Joe Kent’s recent Community Voice, “Honolulu’s ‘Empty Homes’ Tax Proposal Is Mostly An Empty Promise,” cherry picks and distorts the intent and consequences of City and County of Honolulu Council’s proposed Bill 9 in five ways.

First, he considers Bill 9 in isolation rather than as part of a concerted movement on the part of state and local governments to use this year’s tax income windfall and federal funding to begin addressing Hawaii’s housing problem. Up until this legislation, the government response has been “compassionate disruption” or the current “weed and seed” policy that do little more than chase tired and vulnerable people from one place to another.

Weed and seed, a cruel and ineffective leftover from 1990s “broken windows” policing, considers the largely Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander unsheltered population as “weeds” to be picked while it simply neglects the “seed” part of the equation.

Second, Kent’s conclusion that opening up housing that currently stands vacant will have no effect is simply wrong. About 34,000 vacant units on Oahu stand in contrast to the 7,496 unsheltered people according to the last Oahu point-in-time estimate in 2019. Those 34,000 units could house all of Oahu’s unsheltered people and then some, even if, as is likely, the point-in-time count is an underestimate.

To write this off as impractical is a technique of the entitled for deflecting anything that requires a reduction in their entitlements. Introducing 34,000 new rentals into the market, perhaps more if subdivided, would significantly reduce rental costs even if individual rentals introduced were too costly.

Social Responsibility

Native Hawaiians constitute 19% of the population but 41% of Honolulu County’s unsheltered. In a trick favored by liberals and more so by conservatives and libertarians, the preferred “solution” to this non-housing places the responsibility squarely on the people experiencing it.

Politicians, private charities, business interests, and Kent’s Grassroot Institute deflect our attention from social responsibility and appeal to the neoliberal catchphrase “personal responsibility.” Personal responsibility is perhaps necessary but it is not sufficient for solving socially caused problems.

Third, Kent argues that the income generated by the taxes charged would do little to address housing issues, with 95% going toward housing unsheltered people and five percent going toward administering the program, which Kent calls “skimmed.” Such programs do need to be administered, and a 5% operating cost with 95% direct investment is a far better ratio than most non-profits.

Fourth, not all absentee properties belong to the wealthy, and where they do there is plenty of precedent for breaking up large houses, even mansions, into multiple units. My own high-rise building on the Ala Wai side of Waikiki, with 54 units, has a half-dozen or so unoccupied apartments at any one time that could be made into affordable housing.

Across the street sit two large, single-family houses that have just been boarded up, something that bodes long-term vacancy. The multiple-unit housing in many cities is made from splitting up single family mansions in neighborhoods that used to house elites. I lived in several of these during my youth in Rochester, New York, and was able to do so on a line cook’s wages.

Furthermore, one way to avoid the tax would be to hire a live-in family as caretakers if the owners wished to keep their absentee status, providing both housing and jobs. Housing that was too expensive for the working class could go to the wealthier folks, in turn opening up other units.

Finally, Kent complains of a putative state incursion into the privacy of wealthy absentee landlords. The text of Bill 9 notes that for the most part, compliance with the law simply requires honesty on the part of vacant dwelling owners. Audits only kick in for cases of non-compliance or if the owners refuse to say whether they had kept the housing vacant.

Personal responsibility is perhaps necessary but it is not sufficient for solving socially caused problems.

This is no more invasive than a blood alcohol test or a tax audit. Unpleasant, perhaps, but necessary for enforcement to be effective.

To be consistent, Kent might think about the rights of unsheltered people, who suffer massive incursions into their privacy in order to gain any social services. For example, in the last point-in-time report, the unsheltered are carefully broken out by race, gender, mental health, substance use, domestic violence, disability, and recidivism. There is no similar collection of absentee owner data.

The invasion of privacy is one of the reasons many unsheltered people choose to stay outside the auspices of the government. Where is their privacy, not to mention their property, as the last of their worldly possessions are regularly destroyed or placed into virtually inaccessible storage by the city under current policy?

We should enthusiastically support Bill 9 as a first step toward addressing one of the causes of the housing shortage (there are several others) instead of blaming the people suffering the effects.