You’re in line at the airport and the person in front of you is trying to convince the screeners that their carry-on bag is small enough to fit in the overhead compartment. You watch because it’s amusing in an “at least I’m not that desperate” way.

The overstuffed passenger is told to pay the money to check the bag. No, no, see? It all fits. Let me just squish this down and smoosh this together. There! It closes!

Same amount of stuff, just as heavy and still too big. Only now, the macadamia nut cookies and plush turtle doll are smashed almost to oblivion and the zipper is holding on for dear life.

Dealing with Hawaii’s tourism situation is feeling that way, like just rearranging things and squishing things around, rather than having fewer visitors in the islands.

On Wednesday, the Honolulu City Council will have the first reading of a bill aimed at cracking down on vacation rentals in residential neighborhoods, a situation that has affected the quality of life for many Oahu residents and has taken long-term rental units off the market.

For the most part, Bill 41 offers bold relief for communities where strangers come and go, park wherever they please and party late into the night; but like the overfull suitcase, part of the bill pushes vacation rentals elsewhere and would squish out affordable housing for residents.

On the positive side, the bill undoes a 2019 measure that would have allowed up to 1,700 new vacation rental permits in zoned neighborhoods, which really was a backward way to curtail the problem. It also increases the minimum booking from the current 30 days to at least 180 days.

Fines for illegal vacation rentals would increase from $10,000 per day per violation to $25,000 per day, and transient vacation units would be taxed at the same rate as hotels. Of course the vacation rental owners are mad. They wouldn’t get to make the kind of money that they were making in the good old days when tourism was insane before the pandemic.

The common argument is that homeowners should get to do whatever they want on their own property. But if that were the case, an auto body and paint shop could pop up in the house next door to their vacation rental and they wouldn’t be able to complain about it — though they probably would.

One part of the bill, though, is not about controlling the number of vacation rentals, but instead, opening up zones where they would now be allowed. The bill proposes opening resort districts like Waikiki, Ko Olina and the area near Turtle Bay Resort for residential apartments to be converted to vacation rentals.

Christine Otto-Zaa has been working to stem the proliferation of unpermitted “monster houses” in Honolulu for years now. She worries that allowing residential units in Waikiki to become vacation rentals will feed into the same problem of squeezing out local residents.

Otto-Zaa says there are over 19,000 units in Waikiki currently in residential use — from the funky walk-ups near the Ala Wai to the more glamorous buildings near Kapiolani Park — that could become vacation rentals. She worries about where those long-term renters will go.

“I know that a lot of folks feel that Waikiki is ruined anyway so let the tourists run amok there. But there are a lot of low-to-medium income residents living there, and not just the wealthy. To take away this housing for residents is extremely concerning when we have a housing crisis,” Otto-Zaa said.

“And then what happens when these 19,000 units are turned into vacation rentals, you force the density into the surrounding neighborhoods like Kaimuki, Kapahulu, Palolo and McCully, where we already have density and overcrowding issues with monster homes and vacation rentals. So what they are proposing in and around the resort districts will exacerbate the need for housing,” she added.

Council Chair Tommy Waters, who represents the Waikiki district, already has voiced concerns about this specific part of the bill.

“As the councilmember for that district and as council Chair, I am working to create housing for our local families, not take it away. There are many residents living in Diamond Head and the Waikiki Apartment Precinct whose quality of life would be negatively impacted by the de facto expansion of resorts in their neighborhoods, and I look forward to amending the bill to address this issue,” Waters said in an email.

It might be odd to think of trying to save Waikiki for local residents. In some ways, that area was given up for lost a long time ago. But working people live there. Families live there. Retirees live there. If given the choice between getting a monthly rent of, say, $1,900 from a long-term tenant or scooping up a nightly rate of $100 to $130 from visitors, landlords tend to favor the latter.

The bill is only in its first reading and many things can change, but it is an example of how hard it is to solve an issue by just moving things around and not actually reducing the massive bulk causing the problem.