found in the database. We used the Google Maps geocoding API to look up the addresses’ locations. We excluded a handful of addresses that couldn’t be matched to at least the street level. We then aggregated those addresses into census tracts to determine areas’ Native Hawaiian population and median income. In cases where the award recipient’s address was a P.O. box, we used the location of the post office, which, according to the U.S. Postal Service, is typically in the same neighborhood as the person who owns the box. We chose to limit this analysis to Oahu, where residential demand is greatest, because the other islands included more remote, sparsely populated areas that had less reliable address and income data.
The data showed Oahu’s higher-income census tracts had more lease awards per Native Hawaiian household than lower income tracts. In fact, 60% of residential lease awards went to people living in census tracts with median household incomes greater than $75,000 — a threshold chosen because it split the Native Hawaiian population on the island into two roughly equal groups. The trend — that higher income areas had more lease award recipients — was consistent whether P.O. box addresses were included or excluded from the analysis.
This bias toward higher income applicants had consequences: The department routinely had to go thousands deep on its waitlist to find applicants willing and able to accept a lease during the past 25 years, bypassing those who couldn’t qualify for a mortgage. We calculated the amount of time lease award recipients were on the waitlist by linking together two different logs — one that tracks waitlist changes and one that tracks changes to leases — using the lessee name and lease start date. This allowed us to compare the date a person submitted an application and their position on the waitlist to the date the lease started.
Finally, the department has recorded the deaths of at least 2,000 applicants who never received a lease from 1995 to January 2020. Our count of those who died on the waitlist is also based on the transaction logs. We identified every person on the waitlist that included some indicator that the individual had died. In some cases, this was a death date. In others, the name of the entry included the text “DEC’D,” which means “deceased.” We then removed likely duplicates and anyone who had already received a lease. This count is almost certainly conservative because the department records a death only if it is reported by a family member.
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Hawaii News Now [3 TV stations in Hawaii], December 16, 2020; then censored and revised on December 17.
https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2020/12/16/plan-build-casino-hawaiian-home-lands-kapolei-big-gamble-critics-say/
Plan to build casino on Hawaiian Home Lands in Kapolei a big gamble, critics say
By Rick Daysog December 16, 2020 at 6:33 PM HST - Updated December 17 at 11:32 AM
HONOLULU, Hawaii (HawaiiNewsNow) - A proposal to build a stand-alone casino resort on property owned by the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands is facing heavy opposition from community leaders and lawmakers.
“With gambling, and specifically a casino, you see an increase in addiction to gambling, which leads to more poverty, substance abuse and it has an overall negative impact on families,” said state Sen. Mike Gabbard, who represents the Kapolei area.
“Gambling is well outside the DHHL’s mission to provide housing for native Hawaiians, which I feel strongly that should be their continued focus. Additionally, as far as I know, the DHHL does not have expertise in the gambling arena,” he added.
Community activist and longtime Makakilo resident Kioni Dudley says a casino will hurt working-class residents in West Oahu.
“I just don’t think it’s a good idea to put it in the midst of people who don’t have the money to gamble. That’s just wrong,” he said.
Even before the pandemic, the DHHL said the state wasn’t providing it with enough funding to fulfill its mission. It hopes that legalizing gambling will help it build more homes for Hawaiians.
There are about 28,000 Hawaiians on the wait-list for a homestead lot. But at the state’s current funding levels, the DHHL said it would take “another hundred years to meet the needs of its beneficiaries.”
While the measure does not identify a specific location where the casino will be built, speculation has centered on land near the DHHL’s Ka Makana Alii shopping center.
There are already a number of hotels that have been built nearby in recent years, which would benefit from the development of a casino.
DUDLEY POINTED OUT THAT THE FOUNDER OF THE COMPANY THAT RUNS THE SHOPPING CENTER ― FORMER SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS OWNER EDWARD DEBARTOLO JR. ― HAD A RIVERBOAT CASINO LICENSE IN LOUISIANA IN THE 1990S.
IN 1998, DEBARTOLO PLEADED GUILTY TO FAILING TO REPORT THAT FORMER LOUISIANA GOV. EDWARD EDWARDS EXTORTED $400,000 FROM HIM FOR THAT GAMING LICENSE.
The casino measure still needs to be approved by the Hawaiian Homes Commission next week before it can be introduced to the Legislature.
** Ken Conklin's note: I have transformed 2 paragraphs into ALL CAPS because of their importance and because those 2 paragraphs were included in the original news report published on December 16 but were DELETED from the otherwise identical revised version republished on December 17. Pure speculation, of course, but: perhaps some insiders at DHHL demanded the censorship. The HawaiiNewsNow group of TV stations have been extremely collaborative with OHA/DHHL/KamehamehaSchools far more than the other Honolulu TV stations. The connection of the shopping center with the criminal DeBartolo might cause Hawaii residents to feel less sympathetic with the DHHL proposal if they wonder whether a casino located nextdoor is under the control of criminals taking bribes or kickbacks.
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Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Wednesday December 16, 2020
https://www.staradvertiser.com/2020/12/16/hawaii-news/dhhl-considers-proposal-to-build-casino-in-kapolei/
Hawaiian Home Lands considers proposal to build casino in Kapolei
By Rob Perez
The Department of Hawaiian Home Lands dropped a bombshell on its website late Tuesday, floating the idea of building a casino on trust land in Kapolei.
The nine-member commission that oversees the agency and a 203,000-acre land trust for Native Hawaiians will be asked next week to consider a proposed bill that would authorize the development of a casino in a resort in the growing West Oahu community.
Details were unavailable Tuesday night, but just the idea of a casino in a state where gambling is illegal stunned beneficiaries of the trust.
“I’m flabbergasted,” said Big Island homesteader Ian Lee Loy, who served on the Hawaiian Homes Commission from 2011 to 2013.
The proposed bill became public when the department posted its agenda for its two days of meetings Monday and Tuesday. There was a brief reference to what would be presented to the panel: “Legislative Proposal to Authorize Limited Casino Gaming in the Form of a Single Integrated Resort Property in Kapolei, Island of Oahu, on Hawaiian Home Lands Designated for Commercial Use.”
The department would not release details of what would be discussed.
In a written statement, Tyler Iokepa Gomes, deputy to Chairman William J. Aila Jr., presented the proposal in economic terms.
“Given the impact of COVID-19 on our state’s economy, the department is proposing a bold measure that has proven successful for indigenous groups in generating critically needed revenue to improve the lives of their people,” Gomes said. “We are at a pivotal moment in the history of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act and resources to develop infrastructure and acquire lands will be needed to fulfill the vision of Prince Kuhio.”
The proposal would have to be approved by a majority of commissioners to be sent to Gov. David Ige, who would then consider whether to include it as part of his package of measures submitted to the Legislature for the upcoming session, which starts in January.
A spokeswoman for Ige declined comment.
Beneficiaries contacted Tuesday night reacted with shock and anger, criticizing the department for proposing something like this without first consulting the beneficiary community.
