Summary
The video is an in-depth interview between Jason Schwartz and Cara Flores, two candidates running for the Kahului seat on the Maui County Council in 2022. The primary focus of their discussion is the severe housing crisis in Maui, which has escalated to emergency levels, creating significant hardships for local residents. Cara, with 15 years of experience in housing and real estate, explains the complexities of Maui’s housing shortage, emphasizing the intertwined issues of homelessness, skyrocketing housing costs, and lack of affordable rental options. The conversation explores possible solutions such as legislative action, fair housing enforcement, emergency housing projects, and innovative housing models like mixed-use developments and land trusts. Cara advocates for housing to be treated as a human right rather than a commodity, pushing for more government involvement and creative partnerships with private landowners. They also touch on related topics including economic diversification, food security, the impact of climate change, and the critical role of public engagement in political processes. The dialogue concludes with a call for community involvement, hope, and resilience in addressing Maui’s housing and quality-of-life challenges.
Highlights
- [01:29] Cara’s motivation for running: The housing crisis has made it impossible for normal people to find affordable homes or rentals on Maui.
- [06:19] The county’s housing report demands 5,500 new homes in 5 years, but actual needs may be far greater due to overcrowding and other factors.
- [10:18] Temporary housing solutions are costly and being dismantled, reflecting a lack of sustainable emergency housing strategies.
- [15:36] Proposed solutions include deed-restricted housing for owner-occupants and disincentivizing speculative property holding to free up supply.
- [25:09] ️ Housing as a human right: Advocating for government-developed mixed-income housing and land trusts to ensure affordability and long-term residency.
- [32:14] ⚖️ Enforcement of fair housing laws could prevent discrimination against families with children, improving access to rentals.
- [44:20] Importance of food security and local agriculture as part of economic diversification and resilience on the island.
Key Insights
- [02:07] Housing Crisis Impact on Community Stability: Cara highlights how the housing shortage leads to teacher shortages and disrupts families, showing how the crisis affects public services and education, not just individual housing situations. This underscores housing as a foundational issue with broad community consequences.
- [06:53] Complexity of the Crisis Requires Multifaceted Solutions: There is no single solution to Maui’s housing problem. Cara stresses the need for both immediate actions (like fair housing enforcement and freeing up existing units) and long-term strategies (building affordable units, legislative changes), emphasizing integrated policy approaches.
- [15:36] ️ Balancing Supply and Demand Through Policy Innovation: Cara’s proposal to restrict new developments to owner-occupants and require residency verification aims to curb speculative buying, a major driver of inflated housing costs, while increasing supply. This reflects a broader trend in housing policy to protect local residents from displacement.
- [25:09] ⚖️ Reframing Housing as a Human Right Challenges Market Norms: The discussion on shifting from housing as a commodity to a human right highlights the tension between capitalist market forces and social equity. Cara argues that government-led solutions, such as land trusts and mixed-income developments, are necessary because market-driven efforts alone won’t prioritize community needs.
- [32:14] Enforcement of Fair Housing Laws Could Improve Access: The lack of enforcement in Maui allows landlords to discriminate, especially against families with children. Implementing enforcement mechanisms, such as secret shopper programs, could help ensure fairer rental practices and improve housing access equity.
- [44:20] Food Security as Part of Holistic Community Resilience: Cara connects housing stability with food security, advocating for local agriculture and home gardening to reduce dependence on imports. This approach enhances community self-sufficiency amid disruptions like pandemics or climate events, reflecting a comprehensive view of sustainability.
- [48:36] Community Engagement and Youth Involvement Are Critical: Both Cara and Jason acknowledge the importance of public pressure on government officials and the challenge of engaging younger generations in politics. They emphasize educating the public about housing issues and encouraging voting as essential to driving change, underscoring the democratic process in addressing systemic issues.
Summary of Core Concepts
- Emergency Housing Crisis: Maui faces an acute shortage of affordable housing, affecting all demographics and leading to homelessness and overcrowding.
- Legislative and Policy Solutions: Effective responses require both local council action and state/federal legislative changes, including funding, zoning reforms, and enforcement of housing laws.
- Housing as a Human Right: Shifting perspectives from profit-driven housing markets to government-supported, resident-focused housing models like land trusts and mixed-use developments.
- Fair Housing Enforcement: Addressing discrimination in rentals, especially against families with children, can improve housing access.
- Economic Diversification and Food Security: Beyond housing, building a sustainable local economy and food supply is vital for Maui’s resilience.
- Public Engagement: Active civic participation and voter involvement are necessary to hold elected officials accountable and implement meaningful policies.
