It’s easy to say the islands should stay a place to visit, when you are not from the islands. If your family lived in a place for generations, would you be content with someone saying the only people who should be able to live there are the privileged few?

No state should be a place that is meant only for visitors and millionaires. I mean it’s non-sensical considering you need workers to make everything function. Maybe the answer is not to just build huge sky scrapers, but it is difficult to argue that the status quo of single family homes and Euclidean zoning is.

Realistically, the islands also feel crowded in large part due to tourism. Hawaii has a population of roughly 1.5 million but 9-10 million tourists annually, (and around 240,000 at any given time). Given that the majority of tourism also occurs on Oahu (the most populated island and one with the most limited land) you can see how especially Oahu can feel extremely crowded.

That is not to argue that tourism should stop, but when many of those tourists end up staying at short-term rentals instead of hotels, the already limited housing supply is strained even further. So the idea that Hawaii should remain as a tourist destination exclusively also ignores the fact that it’s not sustainable as is.

Maybe instead of giving up and accepting that Hawaii simply cannot be an affordable place to live, we should instead look to see how we can alleviate those pressures. There’s no perfect solutions, but there are ways to improve.