The trust was established a century ago for the benefit of those at least 50% Hawaiian. Its chief purpose is to return Hawaiians to their native lands through residential, farming and ranching homesteads. But the department has long been under fire for its failure to develop homesteads in a timely fashion, and a lack of resources often is cited.
About 28,000 Hawaiians are on a wait-list seeking homesteads. Some have languished there for decades.
If a casino were built on trust land, it would have a unique status. Unlike Native Americans and Alaskans, Native Hawaiians have no government-to-government relationship with the U.S., so a Hawaii casino would be different from those on tribal lands throughout the mainland.
That would raise questions of oversight, and it’s unclear how a casino on trust land would get around the state law prohibiting gambling.
Robin Danner, chairwoman of the Sovereign Council of Hawaiian Homestead Associations, the largest beneficiary group in the state, blasted the department for floating the idea without first consulting beneficiaries. As owners of the land, beneficiaries must be the ones to initiate proposals for their land, not a state agency, Danner said.
“It’s not (DHHL’s) place to do this,” she said. “It’s like a thief coming in the night. This is how we’re constantly losing our land.”
Mike Kahikina, who left the commission last year after serving for eight years, likewise criticized the way the department is handling the proposal, saying it reflects a history of beneficiaries being mistreated and ignored. “One hundred years of just snubbing us continues,” he said.
Details of the proposed bill are expected to be posted on the department’s website as early as today, and the department will take written testimony on the proposal. But the meetings next week, which will be livestreamed, will be conducted remotely because of the pandemic, and no oral testimony will be accepted.
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Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Saturday December 19, 2020
[This newspaper publishes only online on Saturdays; and both online and in print on the other 6 days. This major article appeared Saturday online, and also in print on Sunday but not online.]
https://www.staradvertiser.com/2020/12/19/hawaii-news/promised-land-the-government-promised-to-return-ancestral-hawaiian-land-then-never-finished-the-job/
Promised Land: The government promised to return ancestral Hawaiian land, then never finished the job
By Rob Perez, Honolulu Star-Advertiser, and Agnel Philip, ProPublica Dec. 19, 2020
This story is co-published with ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.
Rob Perez is an investigative reporter at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. He has worked at newspapers in Florida, California, Hawaii and Guam, where he’s from.
Agnel Philip is a data reporter for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.
Twenty-five years ago, the state of Hawaii and the U.S. government promised Native Hawaiians to correct a historic wrong.
Public agencies had occupied thousands of acres intended to return Native people to their ancestral lands, paying little or no compensation for decades as the sites were used for military bases, game preserves, schools and other purposes. In 1995, state and federal legislation pledged to provide reparations.
Then-U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, said it was “a step toward righting a great wrong against the original people of this land.” Then-Sen. Daniel Akaka, a Native Hawaiian who steered the bill through the Senate, called the legislation “a vindication for Hawaiians who had lost hope that this long-standing issue would ever be resolved.”
But as 2020 draws to a close, Native Hawaiians are still waiting for all of what was promised.
While the state has added nearly 16,000 acres to the land trust, just a fraction were on Oahu, the island with the greatest housing demand. The state still owes another 1,300 acres to the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands under the terms of its reparations bill, known as Act 14, an investigation by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica has found.
Over the years, the U.S. government has provided about 900 acres as compensation for its unauthorized takings. But none of the land conveyed, almost all of it on Oahu, was suitable for residential use, according to DHHL. And the federal government still owes additional land under the Hawaiian Home Lands Recovery Act.
“Justice delayed is justice denied,” said former Gov. John Waihee, the only Native Hawaiian to hold that office and whose administration was instrumental in negotiating the Act 14 bill. “At some point, you can’t keep putting things off.”
The unmet obligations are among a number of key missteps by state and federal officials that have exacerbated the decadeslong failure of DHHL to fulfill its mission to Native Hawaiians.
As the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica reported in October, DHHL is failing to award homesteads in a timely fashion, as state law requires. The department has developed just 3,300 residential lots statewide since 1995, even as its residential waitlist has ballooned to 23,000. The strategy of building expensive single family subdivisions has left thousands of low-income and homeless Native Hawaiians behind in a state with one of the most acute affordable housing crises in the nation.
DHHL is now running out of real estate on Oahu, the state’s most populous — and popular — island. About half the residential applicants on the statewide waitlist want to live there, yet just 575 acres remain in the land trust that are suitable for housing. That’s enough to supply less than a third of the so-called waitlisters with homesteads under the current single-family model, according to an analysis of department data by the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica.
WHAT’S LEFT ON OAHU?
Nearly all the 575 acres available for residential homesteads on Oahu are located on the island’s west side. Green areas show the trust lands that the state has deemed suitable for residential development.
DHHL says it is adjusting to the land shortage by planning hundreds of multifamily units on Oahu over the next five years. And to get the additional lands it is owed, the department is currently pursuing settlements with state and federal officials, who say they intend to fulfill their obligations. DHHL plans to hire a private law firm to represent the interests of the trust since it both reports to the state and is negotiating with the state. Gov. David Ige, who as a former state representative participated in negotiating the 1995 reparations bill, said completing the land transfers is a priority for his administration.
Some members of Hawaii’s congressional delegation are calling for federal action.
“It’s long past time to settle old debts to the beneficiaries,” U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, said in a statement.
DHHL faces a number of administrative and logistical hurdles in its efforts to win developable property and accommodate the crushing demand for housing. Some past efforts to make the trust whole have failed, in part because of the poor quality of the lands being offered as compensation.
Advocates, lawmakers and former government officials say DHHL needs to reckon with the realities of limited land in a chain of islands.
Even if DHHL won all Oahu land in the settlements — an unlikely outcome — the trust would still be short of what it needs just to satisfy the current demand. The problem is compounded by a growing waitlist and the department’s chronic money woes, shortfalls that prompt the agency to lease some of its Oahu lands to commercial interests.
BROKEN PROMISES
Nowhere is the broken promise more apparent than on Oahu, where DHHL faces the greatest demand.
On paper, the department’s 203,000-acre land trust contains 7,800 acres on the island, which is defined by two large mountain ranges that create towering ridges, steep slopes, forests, beaches and sea cliffs. But in reality, just a fifth of that land is considered suitable for residential development. A full third of DHHL’s Oahu holdings are on terrain so rugged that it has been marked purely for conservation, including 1,400 acres of steep mountainside in the Hawaiian community of Waimanalo.
The state Legislature improved DHHL’s prospects in 1995 by passing Act 14, providing money and land to settle the trust’s claims against the state for past land abuses. For the next 20 years, DHHL received $30 million annually, helping underwrite the development of more homesteads. On the real estate side, however, the gains were less impressive, especially where the land was needed most.
Just 440 of the 16,000 acres that the state added under the law were on Oahu. And even then, not all the lands were suitable for residential development.
Waihee said the state had little land on the island at the time that was fit for homesteading. Under the program, beneficiaries — defined as those at least 50% Hawaiian — can apply for a 99-year land lease and then, upon award, either build or buy a home on the parcel. According to DHHL, the department developed about 660 lots on Oahu with the added property. The island’s residential waitlist nearly doubled during that time, to 11,000 people.