- Sustainability and Climate Change: Integrating renewable energy policies and resilient infrastructure planning is crucial for Maui’s long-term viability.
Transcript
00:00
[Music] aloha everyone my name is jason schwartz we’re here at the neutral zone mauineutralzone.com we’re on kaku radio 88.5 fm and we’re on akaku maui community used to be tv now we call it media you can find it up on youtube i have a very very special guest today i am sitting here with cara flores cara is running for the kahului seat of the maui county council here in 2022 some of you might say well jason aren’t you running for that same seat and i must say yes i am but i’m not running against
00:56
anyone i’m running because i think i’m a good candidate with a lot to offer and when i met cara i said uh here’s a lady that also has a lot to say and a lot to offer why not have her on the show so the public can see her and see me all the time but see her and get to know her up close and personal welcome cara welcome to the show oh thank you so much i appreciate you having me on um i guess you know anytime i ask a question realize i want you to say well how would you answer that you know if
01:29
anything else you know because uh why are you running what made you decide to to run this time um the housing crisis has gotten to a point where normal people cannot get housing anymore like for rent for sale it’s just become really impossible i have three kids at three different levels of school so elementary middle school and high school and um over the last few years i know there’s been six teachers that have left that i know personally because of the cost of living and housing specifically um so i just you
02:07
know i’ve been doing housing for 15 years and i really like you know working with first-time homebuyers i like to help people find rentals and it’s become impossible for people to do that and i just see the trajectory we’re on is getting worse and i spent a lot of time thinking about it considering it it’s a big job i did feel a very great sense of responsibility to do something because i do have a depth of knowledge about housing specifically and i’ve done a lot of research and been
02:45
on a lot of panels and with solving housing crisis issues and i’ve read through our county’s report that they paid for about solving the housing crisis and i feel like i understand it enough to implement some of the solutions and i really just want to see that happen so that people can have housing and the solutions that you hear proposed um you like i recognize that homelessness and not enough housing are kind of two separate issues but they sort of interweave and the public gets very confused
03:25
um you’re talking about i’m guessing we have an extraordinary deficiency in the number of affordable places to buy and rent and to catch up is an extraordinary feat the county has proposed a few things like how about with mike victorino taking credit for that mike atherton and wykapoo is going to have 1500 houses 500 affordable we don’t know what that price is yet but that’s going to be years away and millions of dollars away and what about all the other people that are in the meantime
04:08
need there’s no one talking about this emergency condition which to me if you can’t find housing whether you’re homeless or whether someone just sold your house and now you have to figure out where to get a two-bedroom and you were paying a lot at 2 000 and now it’s 35 000 crazy increases you’ve seen it yeah i i don’t know what to do except to declare an emergency for now and find land that we have and you know start something that i i really i’m a little overwhelmed do
04:43
you have any thoughts about that because when i think about the housing like you’re talking about i was in the mortgage business and real estate and i used to want to only work with local people i really didn’t feel comfortable about selling houses to people from the mainland coming here and renting it which now i guess that’s mostly what we see you know i i’m wondering what do you think’s been going on that we haven’t seen it from the people that are in office now any thoughts of that
05:13
or where we can go from here yeah so i mean i know gabe johnson and a couple other council members have been working on this issue and i mean i really like the direction that gabe johnson’s going and he’s working on it pretty much full time you know what i’m saying but i think it’s such a huge crisis that it would be helpful to the community to have more than one person working on it full-time and so um i know there’s a senator on oahu who’s really been working on it i met
05:44
with him for an hour his name’s stanley chain and um there’s some you know politicians and nonprofits who are working on solutions in california and there are some good ideas that were put together in the you hero report that just came out you know this last year for our county our county commissioned that and paid to get you know 19 experts to put together a solution but a lot of the solution requires legislative action and so you know that’s where i see that we just need people to start doing things to
06:19
make it happen because according to that report we needed 5 500 homes within five years i think it’s probably a lot more than that because the report isn’t looking at you know people who are several families living under one roof because they have no other option if you start looking at that situation of overcrowded housing i think we need you know tens of thousands of places for people and so i do think there’s you know it’s really complicated like you know there’s not like a single silver bullet solution
06:53
that oh if we just did this it would solve our housing crisis but there’s a lot of little things we could do so one big thing that i see for families because i do have young kids and talk to a lot of working families is there’s a lot of fair housing discrimination going on against families with children and we don’t have anyone in our county who’s enforcing fair housing laws and so just to get you know more of a focus on that and make sure people aren’t being discriminated against
07:25
when they go to get housing you know specifically rentals but also sometimes with sales just making sure that families aren’t being passed over for the retired couple who wants to move to maui and live in this rental and they’re probably not going to cause any damage to it and they’re willing to pay six months up front you know the landlord of course says oh yeah that’s the better family i want to pick them but you’re not allowed to just pick your favorite person and discriminate against
