Living in a Box

At least it's not cardboard

This afternoon the first thing I saw when I stepped out was a windshield sun shade with an inverted Hawaiian flag. Such flags are not on every street, but common enough to indicate that I’m not alone in believing this place is deeply troubled.

I may, however, be (almost?) alone in believing there are no easy solutions. I could be blinded by a lack of imagination, though.

One of Hawaii’s hugest problems is housing. Last night I read this Hipsta Pravda story:

At the 1 Hotel Hanalei Bay, where the cheapest rooms go for about $1,200 a night, wealthy tourists, including Kourtney Kardashian and Addison Rae, enjoy access to $865 anti-aging facials and personalized nutrition plans while many of the housekeepers and chefs who cater to them can’t find a place to live.

[…]

A half-dozen prefabricated container homes at an equipment baseyard a couple miles from the resort represent the Princeville hotel’s newest initiative to address an islandwide workforce housing shortage that has undermined its ability to hire and hold on to workers — a problem not lost on the luxury hotel’s own guests.

As a recent three-star Yelp review of 1 Hotel Hanalei Bay put it: “Beautiful property, severely understaffed.”

I’ve been to the area and can confirm it is beautiful.

Hawai‘i has a well-documented affordability problem, and it doesn’t only affect hotel workers. The average renter in Hawaiʻi earns roughly $16 an hour, almost $10 short of what it takes to afford a one-bedroom rental home, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

To overcome the problem, some businesses are becoming landlords, spending big bucks to develop affordable housing options for their workers. But rarely is this an option for businesses other than wealthy corporations.

The 960-square-foot container homes built by the 1 Hotel off Hanalei Plantation Road provide housing to the temporary foreign workers that the resort has come to rely on despite its efforts to drum up local employment prospects with jobs fairs and a $5,000 sign-on bonus. The foreign employees come from Indonesia, Thailand and other countries on short-term work visas. A shuttle transfers them between the hotel and the prefab containers.

Here’s what the containers look like:

At least they’re not made out of cardboard.

“I’m a livin’ in a cardboard box …”

I suspect a single apartment in one of those containers is bigger than the hundred square-foot (9.3 square-meter) room where I lived in a crowded European city. And safer.

Not saying those containers are nice. No idea what’s inside. A commenter wrote,

Please consider interviewing some of the foreign workers. They might be okay with the living conditions, or maybe not. They might be treated well, and get generous tips, or maybe not.

Interviewing them without an interpreter might be impossible. Another commenter claims the foreign workers were “trained in service trade schools at home, to qualify for these jobs, including learning English.” But on-the-job English is not the English needed to explain how they feel about the living conditions. I’ve been able to talk to hotel staff about hotel stuff in a couple of Southeast Asian languages, but I certainly couldn’t explain how I felt about their countries in their languages (and not just because I might be arrested or something).

In Hawaii no one truly knows how ‘the people’ feel because there is no single people here, no common language, not even Pidgin which comes closest to one. Hawaii is hyperdiverse with at least 130 languages spoken at home. Its many peoples live in parallel worlds - most of which are ignored by the media. Filipinos are arguably the largest single ethnic group¹ at 14.6% but get almost no coverage.

Some of the guest workers in the boxes are from Indonesia. They presumably can all speak Indonesian, but their first language might be one of Indonesia’s seven hundred languages - maybe ten percent of the world’s language diversity. Tell me how you really feel can be hard to answer in a second language.

In the best case scenario, I would have stumbled answering when I lived abroad - and in many cases, my language skills were nowhere near sufficient.

Like me, the article and comments can only look at the boxes from the outside. And see them as a microcosm of Hawaii’s bigger housing problem: e.g.,

In the ENTIRE US, Hawaii has the HIGHEST:

1. Family of 4 living wage needed ($259k).

Try earning that with a typical hotel job.

2. Homeless pop. per capita (8/1k).

I discovered a new (to me at least) homeless camp today. And right after that walked past a beggar.

3. Home price/income ratio (9.1).

4. Cost to maintain a home ($29k).

5. Domestic out-migration per capita (-6.4/1k).

Tonight’s Hawaii News Now Nausea had a story about Hawaii Pacific University’s new Las Vegas campus presumably targeted at ‘expats’². Here Las Vegas is called “the ninth island” because so many people from Hawaii visit and even move there.

6. Percentage of homeowners that are Baby Boomers, a whopping 42.9%.

The workforce at all levels has left and continues to leave at record levels.

To “the ninth island”, for instance.

This is the biggest housing bubble ever seen in Hawaii.

The real value in Pravda and Hipsta Pravda comes not from the articles which either push the party line or only scratch the surface of a problem but from the commenters who can show signs of Tier Two and on occasion even Tier Three thinking. Not all of them are entirely stuck in Hawaii’s deep blue KognoJail. Unfortunately, I suspect even most of the partial crimethinkers vote blue (not to say red is ‘good’ either). Kazenefek (cause and effect) seems largely unknown here. Must be racistimperialistcolonialist.

The where-we-put-our-workers problem isn’t just in Hawaii. From two separate comments:

[…] I know of a golf club in Naples, FL that bought an entire, newly constructed 120 unit apartment complex to house workers because it's so expensive that staff can afford to live within a 60 minute drive. People complain about "subsidized housing", but then they discover no one is willing to work for them when housing is impossible to find.

Same with ski resorts in Canada. They have barracks and apartments for their employees.

I recall Tier Three-ish commenters - at Pravda? - speculating about a long-term scheme to depopulate the islands so they can be exclusively for the elite - Larry Ellison already owns 98% of an island here - with a small maintenance staff …

… living in boxes?

“B-but at least they’re not cardboard …”

1. “Arguably” because “Filipinos” is a cover term for anyone from the diverse Philippines, home to perhaps up to about two hundred languages. One could think of that country as being what Catholic Europe would be like if it were one country with a Moslem minority. Although only a fraction of that diversity is in Hawaii, the non-English-dominant Filipinos here are still split between speakers of Tagalog, Ilocano, Cebuano, and Hiligaynon - the four biggest languages in the Philippines.

2. Yeah, we’re legally Americans, I know …