The federal Hawaiian Home Lands Recovery Act has done even less. Under the law, the only lands eligible for transfer to the trust are those considered by the U.S. government to be surplus property, such as a closed military base or research lab.
“The implementation has ended up essentially being useless,” said Abercrombie, who went on to serve as the state’s governor, in a recent interview.
A major land exchange that was announced to great fanfare in 1998 is instructive. Then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt traveled to Honolulu to join top Hawaii political leaders at Washington Place, the governor’s residence, to tout more than 900 acres pegged for transfer to the trust. The vast majority of that land was on Oahu, and officials applauded the proposed deal as delivering prime land for, among other things, residential homesteads and transitional housing for homeless Hawaiians. But 22 years later, DHHL says the land is not suited for residential use, citing a host of complications.
For example, 586 acres, which were once part of a West Oahu naval air station, would have involved prohibitive development costs and the requirement to involve surrounding landowners on infrastructure issues, according to DHHL. Some of that land is instead being leased to companies for such purposes as solar farms, generating revenue for the trust.
The department has rejected other offers for lands elsewhere on Oahu over the years, citing contamination or other factors.
Such rejections are part of the reason that the federal government still has outstanding obligations to the state, according to a spokesman for the U.S. Department of the Interior. Moreover, few surplus federal lands have become available in Hawaii since 2000.
DHHL, however, is currently evaluating an offer for an 80-acre lot in Ewa Beach on Oahu’s west side. The site of a former tsunami warning center can be used for residential development, which would make the potential deal the first under the federal law to help alleviate the residential land shortage on Oahu.
If all parties reach agreement, the transfer could fulfill the U.S. government’s commitment. In a nod to the limited utility of the lands obtained under prior settlement deals, the Interior spokesman said the Ewa Beach proposal could provide housing for hundreds of Hawaiian families and “has the potential to be one of the most important acquisitions by the trust in the last 25 years.”
LEASING LANDS TO GENERATE REVENUE
Other efforts to fix the problem have faltered.
DHHL has looked to the private market to purchase additional property, but besides lacking land, the department has lacked money.
In 29 of the 61 years since statehood, the department received no operating funds from the state, according to DHHL data. In 2012, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that the state is obligated to sufficiently fund the department, and it has fared much better since then. Still, it has received far less than what it deemed sufficient.
Over the past five years, for instance, DHHL has requested about $50 million for land acquisitions, according to the department, an average of $10 million annually. It got just about $7 million in total.
RELATED STORY
TO RECLAIM ANCESTRAL LAND, ALL NATIVE HAWAIIANS NEED IS A $300,000 MORTGAGE AND TO WAIT IN LINE FOR DECADES
https://www.staradvertiser.com/2020/10/24/hawaii-news/to-reclaim-ancestral-land-all-native-hawaiians-need-is-a-300000-mortgage-and-to-wait-in-line-for-decades/
A 100-year-old program created to provide Native Hawaiians — especially poor ones — land to live on after the U.S. annexed the islands is failing. Thousands have died waiting in line and even more can’t afford the mortgages they’d need.
The department is using the money to acquire a one-acre parcel in urban Honolulu, where it plans to restore two vacant apartment buildings as rentals for beneficiaries.
Cedric Duarte, a DHHL spokesman, said the department continues to look for possible land acquisitions but funding is a challenge.
As a result, the department leases some trust lands to generate revenue, a practice that DHHL considers essential for financial stability.
On Oahu, more than a quarter of the trust’s 7,800 acres are in the hands of nonbeneficiaries, producing nearly $12 million in annual revenue — roughly 17% of the department’s budget. The tenants pay to use the land for a wide range of purposes, from operating churches and other nonprofit organizations to running commercial enterprises.
The most lucrative lease, accounting for nearly $5 million annually, is for a West Oahu regional mall, Ka Makana Ali‘i. Sitting on roughly 70 acres transferred to DHHL under Act 14, the property was developed by DeBartolo Development and opened several years ago. The company is led by former San Francisco 49ers owner Edward J. DeBartolo Jr.
Beneficiaries have long criticized the practice.
Robin Danner, chair of the Sovereign Council of Hawaiian Homestead Associations, the largest beneficiary group in the state, said Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalaniana’ole, considered the father of the homesteading program when it was created a century ago, envisioned having Hawaiians running successful businesses on their land. “Did he intend for the 49ers to get my land to build a mall? No.”
Ka Makana Ali‘i said the 49ers have no ownership stake in the mall and noted the project — one of the region’s largest employers — is supporting beneficiaries and the community, such as through a $500,000 donation to build a park in an adjacent homestead development. “We are committed to uplifting the mission and vision” of the Hawaiian prince, said Stephanie England, Ka Makana Ali‘i general manager.
Still, with 11,000 beneficiaries on Oahu’s residential waitlist and 28,000 on statewide lists for residential, farming and ranching homesteads, advocates say DHHL should be using all lands to directly help Native Hawaiians. “You need every inch of those lands for homesteading purposes,” said Kekoa Enomoto, a Maui homesteader and chair of Pa‘upena Community Development Corp., a nonprofit that assists beneficiaries to build homes and self-sufficient communities.
The department, however, says it needs the money, and this week announced plans to expand its commercial leasing program.
Officials said they intend to seek legislation that would authorize DHHL to lease trust lands for the development of a resort-casino. The proposal must first be approved by the Hawaiian Homes Commission, which oversees DHHL, before going to Ige, who would then consider whether to include it as part of his package of measures submitted to the Legislature for the upcoming session, which starts in January.
“Given the impact of COVID-19 on our state’s economy, the department is proposing a bold measure that has proven successful for indigenous groups in generating critically needed revenue to improve the lives of their people,” said Tyler Iokepa Gomes, a senior official at DHHL, in a statement. “We are at a pivotal moment in the history of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act and resources to develop infrastructure and acquire lands will be needed to fulfill the vision of Prince Kuhio.”
State Rep. Sylvia Luke, who heads the House Finance Committee, raised concerns about placing a resort-casino on buildable trust land on Oahu, shrinking what is available for homesteads. “The priority should be to use developable land to reduce the waitlist,” she said in an interview.
Luke previously told the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica that the Legislature has appropriated record amounts for DHHL in recent years, approving close to what the governor sought for the agency. For his part, Ige has substantially pared DHHL’s annual requests, as he did with other departments, citing his duty to balance what the agencies sought with the state’s available resources.
Given how the coronavirus pandemic has battered the state’s tourist-driven economy and its tax revenues, additional funding for DHHL seems unlikely. Asked whether he intends to include money to purchase land in his coming budget requests to the Legislature, Ige said he would have to work with the department to identify priorities. But he said he would support acquisition money if it meant accelerating the slow pace of homestead awards.
‘THE STATE SHOULD FOLLOW THE LAW’
State policymakers are now scrambling for solutions.