07:55
the people you think might be worse off for you as a landlord for your property and i don’t think people understand that um and it’s really frustrating because i’ve worked with families trying to get them housing and they get passed over and we don’t really get a good reason why you know they have they have income they have good credit there’s no reasonable you know explanation why they didn’t get the property that’s a very very difficult thing to kind of nail down like you say
08:29
i remember the discrimination laws when when i was taking my continuing education real estate classes that was the big one we saw but it’s sort of hard to identify and prove and either way we both come out with the same answer we need more housing we need more housing we need an emergency house we need more housing if we can have thousands of refugees that housed immediately why can’t we do something for the people i that’s what i don’t get i don’t know where the power lies to
09:01
create emergency housing emergency situations while we’re building these long-range plans we’re so disrupted it’s yeah it’s very upsetting it upsets me because i see regular people now being put into this homeless situation with literally no you know whether it’s the the family with the kids and i’m just saying or the red tired couple but i get it when the people are coming from the mainland to having the big money they sure are attractive to these owners that are renting out their places
09:42
so that’s a a real problem and i sure hope that that gets addressed legislatively absolutely yeah i’m back to that thing about housing how do we yeah you know we can put up tents in the army and you know they can do it in two seconds clear an area make it available make it safe i don’t know why that stuff isn’t happening yeah well and they’re planning to take down that encampment that they put up with those small temporary homes right next to on waiale next to the um jail right there there’s that park
10:18
they put up all those temporary homes and i just read they’re going to take those down and so we’re actually getting rid of housing and those were caught those have cost so much money they’re little metal boxes and they pour air conditioning in them full blast because they’re little roasting pits yeah but why can’t you create it i don’t understand you know we could create offices with cubicles we can create tents i don’t know who who has that authority i don’t think the council people
10:49
actually have any authority the mayor and take care of the departments right so all we can do from the council is legislate yeah and they control the purse strings and so which is that is one thing i would have liked to see done better with all the pandemic money i mean we had a hundred million dollars over a hundred million dollars of pandemic money and i think a lot more questions should have been asked before it was allocated um and used in the budget because i don’t see a lot of permanent
11:25
structures or permanent you know benefit to the community from that and i feel you know we should have been focusing on building shaded outdoor areas so people could gather safely and spend less time indoors we should have been improving ventilation and older buildings and doing things that are more permanent which other municipalities did and they could have created a lot of housing with that because part of the problem with the pandemic was in congregate settings where people can’t get away from each other it just
11:59
spreads like crazy and they could have started building housing with that money to be able to spread people out and so i i think it is a combination of you have to have an administration that’s on board and you have to have a mayor who wants to get this done and so any mayor who thinks you know closing down housing right now and taking away housing units is a good idea it’s beyond me we have a huge housing crisis we need a mayor who wants to create housing for the people who live here and we need a council who’s going to get
12:38
on board with that too which most of our council is i think but who can get on board and help create the plan with with the mayor’s office to solve this because it’s going to take a lot of little things so i said you know we could crack down on fair housing that would help that wouldn’t solve the housing crisis but you know other municipalities do this and the way that it gets done is they have people who go and try to apply kind of i don’t know what you would call it like secret shoppers but hud
13:12
you know does enforcement and they make sure like why why aren’t you taking your applicants in chronological order and deciding like if you’re not taking them in chronological order it’s really hard for you as the landlord to explain why you picked one over the other but didn’t discriminate because if they’re not in chronological order what criteria did you use and was it fair and applied to everybody right and so there’s those kind of things um we have a supply issue and a demand issue
13:45
in maui that’s very unique to us i mean the whole country is experiencing a housing crisis but we do have an under supply as you probably know millennials are the largest home buying generation right now gen z is an even bigger generation so when they start buying there’s going to be even more demand the question is at what price right yeah well and this idea that you know in the in the 50s and 60s there was a huge housing boom to help supply housing for baby boomers and the idea that oh well those houses can
14:23
just go to the future generations and get passed down is a nice idea but what’s actually happening is a lot of boomers are just holding their assets and so now you have all these people who maybe they’re just a married retired couple they own four or five homes and they’re just collecting you know rent or holding their assets holding them empty you know we have a lot of empty homes on maui and so the way to solve that side is the you know there’s there’s not enough supply and there’s too much demand so you have
15:00
to address both sides and so on the supply side to free up more supply you can either build it which we can’t totally build ourselves out of this because if we just build build build there’s so much demand that people who don’t live here will buy it so you have to have very specific development that’s for only residents that stays only for residents in perpetuity so forever and ever the homes that get built need to be for owner occupant use only you have to live there as your primary residence you have to file your
