PRICED OUT OF HAWAII
Native Hawaiians shed busy lives of ‘trying to make ends meet’ for cheaper spots to live
KAPOLEI, Hawaii — Kona Purdy never wanted to live anywhere but Hawaii. As a Native Hawaiian, he wanted his children to grow up like he did: rooted in their culture, and nourished by the mountains and ocean.
But raising a family in Hawaii meant squeezing nine people into a four-bedroom house — rented with extended family — in Waipahu, a Honolulu suburb. It felt cramped, but the Purdys accepted that this was the price to survive in their homeland.
“We stuffed ourselves into one room,” Purdy said of his four-member family’s living arrangements.
Their share of the monthly rent was $2,300. When rent increased, the Purdys realized that they could no longer afford to live in Hawaii.
“I was so busy working, trying to make ends meet,” he said. “We never took our kids out to the beach.”
It’s increasingly common for Hawaii residents to be priced out of the Aloha State, where the median price for a single-family home topped $900,000 during the pandemic. On Oahu, the most populous island and where Honolulu is, the median price is more than $1 million.
A state analysis last year showed that a single person working 40 hours a week would need to earn $18 an hour to pay for housing and other necessities in Hawaii, but the state minimum wage is $12 an hour.
Many, like the Purdys, have headed to Las Vegas.
According to 2021 population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, the biggest growth of Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander populations was in Clark County, Nevada, which includes Las Vegas, and Sacramento County, California.
Las Vegas was desirable to the Purdys because it’s a popular vacation destination for Hawaii residents, which meant family would likely visit often. Also, the cost of living is lower.
So in 2017, they uprooted their family and moved to Henderson, a Las Vegas suburb in Clark County, where they could afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment for $1,000 a month.
But thanks to many other transplants, the Las Vegas area is full of restaurants catering to Hawaiian taste and cultural events expressing Hawaiian pride.
A few months after they moved, about 20 other relatives followed them. But in August 2021, four years after leaving Hawaii, the Purdys moved back home.
Purdy said that his wife wanted to take care of her mother, who began showing signs of dementia. Their daughter also got accepted to Kamehameha Schools, a relatively affordable private school system that
gives admissions preference to students with Hawaiian ancestry.
The family moved to Kapolei, a Honolulu suburb, to share a five-bedroom house with their extended family. Now that the Purdys have three children, they rent two of the bedrooms.
“It’s a grind, it’s hard, it’s really expensive,” he said. “But I also feel like we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be right now.”
Help may be on the way.
Hawaii Gov. Josh Green proposed this week investing $1 billion in affordable housing and giving tax breaks to people of all income levels to lower the cost of living in the islands.
Green said every family of four could expect to get $2,000 in tax relief under his plan, while lower-income residents would get more.