State Sen. Maile Shimabukuro, chair of the Senate Committee on Hawaiian Affairs, believes the pending settlement with the state represents the most practical way for Hawaii to help DHHL address the land shortage. “If there’s going to be any kind of solution, land is more likely than cash,” she said, and “if they can find some on Oahu, that’s really the way to go.”
State House Speaker Scott Saiki agreed, saying “the state should follow the law and prioritize the islands where the needs are greatest.” He mentioned Oahu specifically and raised the possibility of lawmakers passing a bill that would give the Legislature the power to oversee negotiations.
State Sen. Gilbert Keith-Agaran, vice chair of the Senate’s Water and Land Committee, said lawmakers may need to pursue legislation outside of the settlement process to help alleviate the Oahu land shortage. One option could be to transfer or exchange lands held by other state entities to DHHL. “I don’t think we should foreclose any of these things,” he said. “The benefit to the entire state is that the more people we move off the waitlist and put into housing also helps alleviate our general shortage of housing.”
Ige was open to the idea but said any potential sites would have to be evaluated in consultation with the state agency holding the land.
“If there are lands that are suitable, we certainly would be looking at it and seeing whether it makes sense that those should be included to finish our commitment.”
Still, even under the most optimistic settlement scenario, DHHL will be short of the lands it needs to accommodate the growing waitlist. That has prompted advocates, legislators and others to urge the department to make more efficient use of its limited holdings. One potential solution: develop high-rise condos. “We have to go vertical,” said Kama Hopkins, who served on the Hawaiian Homes Commission from 2011 to 2014. “There’s no choice.”
Historically, the department has been reluctant to pursue the idea, in part because the beneficiary community is divided over the concept. Some question whether providing condos in a high-rise unit would fulfill the department’s constitutional obligation to provide homesteading lots to beneficiaries. “If you ask a Native Hawaiian on the waiting list what they want from DHHL, they will tell you they want their land,” said Duarte, the department spokesman.
Meanwhile, thousands continue to wait.
Waikiki resident Darrell Maielua, a 58-year-old district manager for a Hawaii laundry company, applied for a homestead on Oahu in 2008. Today, he is more than 7,000 deep on the island’s residential waitlist and has yet to get an offer.
He dreams of getting a house for his family of five and wants his granddaughter, who is not yet 2, to be able to run around outside in their yard. But he’s growing impatient with the department and the long waits for a homestead. “They’re just coming up with excuses,” he said of DHHL. “They’ve been doing that for 50 years.”
HELP US INVESTIGATE
The Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica are spending the year investigating the homesteading program for Native Hawaiians. We’d like to hear from you if you or someone you know:
>> Have bought into a newer subdivision under the program
>> Worked on construction projects within the trust subdivisions
If you have something to share with us, here’s how to do it:
>> Email Rob Perez at rperez@staradvertiser.com
>> Text or call him at 808-479-2109
Rob Perez is an investigative reporter at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. He has worked at newspapers in Florida, California, Hawaii and Guam, where he’s from.
Agnel Philip is a data reporter for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.
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Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Tuesday December 22, 2020
https://www.staradvertiser.com/2020/12/22/hawaii-news/kapolei-casino-seen-as-key-to-land-trusts-future/
Kapolei casino seen as key to land trust’s future
By Rob Perez
Given the severe budget deficits expected by the state over the next several years, a plan to develop a West Oahu casino is key to avoiding the prospect of more Native Hawaiians waiting decades for homesteads and thousands dying without getting onto the land, according to an executive with the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands.
Tyler Gomes, deputy to the department’s top executive, told the Hawaiian Homes Commission on Monday that a proposed resort casino on trust lands in Kapolei would generate desperately needed revenue for the trust to develop homestead lots at a quicker pace and acquire land needed to serve 28,000 Hawaiian beneficiaries seeking residential, ranching and farming homesteads statewide.
“This bill is the single greatest opportunity we have to put ourselves in the dominion of exercising economic self-sufficiency,” he said of proposed legislation to pursue the project. “Self-sufficiency is self-determination. Self-reliance is an act of sovereignty. This is a very real chance for Hawaiians to be in the driver’s seat on the economic engine for our own futures and to make sure it directly benefits and fulfills beneficiaries and helps us solve the problem of putting Hawaiians on lands.”
But several commissioners told Gomes and William J. Aila Jr., the department director and commission chairman, that they were caught off guard by the abruptness in which the controversial proposal emerged last week and needed more time to consult with beneficiaries and understand the ramifications of the proposed project.
“This seemed to have been something that just popped up overnight,” said Commissioner David Kaapu of the Big Island.
Gomes apologized for suddenly broaching the proposal just a month before the legislative session is scheduled to start, and said it was partly in response to the drastic budget cuts anticipated because of the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on Hawaii’s tourism-driven economy.
He also cited findings from a Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica investigation published in October that, according to Gomes, reflected universal agreement “that the status quo is not working for our department, the status quo is not working for our beneficiaries.”
He mentioned several key findings from the investigation, including that it would take DHHL 182 years to accommodate the 23,000 people who are awaiting residential homesteads and that at least 2,000 have died while on the wait-list without getting one.
Gomes said he challenged his staff to think outside the box to come up with one big move that could make a difference over the next 100 years and underscored that legislators will have no money to hand out in the coming session.
Gomes touted the expected economic benefits from the proposed casino, cited data to show concerns over increased crime are unfounded and noted that 75% of the gaming tax revenue would go toward lot development and the acquisition of land.
A story this past weekend from the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica highlighted the severe residential land shortage on Oahu and how land transferred to the trust by the state and federal governments since the 1990s to settle past claims has done little to alleviate the problem.
Referring to the land shortage, Gomes told the commissioners, “At the very base level, we simply do not have enough developable residential land to solve our need.”
The casino resort, which would cost a minimum of $50 million to develop, is expected to create an estimated 3,000 to 8,000 jobs in Hawaii, including managerial positions, and it would be structured so that training opportunities are available to help trust beneficiaries land careers in the gaming industry, according to Gomes.
The commission is scheduled to vote on the proposal today, and Monday’s discussion among the nine-member body reflected a lack of a consensus. Several said they needed more time to fully evaluate such a significant proposal, noting that the feedback they’ve received from trust beneficiaries — those at least 50% Hawaiian — thus far has been overwhelmingly negative.
“I’m not sure there’s any support for this bill, actually, to tell you the truth,” said Pauline Namuo, a commissioner from Oahu.
Randy Awo, a Maui commissioner, said more time was needed to consult beneficiaries, but recognized the reality of the department’s dire fiscal situation. “The evidence is all around us that the cavalry is not coming anytime soon,” he said.
Several commissioners expressed support for the measure.
One of them, Dennis Neves of Kauai, responded to legislators who already are speaking against the proposal. He noted that the department has received appropriations far short of what it sought, and wondered how the DHHL was supposed to make up the difference, which has been in the tens of millions of dollars annually in recent years. “If you don’t give us the money, where do you think we’re getting it from?” he asked.
Yet if the casino project is done right, Neves added, “we could take care of our problems in a very short period of time.”