15:36
taxes in hawaii you know you have to be a full-time resident here i think that’s appropriate and that can be done through deed restrictions the other way you increase the supply is you make it a lot more costly to do the things you don’t want to see so you de-incentivize those things which our council has been working on yeah they’ve been really good at it they’ve been really making great strides like you said yeah you can free up you can free up hundreds maybe thousands of units that
16:06
way but you need both we need to build more housing because there’s physically not enough and you need to also free up housing that’s already built freeing up housing that’s already built is more immediate but you know for the long term for the five years down the road from now we need to be building right now and we need to find a way to the thing that i don’t know is how are we gonna solve the the maybe it’s all across the country and i just don’t know it but we sure have so many homeless that are
16:39
virtually everywhere yeah and um whenever i speak to them they just have nowhere to go and there’s no programs to the the the uh organized programs for housing and uh the social services seem to be married together and if some of these people don’t fit into the box of the social service help or don’t want some of it they’re not getting out of that problem on the street that’s why i guess i’m going back to that and i wonder you and i both like could we do this being on council or not
17:17
being on council somehow like our ideas that we’re talking about the people that are on council are either so busy dealing with alligators they’re already dealing with and so busy with all the problems that have mounted up um what can we do what can we encourage our public to do to help us do this because isn’t that what it really is going to take pressure from the public to the people that are like the mayor um you said it the emer when we have emergency 100 million dollars or however
17:57
much it was from the colvin why aren’t we addressing these public emergencies in a more immediate way that really help everyone and not be so i mean those 23 places you’re talking about there next to the jail cost a bloody fortune ridiculous numbers and like you said 23 families and you’re telling us do you have a housing that’s your housing solution yeah that’s ridiculous yeah well we so as the public we need to keep putting pressure on our government but i do think there are things that only the
18:41
legislation the legislative branch can do and that’s where we need them to help you know with mike molina passing the affordable housing fund that created money that can only be used for creating housing now for our local residents so now we’re at a point where we’re starting to build that up and that’s awesome but we need to have plans for how to use it well and make sure it starts getting executed right away and start groundbreaking and so i think you know for the public to understand what the
19:17
issues are and what helps and what doesn’t and understand what the plan is you know like check out gabe johnson’s plan on his website it’s pretty thorough and pretty good and to call in and publicly support those things when they come forward another thing that could be done to help housing supply and i’ve been going and knocking on doors and talking to people and i’ve been mostly focused here in kahului because i live right here it’s easy and um yeah but i plan to go knock doors everywhere
19:51
you know but what people have told me here because there’s a lot of older plantation style single wall construction homes is i’d like to build an ohana but the permitting process is so long there’s so much red tape it’s so difficult but i’d like my kids to just live on our lot but either i’m gonna end up building it unpermitted or they already did or they have to come up with this you know money to go through the process which there should be a process i mean for safety and whatever but i do think on
20:26
the supply side we could say hey for owner builders if you’re building your own home or you’re building an ohana unit on your own property and it’s going to be for local use either your family or you know you rent it out to other residents or whatever maybe you move into the ohana because you’re retired and raised your kids and you rent out the home to a local family that we have a fast track process for you to do that and maybe you can apply for it once every 20 years or something so that somebody’s
20:58
not abusing it you know but that’s something it’s a simple solution that would have to go through the legislative branch it would have to be a change in our ordinance to make that happen but all of a sudden now you’re letting local people start solving some of our supply side issues you’re letting local people move three families from one housing unit into three housing units on their property if they have you know an acre and a half or something and so you make it easier for people to solve
21:28
their own problems and people do that i mean we see that all the time the community comes together and people will do the work to solve their own problems but we do need help from the legislative side to overcome those obstacles and you just mentioned and they currently when you said an acre and a half that triggered me thinking uh and even less you know i mean yeah around the world we are an island and i think we’ve already kind of forgotten that in the whole way we’ve been building this place out
22:00
we don’t have the same issues that they do on the mainland we can’t push our problems out and push them out of city limits we run into a water problem very very much so yeah so i i when i’m listening to all this and i recognize what you’re saying is absolutely right on the money and see you’re the kind of candidate i want to say like me when the programs are in place and we can be moving these things forward but i’m wondering i mean i’d keep wanting to appeal to the again maybe this is as well as right
22:37
these large landowners that have large swaths of land and they have so much equity there they could be partnered with the people that move the land and construct it and an equity sharing program where over time the the big land owners and construction people could get more ownership and they could supplement and make these things affordable and create the places i don’t know why we don’t see more of that i mean 80 i don’t know exact number but i think it was 87 million dollars for the
