Thread by @VanDiemen_

Despite being fully integrated as a state in the USA, Hawaii suffers from a set of intractable problems that I don't think will ever be solved due to its geography and isolation. And this manifests itself in actually very bad local governance and real pain for the population.

The entire local voting base has been house-poor for generations. Median house price to annual income ratio is approaching 10. Anything above 5 is generally considered "severely unaffordable".

All sorts of distortions to normal, healthy society happen under these conditions.

The reason for these home prices is that the post-war real estate boom on Oahu showed Hawaiians the ugly face of urban sprawl as some of the most beautiful places on the planet were eaten up by new development. The backlash in the 70s and 80s shut the door on large new projects.

It's nearly impossible to get anything built in Hawaii. Permits for a new single family home on the Big Island, the most builder friendly island, will take a year. In some places you're not allowed to demolish old homes to make place for new ones. Endless rounds of

environmental and historical reviews add time and cost. There are really only two development zones in Hawaii - Urban and Agricultural. Nothing pencils in the urban zones, and the agricultural zone is off limits. Good luck ever getting anything rezoned.

Tech billionaires are turning the islands into their private fiefdoms. Zuck owns a lot of Kauai. Benioff is buying up the Big Island. Larry Ellison owns Lanai.

You might think what I meant to say was that Larry owns a lot of land on Lanai. No, he owns literally 98% of Lanai.

The intent of all this is to conserve the natural beauty of Hawaii, to preserve its open space, to keep it unspoiled for future generations.

To be clear, I think this correct. We should want to preserve open space and ag land.

But the costs have been absolutely brutal.

Hawaiians pack their together into the few existing homes. Garages are turned into bedrooms. Unpermitted construction is common. The only hope for many is to inherit the family home from grandma. Many leave for the mainland. Homelessness is very common.

Hawaii gets about 50% of its GDP directly from tourism and 25% from US military spending. If it wasn't for these two massive inflows of money from the mainland, Hawaii would be a third-world country. The previously dominant ag sector is down to about 5% of GDP.

This day-to-day hardship opens the door to corruption. Like actual Sopranos style bribe-taking and racketeering. I have family on Oahu and many professional connections in Hawaii. Talk to anyone who has been there awhile and they'll confirm it, it's a real problem.

Part of this corruption manifests itself in a local bureaucracy that extracts rents from the tourism industry, the only real income generator they can exploit. They'll use the local concern about "overtourism" as a ruse to open and shut tourist attractions.

I live in a high tourism part of the country, and places are almost never shut down, but it's extremely common in Hawaii to have multiple places closed for farcical reasons. "Coral spawning" "sea turtle nesting" "rocks falling" "closed for construction". It feels third world.

I understand that overtourism can be a problem, but many residents take it up on themselves to wage their own silent wars. They'll put up "No Trespassing" signs on public property. The people who live nearby know that all beaches are public in Hawaii, but the tourists don't.

I am sympathetic to the concerns of locals about overtourism, but the failure to control this arbitrary and hostile behavior is another example of the failure of local governance.

Bribing local inspectors is part of getting anything built. Bring in contractors from the mainland

and expect to have their truck windows smashed and tools stolen.

But the biggest way that corruption manifests itself in Hawaii is through racial discrimination against whites. Good luck doing business if you're a white guy from the mainland. Opening up operations in Hawaii

means hiring a local front guy to talk to the governing bodies and local businesses you need to do business with. White kids are regularly bullied at school.

Asians are by far the largest ethnic group in Hawaii. They've been very successful at allying with the native Hawaiian population against whites.

Asians are allowed to adopt the title of "Hawaiian" but whites are not. No matter how many generations back your white family has

lived in Hawaii, you'll always be a haole.

The Asian-Hawaiian voting bloc has dominated local politics for several generations now, leading to a classic one-party rule at the expense of local whites a la South Africa. Hawaii is a good case study of how Democracy doesn't exist

in multicultural societies, only racial head counts. And it's exactly this one party rule that has eroded the quality of the governance on Hawaii so greatly.

The Maui fires, the cost of living crisis, the most draconian covid lockdowns in the country, bribery scandals.

All of this speaks to a local government that is actually very poorly equipped to handle its problems, keeps well-qualified people away from power, and wouldn't be functioning absent the military-tourism cash cows.

And lest you think that all of this is unique to Hawaii, American Samoa deals with the same problems, only more so. They recently faked a measles epidemic in order to extract money from the US government, and it was almost entirely unreported.

I love Hawaii, we go at least annually, and I would love for them to clean up some of these issues.

Thinking of Hawaii as just another of the 50 states when in fact it's the most anomalous by a mile means missing a lot of the context about what's actually going on over there.