Gomes said a conservative estimate on the low end on how much a single Hawaii casino would generate is $30 million annually, but he also added that there are billion-dollar operations on the mainland.
He urged commissioners to approve the proposed bill, which would carve out an exemption to Hawaii’s law that currently makes the state one of only two — the other is Utah — that prohibit gambling. The measure would authorize only one resort casino on the trust’s commercial land in Kapolei. An actual site has not been identified.
But Gomes said the trust lands in Kapolei designated for commercial use — a designation that resulted from beneficiary consultation when the agency’s Oahu island plan was last updated — cannot be used for residential homesteading. So the question is what type of commercial use should go on those lands, he added.
If the commission passes the measure, the proposal would be sent to Gov. David Ige for his consideration. If Ige approves, the bill would be included in the package of measures he intends to submit to the Legislature for the upcoming session, which starts Jan. 20.
Ige was not available for comment Monday.
If the bill makes it to the Legislature, Gomes said he expects to see millions of dollars spent on lobbying from out of state to keep gambling out of Hawaii. The state provides a steady stream of visitors to Las Vegas to gamble in the casinos there.
But DHHL doesn’t intend to sit idly by if mainland interests try to exert their lobbying muscle. If the bill is introduced, the department is looking to tap consultants and lobbyists to help promote the bill, according to Gomes. “That’s not a detail we’ve ignored.”
Gomes cautioned commissioners against waiting until 2022 to seek the introduction of the legislation. Now that the idea has been floated publicly, the mainland interests who oppose the proposal would have a year to lobby against passage and “essentially buy its failure,” Gomes said.
“A year from now we will lose on this at the Legislature,” he said. “Guaranteed.”
The department received more than 100 written testimonies to the proposal, and over 90% were in opposition, according to DHHL. But only about 10% were from beneficiaries, the agency said.
Even though today’s commission meeting is being held remotely because of the pandemic, state Sen. Kurt Fevella, whose district is in West Oahu, has put out a call for protesters — urged to wear face masks and maintain social distancing — to show up this morning at DHHL’s headquarters in Kapolei to wave signs.
While most of the written testimony opposed the casino idea, there were voices of support.
Kali Watson, a former Hawaiian Homes chairman, was among those. “In the past, and more so in these pandemic times, the state has not and will not be able to provide sufficient funding to truly make a difference in significantly reducing DHHL’s waiting list,” Watson wrote.
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Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Tuesday December 22, 2020 Updated 11:11 pm
https://www.staradvertiser.com/2020/12/22/hawaii-news/kapolei-casino-seen-as-key-to-land-trusts-future/
Department of Hawaiian Home Lands to help with down payments
By Rob Perez
Unable to keep pace with the soaring demand for housing, the state agency that manages a homesteading program for Native Hawaiians is taking a radical step in a new direction.
It plans to start offering financial help to eligible Hawaiians seeking to buy Oahu housing, but the homes would be off of homesteading land.
Under a pilot program approved Monday, the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands will use $1.5 million to provide a limited number of Hawaiians on an Oahu wait-list with down payment assistance to purchase fee-simple homes — you own the land — that are not within established homesteading communities on the island.
Those getting the help would then be removed from the wait-list, which now numbers 11,000 on Oahu. If the pilot program proves successful, DHHL intends to expand it.
Monday’s action marks a major shift in the way the program has operated for most of its 100-year history and is the first time DHHL is investing in housing not within the 203,000-acre land trust Congress authorized a century ago to save a then-dying race. It also comes after a Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica investigation showed the department’s approach of developing expensive single-family homes in large subdivisions is leaving thousands of low-income Hawaiians behind and is eating away at the trust’s severe land shortage on Oahu.
“I think this is an excellent idea,” state Sen. Maile Shimabukuro, who heads the Senate Committee on Hawaiian Affairs, said Monday in an interview.
This will be only the second time in the program’s history in which trust beneficiaries — those at least half Hawaiian — have been able to buy housing off of homestead lands with state assistance. In 1965 the state allowed $10,000 loans from its retirement system for beneficiaries to purchase homes on or off trust land. That law no longer is on the books.
The pilot program is intended to provide an an additional way to tackle the intractable problem of addressing a growing residential wait-list on Oahu, the island with the greatest demand but where the trust has the least amount of land.
Until now the main way for applicants to get off the list was to wait, sometimes decades, for their names to be called and then be awarded 99-year leases for land on which they would build or buy a home.
But DHHL’s pace of developing homestead lots has failed to keep pace with demand, partly because of chronic funding shortfalls for construction. The agency also has focused since the mid-1990s on developing subdivisions with developer-built houses too expensive for many wait-listers.
The pilot program is intended to help wait-listers who financially are almost ready to purchase homes but need help with the down payment. The details of the program still have to be hashed out, but the department says the wait-lister would have to put money into the transaction.
Proponents of the proposal said the money could help more wait-listers than the same amount devoted to developing homestead lots because the cost of installing infrastructure is so high.
According to the basic framework of the program, the trust would be repaid its down payment contribution if the home eventually is sold. The department also would have the right to purchase the home, and that property would be added to DHHL’s inventory of available homesteading lands.
“It would allow us to grow the trust over time one parcel at a time,” Jobie Masagatani, a DHHL executive, said at a November meeting of the Hawaiian Homes Commission, which oversees the department.
But just like with the turnkey subdivision strategy, the down payment one will help wait-listers who largely have the means — or fall just short — to purchase homes. Those who don’t — low-income and homeless wait-listers — would continue to be left behind. The department, however, says lower-income wait-listers still would have access to more affordable options, such as vacant lots on which they can build homes suited to their budgets.
Owning a home fee-simple would provide beneficiaries more flexibility, allowing them to pass on their homes to their children or others who don’t have the required blood requirements under the homesteading program.
The pilot program initially is not expected to help large numbers because the cost of housing on Oahu is among the most expensive in the country. The median price for a previously owned single-family home in November was $872,500.
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Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Tuesday December 22, 2020 breaking news Updated 1:15 PM
https://www.staradvertiser.com/2020/12/22/breaking-news/hawaiian-homes-commission-oks-plan-to-pursue-development-of-casino-resort-in-kapolei/
Hawaiian Homes Commission OKs plan to pursue development of casino resort in Kapolei
By Rob Perez
The Hawaiian Homes Commission today narrowly approved a proposal to pursue the development of a casino resort on lands set aside for Native Hawaiians in Kapolei.
By a 5-4 vote, the commission intends to forward to Gov. David Ige a proposed bill that would permit the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, which manages the 203,000-acre land trust for a homesteading program, to lease trust lands for a single casino on property designated for commercial purposes in the West Oahu community.
If Ige approves it, the measure would be introduced as part of the governor’s package of bills submitted to the Legislature.
The proposal was opposed by some commissioners mainly because of what they said was insufficient information to evaluate it and because the proposal had not been discussed first with trust beneficiaries — those at least 50% Hawaiian — before it abruptly was floated last week by the department.
But Chairman William J. Aila Jr. said any delay beyond the coming legislative session likely would doom the proposal.