23:15
infrastructure cost there in waikapu to come out with 500 affordable houses you know you probably saw that article just like i did it sure seems like extraordinary that could be picked up by someone who owns the land because they don’t if mike averton were to make what they project in these articles 150 million dollars what does he need 150 million dollars in his pocket why couldn’t some of that be equity that he gains over time to to get this thing happening more quickly i don’t really understand that we don’t
23:52
use the power it’s kind of a fun power eminent domain that means we like your land we don’t really want to take it what if we become partners can’t we do that isn’t that a better way because we really have these you said 5 000 units they say we need i think we can laugh together i haven’t it was 20 years ago when i heard them say we need 5 000 units i don’t know how they recalculate now and come out with 5 000. someone someone missed a digit somewhere we need a lot more housing and you know
24:30
the i i do think there needs to be a paradigm shift on housing not just in maui county i think nationwide because it is such a crisis but it’s a bigger crisis in maui than most places um of how we think about housing and this is hard like i know a lot of realtors may not like this shift but right now we think of housing as this commodity um to be bought and sold in a way that’s i mean it’s a very western way of thinking about housing and we need to start thinking about housing as a human right
25:09
and um if we think about it from that way then operating in a capitalist society and infrastructure with you know the free market the landowners will always try to maximize their profit and we can expect that and corporations are going to do that so to hope that other people will solve our housing crisis for our residents being developers or anyone else that’s not the government i think is hoping for capitalism to work different than it ever has for them to put the greater good of the community above
25:50
their own profit i don’t think that’s realistic and so i think we have to start looking at housing the way that places that have solved their housing crisis much better have done it and that’s what we’re seeing in the legislation and some of the non-profits in california that’s what they’re trying to pass on oahu right now is um this government developed housing and people have a really bad connotation with that because we think of the projects and the government traditionally in america has
26:23
done a terrible job a terrible job of developing housing because they make it they make it only for the poor it’s not housing you’d want to live in and then they just forget about it and stop maintaining it starts falling apart it becomes the projects and no one wants to live in the projects but other countries and other places now are starting to look at developing housing that’s mixed use you know it would be multi-family residential type of high-density housing maybe you have you
27:31
over here what would be wrong with a doctor living next to a waiter you know in the same building and you start developing infrastructure and housing in a way where you’re just trying to provide long-term housing and the way that you keep it affordable at least in hawaii and it’s so common that it’d be easy to do here is kind of through a land trust model which is actually what was recommended that you hero report so hawaiian homes already does it right they the hawaiian homes they keep the land and you get the house
28:07
you get a 99 year lease if we could do that for all maui residents who qualified you know and not have it limited to affordable housing for you know 60 ami or less have it be everybody you know have some a little bit of everything for everybody i think you would get high quality housing that people wanted to live in their mortgage payments would be half or less of what traditional housing is because the land is already owned and if the county owns the land or a nonprofit or somebody owns the land they can
28:44
control and regulate the use on that land so they can say you have to be a resident to buy here you can’t buy this as an investment property to rent it out to someone else if you want to live here you buy it you live here this is your full-time gig and so i think that’s the direction that we need to start thinking is i i hear you and i i like your ideas i think that um the only thing i keep looking at is this short term i’m trying to think about what to do quicker now i really like that you’re
29:18
thinking over the horizon and when you talk about the land owned by the county my only idea was yes you’re right these people are not going to give up their profit so include them in it rather than the county having to provide the land i was just trying to get the private sector to get more involved with that that was right i am yeah you know get them to buy in it’s not going to do any they don’t they’re not going to be ever touching that money they’re way above having to worry about the little money
29:50
that’s what i was talking and again this island thing we’re talking about like mixed use when i said oh yeah they’re ki hey there at the corner of lopoa and kihei road people live above their stores every city in the world is doing that in here it’s a novel concept what is that why does it take so long for something it’s like that that is a very western thing that i think when it was developed city planning ideas i mean i’ve been looking into this it was developed by people who were very
30:25
wealthy in america specifically and the wealthy people didn’t want to live where they worked because they frowned upon that or they didn’t work you know and so this idea of separating your residential from your commercial and keeping workplaces and shopping far away from your home it’s a it’s a very elitist ideal and it depends on having a car and i think now we can look at it and go that’s not even what we want for most people i mean i would love to live in a walkable area where i can walk down to
31:01
my grocery store and walk to the kid’s school and walk to you know the doctor’s office that sounds great if i didn’t have to use a car especially you know older people who need exercise and whatever i know my mother-in-law would love that but it’s just not that’s not how our city’s designed right now but in the future i think we should shift the way we design our land so that we are focused on bike ability walkability you know easy access to green spaces giving people a higher quality of life
