Comment Detail

Comment

Dear decision makers,

My name is Colleen Rost-Banik and I am a sociology instructor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. I am a resident of Honolulu and am concerned about our increasing housing crisis. While many people want to build our way out of the problem, in Hawaii, much of what we face is that condo units and single family homes are owned but unoccupied due to people using housing as a means of investment. Thus, we don't have a housing shortage problem as much as we have a problem of using-unoccupied-housing-as-investment problem. This drives up the cost of housing that is on the market - both for renters and home buyers.

Additionally, we have an increasing rent problem that is exacerbated by the overall cost of housing, AS WELL AS the housing vouchers supplied by the overwhelming amount of military families in the islands.

Rather than placing all the solutions into the category of development (building both single family and tiny homes), we need to be 1) instituting rent caps and 2) placing significantly higher taxes on properties that a) are not one's primary residence and b) are left unoccupied.

Thank you for taking these comments into consideration. I look forward to your action on the housing crisis.

Sincerely,
Colleen Rost-Banik, PhD