The action was sought in response to a recent Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica investigation that identified a status quo that is leaving thousands of low-income Native Hawaiians behind, and because of the expected budget cuts facing state government due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Department officials and many others said the status quo was unacceptable, but finding the huge sums needed to develop more homesteading lots to get beneficiaries onto the land on a more timely basis has been daunting.
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Honolulu Star-Advertiser Wednesday December 23, 2020
https://www.staradvertiser.com/2020/12/23/hawaii-news/proposed-kapolei-casino-survives-narrow-vote-to-move-forward/
Proposed Kapolei casino survives narrow vote to move forward
By Rob Perez
A controversial proposal to develop a casino resort on lands set aside for Native Hawaiians in Kapolei survived a narrow vote Tuesday at the Hawaiian Homes Commission and now heads to Gov. David Ige for his consideration.
By a 5-4 margin, the commission approved a measure that asks the Legislature to adopt a bill allowing development of a single casino on a commercial parcel that is part of a land trust created a century ago to return Hawaiians to their native lands.
The bill ran into resistance because the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, manager of the 203,000-acre homesteading trust, abruptly floated the measure last week without vetting it first through trust beneficiaries, who are those at least 50% Hawaiian.
After DHHL unveiled the draft measure a week ago, the panel was briefed for the first time Monday and was asked to vote on it the next day. But several commissioners said they didn’t have enough information to make such an important decision, felt rushed and underscored the need to consult beneficiaries before making the call.
“For me what remains are many, many more questions that (are) unanswered,” said Maui commissioner Randy Awo, who joined three of his colleagues in voting against the proposal.
Big Island commissioner David Kaapu, who also voted no, cited “huge concerns,” including turning over too much control to a newly created gaming panel whose five members would be appointed by the governor to license and regulate the casino developer and operator.
Patricia Teruya, an Oahu commissioner, said the process was moving too quickly to make a “massive decision” for beneficiaries and the state. “I do not want to rush into this,” she said.
Molokai commissioner Zachary Helm was the fourth no vote.
But William J. Aila Jr., citing a variety of circumstances, warned the commission that a delay beyond next month’s legislative session likely would doom the proposal and leave the department stuck in a situation in which huge financial shortfalls undermine its mission to get Hawaiians onto the land in a timely basis. And no alternatives have been offered to fill those gaps, department officials said.
“If we wait, it’s going to be next to impossible,” Aila said. “This is the time — or there’ll be no time.”
Postponing the matter for a year would allow the Las Vegas casino industry to mount a sustained lobbying campaign to kill the measure, department officials warned. Las Vegas is a popular destination for Hawaii residents wanting to gamble.
Also, the chances of getting legislative approval for something so controversial is unlikely in an election year, Aila said. The majority of the Legislature would be up for election in 2022.
Aila urged his fellow commissioners to advance the measure, saying it can be amended as the process unfolds and beneficiaries are consulted. But he acknowledged the proposal was a “very last-minute initiative.”
In briefing the commission Monday, Aila’s deputy, Tyler Gomes, justified taking such a bold step on short notice by citing the October findings of a Honolulu Star-Advertiser and ProPublica investigation that he said showed the status quo is not working for the department and beneficiaries.
And even commissioners who opposed the casino measure acknowledged that DHHL cannot expect anyone else to bail them out, emphasizing that funding shortfalls have plagued the program for decades. “Nobody is coming to help us,” said Awo, the Maui commissioner.
If the governor does not include the casino bill in his legislative package, DHHL said it might ask a legislator to introduce the proposal. Ige could not be reached for comment Tuesday afternoon.
One legislator said he intends to introduce a similar bill even if Ige opts not to submit the DHHL one. “It’s an opportunity to have more voices participate in the discussion,” said Sen. Jarrett Keohokalole, whose father is a beneficiary. Keohokalole said he supports the DHHL measure.
Hawaii is one of only two states where commercial gambling is not allowed. Utah is the other.
The bill would essentially create a carve-out to the state prohibition and authorize the appointment of a gaming panel that would issue a 10-year license to a company to develop and operate the resort casino. Hawaiian Homes would grant the land lease for the site, which has not been identified yet.
Once the facility is open, it is expected to generate conservatively at least $30 million annually for the department, and potentially much more, according to DHHL. The bulk of the money would go toward lot development and land acquisitions so the department can more quickly issue homestead leases and pare a wait-list that now totals around 28,000 beneficiaries. Some have languished for decades on the list, and more than 2,000 have died without getting 99-year homestead leases.
The department estimates that at least $4.5 billion would be needed in the years ahead to install infrastructure on homesteading lots for the 28,000 wait-listers. Growth in the wait-list would add to the tab.
The casino proposal is expected to face rough waters at the Legislature, just like other gaming measures in prior years. “Realistically, I think it would be long odds that something like this could pass,” Senate President Ron Kouchi said recently.
House Speaker Scott Saiki told the Star-Advertiser on Tuesday that he has reservations about the proposal. Saiki said he is concerned that allowing casino gaming in Kapolei might trigger the federal law that would allow Indian tribes to open gambling operations in Hawaii.
The department received more than 100 written testimonies to the casino proposal, and over 90% opposed the measure.
A handful of opponents on Tuesday came to DHHL’s main office in Kapolei to wave Hawaiian flags and signs in protest.
Steven Thomas of Mililani said DHHL is not fulfilling its mission, but running itself like a business instead. “This is just another example of the double-cross of this department,” he said.
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Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Wednesday December 23, 2020
[This article appeared as "breaking news" Tuesday December 22 at 12:43 AM on the newspaper's website, and then appeared on page A4 of the print edition on Wednesday December 23, 2020 but not on the online website]
https://www.staradvertiser.com/2020/12/22/breaking-news/hawaiian-homes-commission-oks-plan-to-pursue-development-of-casino-resort-in-kapolei/
Group rallies against casino proposal before Department of Hawaiian Home Lands headquarters
By Nina Wu
A group opposing the proposed casino on trust lands in Kapolei held a rally Tuesday morning in front of the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands headquarters.
Approximately 25 protesters from Waimanalo to Laie held a prayer, then marched around the corner to wave Hawaiian flags and signs along Kapolei Parkway at Kinoiki Street that said, “No future in a casino,” “Family before profit” and “Delayed justice is no justice,” which elicited honks from drivers passing by.
“This is going to be a stab in every single family that calls Kapolei, Makakilo, Ewa Beach, Nanakuli and the West side, Leeward Coast, their home,” said state Sen. Kurt Favella, who organized the rally. “First of all, the casino brings, for a fact, drama to the community. It’s going to be bad elements. We want our keiki to live in Hawaii, the way that we grew up.”
A casino is bad news, according to Favella, and brings with it gambling addictions, crime, substance abuse and, with that, sex trafficking, adding that it was disappointing that local police and psychologists were never consulted.
“Kapolei is the piko of the Leeward side because it’s about family,” he said. “This is the new city that is nourishing the new young generations of families. Why would we want to do this? It is just appalling that they would do something like this here.”