31:39
and it builds the community because you tend to stay in your little area and get to know everybody and ultimately it makes it just a better place and safer and yeah for for the more immediate use um or need i think the county can kind of pull back on some regulations and maybe i like kelly king’s idea of creating a safe space for people who do live in their vehicle to be able to like go charge their phone take a shower you know just have a little bit of dignity in a place where they’re not going to get swept out of um
32:14
and creating spaces for now for that also the county could go and start trying to implement um and enforce better you know cracking down short-term rentals so those become long-term rentals they could push and advertise more of their long-term rental credit because i know a lot of people aren’t aware of that and maybe if you know landlords knew there was an incentive and they would save a lot in tax money every year they would choose to rent out their units long term instead short term and so if more landlords were
32:51
aware of that they may choose to do that because it’s less hassle to have a long-term tenant than constant turnover of short-term so we have all those properties on the minitoya list some of them are pretty old and run down and those owners might prefer to rent long term if they understood how much money they could save because right now they’re paying the highest tax bracket and so i think some of it could be communication the county could look into buying um privately developed areas that
33:27
are run down and trying to fix them up because that’s a lot faster than starting from scratch and turning those into like social type housing but there’s a lot that can happen short term it wouldn’t be as high quality as what we could do long term with planning but i think we need both right because we have all these kids graduating right now going to college why would they come back here they have nowhere to live they have no opportunity here we’ve made it inadvertently i don’t think anybody
33:58
intended for this but we’ve made it where it’s better for our kids to leave and never come back than to come back and build their future here because there’s just not opportunity here and i keep wondering about the room you know maybe an island isn’t supposed to say look we don’t have any more room we don’t want to keep building and building and building we’re not a mainland we’re the most remote land mass in the world we need to really put our focus on self-sustainability so it’s it’s a real
34:32
complicated issue that you’re hearing and you’re expressing um housing i mean one it’s that old thing about there are so many alligators it’s difficult to remember that you came here to drain the swamp you know it’s a very funny thing politics like we have seven people in the primary isn’t that crazy in the race that we’re running seven people and the public gets to kind of find a little about this i found about you i i know tony over there at kaku and when i said oh carrie said oh i
35:13
know cara she was here she was the voice and sharing with people about covet and the math and the whole thing so what other issues you feel are in your view i mean my view as a candidate i am really pushing the fact that there’s no over the horizon programs to develop jobs and create an industry other than tourism to try to use our local economy and give our people opportunities and art and music and culture were my my plan vehicle and taking money for things but all these things take a future
35:58
over the horizon takes do you find that young people now are interested in politics when you get out there do you find that i mean i know i i’m wondering what is it that’s going to grab the younger people to realize they have to be part of this solution thing they’re the ones going to be saddled i’m 71. you know if i live 30 years thank you god you know it’s the people that are after us they’re gonna that are gonna deal with all these problems and mistakes that we have to start dealing with now
36:34
change you know we talk about housing what about one of our candidates is living in a communal situation on land where maybe there’s 35 people common kitchens and i’m sure you yeah i hope we build alternative potential plans to because the things are changing work is changing the concept of what we want as families are changing young people who don’t want the responsibility of property and their traditional model it’s almost like a different world is kind of happening around us i mean i i
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feel like young people not wanting a yard and not wanting like the single family detached home is a little off from what i when i talk to people i think people are adjusting their expectation due to reality but you know it there i get frustrated that younger people aren’t more involved in politics when i looked at who all voted you know it is mostly older people and um it is mostly i feel that the older generation doesn’t necessarily always understand the plight of the younger generation and
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um the lack of opportunity that is here now and that was there before and so you know decades ago you could buy a house with a yard and raise your family there and kind of have the american dream and i don’t think that is an opportunity that the younger generations now have at you know with the average home price being a million dollars and so i think there’s been an adjustment of expectation due to the reality of what we’re seeing i do worry that younger people are becoming cynical
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because we’re paying social security you know my kids will pay social security the likelihood that they’ll actually ever get any social security highly unlikely i mean they’ve already pushed me in my husband’s age of retirement i think it’s 76 or 78 i don’t remember what it is now but it’s it’s not 65 you know it’s my mother-in-law started collecting social security we helped her with that helped her get the medicare and everything and you know she’ll probably live a long
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time because we have such a long life expectancy now and i think it’s wonderful that she can retire and enjoy her life and you know live out all the rest of her life just with you know a decent income that can get her by enough even though the cost of housing is impacting that we are helping her currently but you know our generation we’re not going to be able to do that and we’ve gone through two financial downturns and a lot of companies don’t have pensions and so the idea that
