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An affordable home is the bedrock that families and individuals build their lives upon. Home is where stability, self-sufficiency, and economic security begin. Home is where success in education blossoms and healthy families develop. Home is where strong values, responsibility, and resilience are learned. Homes build strong communities. In Hawaii, we pay some of the highest home ownership and rent prices in the country. As a result, families and workers are suffering. They sacrifice healthcare, education, social health, transportation, insurance, and employment just to have a place to live. Our people can't afford everything, and their quality of life is suffering.
The Hawaii Housing Alliance is dedicated to making affordable homes a reality for the workers and families of Hawaii. We believe that every person deserves the opportunity to own or rent a home they can afford. Local people leave Hawaii because they cannot afford a home here. Teachers, policemen, doctors, nurses, first responders, and service industry workers leave Hawaii because of their inability to purchase a home and raise their family in Hawaii. Our housing costs have, and continue, to create an exodus of these valuable workers. In the end, we will suffer from the shortage of a skilled workforce, and the devastating effects of losing our local children to mainland jobs. We must change laws and policies that are causing the price of a home to skyrocket.
Click here to view a list of our team
"Lead by example with humility and perseverance."
– Kanu Hawaii |
At Hawaii Housing Alliance we create and support healthy, safe, and stable communities for children, families, and workers by advocating for homes that are affordable. |
A home provides our foundation; it shapes and defines us. Whether your Home has been Hawai‘i since birth, or it has become your Home, it is our collective kuleana to mālama our Hawai‘i and our people.
“We're the ones we've been waiting for.”
– President of the United States,
Barack Obama |
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It’s not enough to live our lives within the narrow minded existence of ambition; to be focused solely on making more money, and having more things. Our potential as human beings and as a people is greater than our single existence, and deeper than our own pockets.
What will the next fifty years of statehood look like if we continue to live this way? We must be the change, in order to bring about change.
“Lead by example with humility and perseverance.” – Kanu Hawaii |
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Civil societies are governed by rules and regulations to ensure the health and safety of its people. These rules and regulations are usually laws, or policies. As children, our parents set certain rules for us: dinner, homework, family activities, and bedtime for example. As we grew older, these rules changed to accommodate our growth, and as we became adults we were responsible for setting our own rules. The same principle applies to the laws of society so that as growth and change occurs, laws and policies evolve to protect and provide for its people. However, over time, many laws and policies accumulate, overlap, and result in the unintended consequence of spiraling home costs. These laws need to be optimized by protecting those things that make Hawaii unique and special, while pruning the obsolete and ineffective provisions that make it impossible to produce and preserve homes that are affordable for all of us.
Hawaii Housing Alliance works to increase the acceptability and availability of homes our workers and families can afford. You can click on an item to read more about it.
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Our team at Hawaii Housing Alliance brings over fifty collective years of experience in housing development, research, and analysis. Through these years of experience, we have learned that the conversation about “home” is often misunderstood. Our team believes that if a person can afford the home they live in many other areas that affect their quality of life improve. Likewise, if people cannot afford the home they live in, the social costs to themselves and our communities include educational challenges or failure, unemployment, poor health, and fractured family units. We have the ability to capture market and research data, analyze this with the unique social impacts of the “home,” and produce reports and planning strategies for Hawaii’s community, businesses, policy makers, and developers.
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The cost to do business in Hawaii is amongst the highest in the nation. Both big and small businesses struggle with onerous business regulations and obligations. Another challenge to do business in Hawaii is hiring and retaining qualified workers. The high cost of rental housing or home ownership in Hawaii coupled with wages make it difficult for businesses and government to hire and retain trained professionals. It also is the reason many of our local kids move away to live and work in more affordable areas of the country, like Seattle, and Las Vegas. The recent decline in our economy, particularly tourism, has caused unemloyment to sky rocket, and foreclosures to escalate. There is a great need for employers to become proactive in working with their employees’ or potential employees’ housing needs. Hawaii Housing Alliance works with employers to identify their workers’ needs, and propose supportive options for employers to provide their workers.
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As a 501(c) 3 non profit corporation Hawaii Housing Alliance provides education and advocacy at the legislative level of government. This means that we are allowed to provide information to educate policy makers at the city, state, and federal levels of government. We are also allowed certain exemptions that enable us to provide information in response to specific requests from such policy makers that are not considered lobbying. The benefit of having a non profit organization provide information and testimony to policy makers is that individual special interests are removed from the discussion and the conversation becomes more inclusive of everyone’s benefit and holistic. Leaders in Hawaii Housing Alliance have approximately twenty years of experience with this work here in Hawaii.
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The housing community in Hawaii runs the spectrum from homeless providers, to self- help housing developers, affordable housing developers, and large land owners and developers. To successfully build and develop a system and regulatory structure that makes homes affordable for our workers and families, it is important to listen to various perspectives and needs from our spectrum in the housing community. However it is critical that other issues be considered when evaluating housing issues, strategies, and policies. The tie in of health and education to a home someone can afford is vital to building and sustaining strong families and strong communities. Hawaii Housing Alliance has the unique ability to bring together stakeholders and moderate or facilitate work groups, task forces, and special committees to produce plans and solutions that are successful.
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Our mission at Hawaii Housing Alliance is to create and support healthy, safe, and stable communities for children, families, and workers by advocating for homes that are affordable. Naturally a significant part of our work is to engage the community and our keiki and to provide education on the importance of a home our workers and families can afford. Community service and education projects that Hawaii Housing Alliance supports include: homeless outreach, volunteer hours with self help housing projects, and educational programs or presentations in our neighborhoods and schools.
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