A few weeks back, we reported on a Hawai‘i Affordability Survey, conducted by Holomua Collective.
The nonprofit organization worked with AE Consulting to survey more than 3,200 Hawai‘i residents. They found that 29% of respondents believe they’ll have to flee the Islands for economic reasons, up from 26% when the same survey was conducted in 2024. Add in the respondents who think they might need to flee and you’ve got 75% of respondents who either suspect, or flat-out know, they’ll have to go.
Is there a word for information that is both shocking and unsurprising?
The survey asked people about a number of related issues and one in particular stood out for me: Confidence in our local institutions. It’s the first time Holomua Collective has asked this.
Here are the percentages of respondents who said they have “a great deal or fair amount of confidence in each institution … to do right by Hawai‘i’s working families.”
- Nonprofits: 54%
- Business community: 39%
- Public school system: 38%
- Labor unions: 36%
- Government: 20%
That’s pretty grim.
If you took a test and got 54 out of 100, you’d get an F. And yet that’s the highest score any sector in Hawai‘i received.
I asked Holomua Collective if it was possible to see a breakdown of respondents by the institutions in which they work. Do government workers, for example, have the same low opinion of their own sector? Do people in the business community agree that they can barely “do right by Hawai‘i’s working families?”
It wasn’t possible to break it down that way, unfortunately. I hope they repeat this question next year and sort the results by institution as well as in aggregate. It would be useful to know, for example, if government folks think they’re doing a stellar job while the rest of us disagree.
What we do know about the respondents is that they work in at least one of these sectors. “We surveyed 3,241 employees from 25 local for-profit, nonprofit, and public sector employers,” Holomua Collective explains at the survey web page.
They have deep experience behind their opinions:
- Lifetime resident: 63% of respondents
- Over 20 years in Hawai‘i: 19%
- 11-20 years: 8%
- 6-10 years: 5%
- 1-5 years: 4%
- Less than a year: 1%
They mostly like their jobs, with 68% of respondents somewhat or very satisfied, and only 17% somewhat or very dissatisfied.
About 61% of them have household incomes of $100,000 or more, with a median household size of three people.
The bottom line is, people are not just packing their bags because Hawai‘i is expensive. They’re packing their bags because they don’t believe any institution can do anything about that, least of all the politicians and bureaucrats who set policy.
That ought to inspire a political revolution, but it hasn't yet. Hawai‘i’s middle class looks around the Islands and thinks, “This place cannot be changed or fixed. I’m outta here.”
Yet we keep electing the same people from the same party, election after election, even though apparently no one has any faith in them to do right by working families.
What does that tell the lifers in government?
It tells them 20% is a passing grade after all. No need change. Just wait, the grumblers going leave.
Government can probably wring one more generation out of Hawai‘i that way. But one day, they’re going to go out into the fields to milk the middle-class for the taxes that pay their salaries and pensions, only to find the herd has vanished.
I guess we're choosing to watch the collapse from Vegas. But that isn't the only choice we could make.
A. Kam Napier is editor in chief of Aloha State Daily. His opinions in Pipikaula Corner are his own and not reflective of the ASD team.
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A. Kam Napier can be reached at kam@alohastatedaily.com.