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we’ll have something other than social security to help us out like a 401k well i’ve watched my 401k jump up and down for decades now and when we first started putting in as learning about it i was told i was gonna have two million dollars by the time i was 50 and by the time i retire i’d just have this huge fund and i can tell you it’s nothing close to that i really totally get it yeah it’s not even close to a million dollars you know and so and and we’ve been lucky because
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we bought property young um and that’s very fortunate for us we were lucky that we took that opportunity because if we hadn’t people who do not own property right now have such little opportunity to permanently you know have housing and have savings because that is most people’s number one asset largest asset above their retirement everything else is usually the home they own and young working families cannot buy a home right now average home price is over a million dollars that’s a five thousand dollar a month
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mortgage payment i don’t know anybody who can afford that that’s what i say i agree i think you know with other issues i i’m really worried about climate change i take it very seriously um i have three young kids and they’re going to be hugely impacted by it and so when i see things like our state legislator decided to cut to cap solar and you know non-firm energy at 45 for each island i think that’s bananas what are we doing i mean it’s the cheapest easiest form of creating electricity in a place where
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we’re so close to the equator we have so much sun battery technology has just been getting better and better by every year and the efficiency that why would we limit our best possible solution for the future and so you know that that’s frustrating because i take it as a personal attack on my children i’m like you are you are going to burn trees and put carbon into the air for what for somebody somewhere had to pay for something you know to get that to pass when i’m hearing you the one
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thing it does to me is it makes me feel comfortable you know you may not have seen it but in 1995 i interviewed the president of maui electric about cell sustainability and solar energy three decades later and we still have people doing the things you’re talking about limiting renewables at a time when the crisis is even more clear it’s a crazy life you know where we still have a little bit of time but i when i do this i somehow want to give you plenty of time if there are issues that you’d like to share with
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our audience and and the people um and then you know i just want to give you more time to because we’re talking about this issue and man this issue of housing and all the things with quality of life on council you know obviously that’s a real good issue and it’s really terrific to hear how you’ve kept up with what’s going on and sounds like you can hit the ground running on that issue um other areas that you’d like to share with the audience obviously you wonder why am i as
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candidate doing this i want people to be involved with this if they think that you’re the best candidate for the job i want them to be comfortable to know that they heard it here that we’re an open forum so that we can continue on getting public input and working together for solutions you know yeah well um you know i i do think we import way too much of our food and especially with the pandemic showing us you know we were lucky we got out of the pandemic really on a good note compared to other places and it
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could have been much worse you know we we really i feel dodged a bullet and people can be critical i’m not happy with how our pandemic unfolded as far as the use of funds and the plan um i think it had a lot of pukas i think we kind of went in with you know a hammer instead of a scalpel as far as dealing with things we didn’t have a very detailed plan but compared to every other state i think we came out a lot better because i there were a lot of people who died here and were suffered but
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almost everyone i know who had a huge impact it was on the mainland the friends and family i lost were on the mainland and i know people here who have long covered who have you know who passed away but we just weren’t nearly as impacted and we’re really lucky because had it hit in a way where it took out our shipping you know or something like that it could have been much worse and it just opened my eyes to the fact that we need to grow our own food here so i think we should incentivize home
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gardening get more people just grow more food if they have land even if they’re a renter you know if there’s a way that we can help encourage that i think you know financially or otherwise that would be awesome because it empowers you to know you can grow your own food i mean i learned how to grow micro greens and all kinds of vegetables and stuff thinking what if our food shuts down i have three kids to feed what will we do and i feel confident in the fact that i can grow a lot of greens
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really quickly if i had to and you know i bought a lot of seeds and learned a lot of skills that i think we should all have at this point being on an island because pandemics aren’t the only disaster that we’ll have we’re gonna potentially with climate change have some huge storms come through and that can disrupt shipping there’s a lot of things that can disrupt shipping and so growing more local food i think is critical um you’ve seen that there are you know i always wonder if the media
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here you know the media is sort of like the corporate america they’re running after the money even in the stories they tell food security hawaii you see all these groups around here that are waving that flag as hard as they can and more will be coming so i’m glad you’re waving the flag with me it’s a great thing yeah and i think you know for for overall because when people talk about diversifying the economy there is something that it’s more of a big picture idea but you have to have a community where