The rally was held outside of DHHL headquarters prior to the nine-member Hawaiian Homes Commission’s narrow approval Tuesday afternoon of a proposal, 5-4, authorizing the development of a casino resort in Kapolei.
The proposal goes to Gov. David Ige and, if he approves it, would be included in his package of bills for the state Legislature to consider.
Many of the protesters, who brought their keiki, said it was time that DHHL did its job and actually focused on giving Hawaiians homes rather than catering to developers.
Favella said a better solution is to just give Hawaiians their deed.
“Let them build their own home on their own land that was given to them by Prince Kuhio and the rest of our alii,” he said. “That’s it. That’s a simple fix. Give the people their land, not leases.”
Kamalani Kaliikuli of Laie agreed.
“I don’t want no casino,” said Kaliikuli. “There’s been a big problem for illegal gambling and drug trafficking already with a lot of the homesteads, and I just want to prevent any more from coming in. It’s not the right answer, it’s not the right time. People need homes.”
Councilwoman Heidi Tsuneyoshi offered her support to the protesters.
“This is a long line of generational trauma and land dealings that haven’t been open and transparent for the beneficiaries,” she said, adding that this particular decision on this land comes after a land swap that happened for the rail operation center. “They said the swap was so important because the land they were going to get was in the heart of Kapolei, was perfect for people to have housing. … To hear that already they’re talking about a casino instead of housing is so disappointing.”
When that resolution was brought up last year, supporters said there would be an open discussion with the beneficiaries, but now a decision is being made before the holidays, she said.
“It’s obviously not something that the people here are going to benefit from,” she said. “There’s no indication on how revenue is going to be brought directly to the people.”
Steven Thomas of Mililani said the DHHL is not fulfilling its promise or mission or putting kanaka on the land, but running itself like a business instead.
“This is just another example of the double-cross of this department,” he said, adding that the department should be dissolved.
Numerous homestead leaders also said they were never informed or consulted about the casino.
“For me, self-determination shouldn’t be at an executive or administrative level,” said Iwalani Laybon- McBrayer, a Kapolei homesteader and chairwoman of the nonprofit Homestead Housing Authority. “It should be at the grassroots level of the beneficiaries.”
Building the casino might cause problems already exacerbated by the pandemic, she said.
“I think we can generate money and income other ways, and it should definitely not be controlled by a department,” she said. “It should be inclusive, with us engaged.”
Mokihana Waa-Komoda of Kaululokahai, a homestead community in East Kapolei, pointed out that illegal game rooms around the isles bring crime and take advantage of the desperate. Some, she said, are gambling for food stamps and diapers.
“I just don’t want it,” she said, “and not in my Kapolei.
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Hawaii News Now [3 TV stations in Hawaii] Wednesday December 23, 2020
20-minute interview of Governor Ige by Sunrise News Anchor Grace Lee
between 7:30-8:00 AM
Segment about the casino proposal, in its entirety
https://www.staradvertiser.com/2020/12/22/breaking-news/hawaiian-homes-commission-oks-plan-to-pursue-development-of-casino-resort-in-kapolei/
Q by Grace Lee: The Hawaiian Homes Commission has voted to move forward with a plan to build a casino resort in Kapolei. Do you support this?
A by Gov Ige: I don’t support gambling. I really don’t believe that it’s appropriate for our community. I appreciate the Hawaiian Homes Commission, looking at ways to get additional resources. We have developing homestead lands for revenue purposes.
I do think the Ka Makana Alii shopping center out in Kapolei has been a good start and we need to look at other ways to generate revenues and income for the Hawaiian Homes program. But I don’t support casino gambling. The costs to our community is high and really, it would be changing the nature of our hospitality industry here in the islands.
Q by Grace Lee: Does that mean the plan is effectively dead?
A by Gov Ige: I’m certain as in past that anyone can introduce bills and I’m certain that someone would introduce the measure and it would be presented to the Legislature. The difference, primarily, would be whether it would be a proposal that’s fully supported by the administration or not, and clearly, I do not support casino gambling here in the islands.
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Honolulu Star-Advertiser Thursday December 24, 2020 [Christmas Eve]
https://www.staradvertiser.com/2020/12/24/hawaii-news/casino-plan-underscores-worsening-problems-with-homesteading-program/
Casino plan underscores worsening problems with homesteading program
By Rob Perez, Honolulu Star-Advertiser, and Agnel Philip, ProPublica
This fall, as the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands faced mounting criticism over its handling of a century-old program to return Native Hawaiians to their ancestral lands, top officials asked their staff to come up with bold solutions.
The Star-Advertiser and ProPublica had reported in October that DHHL was failing to meet a crushing demand for housing. Under state law, anyone who is at least half Hawaiian and 18 or older is considered a beneficiary of a state-controlled land trust and entitled to get a homestead in a “prompt and efficient manner.” The department had developed just 3,300 residential lots statewide since 1995, though, while its residential waitlist ballooned to 23,000. If DHHL continued at the same pace, it would take 182 years to accommodate the so-called waitlisters, some of whom have waited for decades, the news organizations reported.
Shaken by the reporting, Tyler Gomes, deputy to the department’s top executive, challenged his staffers to “think outside of the box” to come up with one big move that could make a difference over the next 100 years. On Monday, at a meeting of the Hawaiian Homes Commission, he outlined their proposal: a resort-casino on Native Hawaiian land.
The casino project, he argued, could generate the revenue the department needs to build more housing at a quicker clip amid a worsening fiscal climate. The pandemic has battered Hawaii’s tourist-driven economy, and state agencies are bracing for budget cuts.
“The status quo is not working for our department,” Gomes told commissioners, citing the investigation by the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica. “The status quo is not working for our beneficiaries,” the group of people who are at least half Hawaiian and entitled to homesteads.
Several commissioners pushed back, saying that they were caught off guard by the abruptness of the proposal and needed more time to consult with beneficiaries and understand the ramifications of the proposed project. On Tuesday, however, the commission narrowly approved the measure by a 5-4 vote.
Proponents acknowledged it was a “last-minute initiative,” but they urged policymakers to support legislation that would authorize the development of a single casino on a commercial parcel that is part of the land trust created a century ago to return Hawaiians to their native lands. (A casino cannot be built without support of the Legislature, which meets beginning in January. Gambling is currently against the law in the state.)
“If we wait, it’s going to be next to impossible” to get a bill passed, said commission Chairman William J. Aila Jr. “This is the time — or they’ll be no time.”
A spokesperson for Gov. David Ige, however, said on Wednesday that he was opposed to gambling in Hawaii, and legislative leaders expressed concerns about DHHL’s proposal.
Nevertheless, the casino measure underscores a growing realization within DHHL that the homesteading program’s problems are worse than previously thought — and far from being fixed. While state and federal watchdogs have long criticized the department, the investigation by the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica marked the first time DHHL’s development strategy has been extensively examined, and many of the findings were new — even to DHHL.
Beneficiaries apply for a 99-year land lease and then, upon award, either build or buy a home on the parcel. But by focusing on developing expensive single-family subdivisions, the department has left thousands of low-income and homeless Native Hawaiian behind while exhausting large portions of its limited land holdings. Officials are now scrambling to explore radical ideas to reduce the waitlist, even as hundreds continue to join each year.
This week, DHHL officials said a casino could generate at least $30 million annually for the department, and potentially much more. The bulk of the money would go toward housing development and land acquisitions.
The proposal has proved divisive in the beneficiary community though, and some Native Hawaiian advocates are speaking out against it.
On Tuesday, approximately 25 protesters demonstrated outside the headquarters of the Hawaiian Homes Commission. They held a prayer, then marched and waved Hawaiian flags and signs that said: “No future in a casino,” “Family before profit” and “Delayed justice is no justice.” Drivers passing by honked their horns.
“I don’t want no casino,” Kamalani Kaliikuli of Laie said. “There’s been a big problem for illegal gambling and drug trafficking already with a lot of the homesteads, and I just want to prevent any more from coming in. It’s not the right answer; it’s not the right time. People need homes.”
The department received more than 100 written testimonies to the casino proposal, and over 90% opposed the measure.
But commissioners who approved the proposal this week said DHHL has few options left to fulfill its mission.
In response to critical lawmakers, Dennis Neves of Kauai noted that the department has received appropriations far short of what it sought and wondered how DHHL was supposed to make up the difference, which has been in the tens of millions of dollars annually in recent years. “If you don’t give us the money,” he asked of the legislators, “where do you think we’re getting it from?”
Even commissioners who opposed the casino measure acknowledged that DHHL cannot expect anyone else to bail it out. Randy Awo, a Maui commissioner, said more time was needed to consult beneficiaries but recognized the reality of the department’s dire fiscal situation. “The evidence is all around us that the cavalry is not coming any time soon,” he said.
Applicants must contend with long waits, sometimes lasting decades, before their names are called and they are offered a 99-year lease. In fact, more than 2,000 beneficiaires have already died without receiving a homestead, the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica found.
On Monday, the commission approved a separate proposal aimed at addressing the waitlist problem on Oahu, the state’s most populous island, while DHHL continues to develop subdivisions and other housing.
In a dramatic departure from the current model, DHHL will launch a $1.5 million pilot program to provide down-payment assistance to help eligible Hawaiians purchase housing on Oahu on the open market, not on land specifically set aside for homesteading.
The details of the program still have to be hashed out, but the department says it’s targeting waitlisters who are almost ready to purchase homes but need help with the down payment.
As the news organizations reported, the situation is most dire on Oahu, where the department doesn’t have enough land to satisfy housing demand. About half of those on the statewide residential waitlist, roughly 11,000 people, want to live there. But just 575 acres remain in the land trust that are suitable for housing — enough to supply less than a third of the waitlisters under DHHL’s current development model.
Supporters of the pilot program said using these DHHL funds for down payment assistance was a faster and more efficient way to help waitlisters than developing homestead lots, which take years to build and require costly infrastructure.
According to the basic framework of the program, the trust would be repaid its contribution if the home is sold. The department also would have the right to purchase the home, and that property would be added to DHHL’s inventory of available homesteading lands.
“It would allow us to grow the trust over time, one parcel at a time,” said Jobie Masagatani, a DHHL executive.
If the pilot program proves successful, DHHL intends to expand it.
“I think this is an excellent idea,” said state Sen. Maile Shimabukuro, who heads the Senate Committee on Hawaiian Affairs.
It is not, however, a panacea. Just like the subdivision strategy, the down payment initiative will mostly help waitlisters who have the means — or fall just short — to purchase homes. Those who don’t would likely continue to languish. The department says lower-income waitlisters still would have access to more affordable options, such as vacant lots on which they can build homes suited to their budgets.
Help us investigate
ProPublica and the Honolulu Star-Advertiser are spending the year investigating the homesteading program for Native Hawaiians. The Star-Advertiser is a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network. We’d like to hear from you if you or someone you know:
Have bought into a newer subdivision under the program
Worked on construction projects within the trust subdivisions
If you have something to share with us, here’s how to do it:
Email Rob at rperez@staradvertiser.com; text or call Rob at 808-479-2109
Rob Perez is an investigative reporter at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. He has worked at newspapers in Florida, California, Hawaii and Guam, where he’s from.
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https://www.staradvertiser.com/2020/12/26/editorial/our-view/editorial-alternative-from-dhhl/
Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Saturday December 26, 2020
[Saturdays online only, no print edition]
Editorial: Alternative from Department of Hawaiian Home Lands
For most of its 100-year history, the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands has limited the reach of its investment in housing reserved for Native Hawaiians to a total of 203,000 acres that Congress authorized as a land trust a century ago. But due to various stumbling blocks, while this homesteading program now has 8,400 residential lessees, its wait-list includes some 23,000 eligible beneficiaries.
As the state agency tasked with managing the program, DHHL clearly is failing to develop homestead lots at a pace that meets demand. So, a new plan to start offering financial help to beneficiaries — those who are at least 50% Hawaiian — seeking to buy housing situated outside of homesteading acreage, seems a sensible move.
Approved last week by the Hawaiian Homes Commission, the initiative allows DHHL to remove a set count of beneficiaries from the wait-list by providing them with some down-payment assistance to purchase fee-simple homes (the buyer owns the land) on Oahu — the island with the greatest demand but where the trust has the least amount of acreage suitable for housing.
Should these properties be sold, DHHL would have the right to purchase the homes, and the properties would be added to DHHL’s too-tight inventory. About half the residential applicants on the statewide wait-list want to live on Oahu, yet just 575 acres here are suitable for housing.
Given Oahu’s sky-high housing market — the median resale price for single-family home was $872,500 in November — the $1.5 million pilot program is not expected to help a large number of beneficiaries. But getting some people off the wait-list could help shorten the wait for others.
So far, the main way to get off the wait-list has been for a beneficiary to wait — in some cases, for decades — until it’s their turn to accept a 99-year lease for land on which they can build or buy a home. Since the mid-1990s, DHHL has also focused on developing subdivisions with developer-built houses, a too-expensive proposition for many beneficiaries.
Compared to a controversial proposal backed by the commission last week — a plan to seek the Legislature’s support for envisioned development of a casino resort on trust land in Kapolei — this one is more realistic. It creates an immediate opportunity for DHHL to further chip away at the obstacles that prevent it from fully realizing its mission: to manage the Hawaiian Home Lands trust effectively and to develop and deliver lands to Native Hawaiians.
** Ken Conklin's online comment:
Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920 was unconstitutional violation of 14th Amendment back then and still today. Lawsuits to abolish it were dismissed on technicalities of standing and political question, but never adjudicated on merits.
DHHL racial ghettos are bad enough; this editorial supports helping them metastasize like a spreading cancer -- person with 50% native blood gets DHHL help to buy fee simple house outside the ghetto, then when sold DHHL gets first dibs to buy it and make it DHHL property leasehold with racial restriction adding new land to ghetto.
Editorial distracts attention from main item in DHHL proposal: casino in Kapolei.
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