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people enjoy living there and i think the grind has gotten too hard for people everything everyone’s stressed i feel like everybody needs like a two year long break right now to recover and and there’s more crazy going on in the world and it’s unfortunately probably not gonna stop right and so because there are no people in power who are doing what needs to be done right now to make things to change our course and so we can keep trying to get that to happen but also i think it’s important to realize that
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if we build a good community where people want to live and want to stay and want to invest and we have people who have a high quality of life living here so that’s going to take a lot of work on our part and the government’s part and maybe some outside the box thinking and open-mindedness but that’s where you get innovation that’s where you get new industries that’s where you when you talk about transitioning away from tourism and diversifying our economy well people have to want to live here
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and work here to make that happen people have to be able to live here and work here and so you know i care about a lot of different issues uh especially regarding quality of life but that’s why i always come back to housing because if people don’t have secure housing if people i mean i know a student a substitute taught this past year because we had such a huge crisis in the schools and um in one of my kids schools they were having kids go in the cafe a lot and just sit there during class because they
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didn’t have enough substitute teachers and so i decided to do the substitute teacher course and sub and that was really hard work and now myself yeah i appreciate teachers so much more now but you know it’s it’s one of those things one of the students has moved six times the school year they were sharing with me and one school year i think how do you even care what your grades are like you know there’s a lot of talk about the kids came back from the pandemic and they don’t want to do schoolwork or they
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don’t care anymore and i think how do you make a person who’s having to constantly move whose home life is so unstable care about this is such a small thing compared to that that they’re they’re going through a crisis i know students who live in a van you know there’s a lot of students when i ask the students hey what what matters to you guys in the community just trying to feel out what this younger generation’s worried about you know some of them are worried about the parks because they spent a lot of
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time in the parks and made me realize we should be dumping a lot more money into our public infrastructure that our residents use and people who are in crowded housing situations they really appreciate our public spaces and if we build those up that gives them a better quality of life even if we can’t get them a bigger housing situation right away at least we can make spaces where they can go spread out and enjoy their day so they can spend a lot of time out of their home and still have a high quality of life
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and so you know investing in that is worth it but even with middle schoolers the number one thing they all said housing they’re all worried about housing because even if they have housing their best friend doesn’t or their cousin doesn’t someone doesn’t they have you know another family living in their living room sleeping on the couch because they can’t find housing the housing crisis has gotten to a point where we should declare it an emergency and start thinking outside the box to
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take action because it is impacting so many people and if you have housing now i have housing now we should consider ourselves really really fortunate and blessed because so many people don’t and i do feel like that low quality of life makes it a place where people won’t want to live here and then we’ll never diversify our economy if the only people who live here are people who can’t leave because they have nothing you’re i’m gonna stop you for only one reason first of all it’s cause we’re
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running out of time but uh um it’s really been a pleasure here and obviously your passion for uh running is very clear and um i’m happy to be in this contest with you because i don’t feel a contest i feel like we’re gonna come out with the public will choose what they want but it’s refreshing to know there’s a spirit and the the power and someone who cares for local people like you do i hope this has been a good experience for you kara and i um i hope that the public realizes that the most important they
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can do is get out there and vote and be part of this process and don’t just leave it up to those other people that may be involved let your passions come out and come and say hi on the vote yeah i encourage people and not be cynical i know it’s easy to do especially in this time don’t give up don’t lose hope even if our future is harder than our past moving forward humans are really resilient and when we come together we can do amazing things and it only takes a small group of people to really change the entire
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trajectory of where we’re going a very small group of people with a lot of heart and a lot of care and passion and i think we do have that here so and in in history you know everyone uses that quote from margaret mead it is the only thing that ever has is a small group of committed people so here we are please join us carrot has really been a pleasure and i don’t really mean to cut you off but we’ll have to come back again if you are most welcome here at the neutral zone and uh there’s anything that i can do as we’re
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in this campaign season don’t hesitate please awesome thank you so much jason so nice to talk with you thank you and i to our audience out there thank you for joining us please be involved in this process get out and vote and uh hope you’re having a great day and continue aloha everyone [Music] you
