Hawaii’s Big Fix to Its Housing Shortage for Native Hawaiians? A Casino – By Rob Perez (Honolulu Star-Advertiser) and Agnel Philip (ProPublica) / Dec 24 2020
The state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands is pushing a plan to build a casino on ancestral land to raise money for more housing. This happened just after the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica found chronic problems in the state’s native land program.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
This story was co-published with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, a member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.
This fall, as the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands faced mounting criticism over its handling of a century-old program to return Native Hawaiians to their ancestral lands, top officials asked their staff to come up with bold solutions.
The Star-Advertiser and ProPublica had reported in October that DHHL was failing to meet a crushing demand for housing. Under state law, anyone who is at least half Hawaiian and 18 or older is considered a beneficiary of a state-controlled land trust and entitled to get a homestead in a “prompt and efficient manner.” The department had developed just 3,300 residential lots statewide since 1995, though, while its residential waitlist ballooned to 23,000. If DHHL continued at the same pace, it would take 182 years to accommodate the so-called waitlisters, some of whom have waited for decades, the news organizations reported.
Shaken by the reporting, Tyler Gomes, deputy to the department’s top executive, challenged his staffers to “think outside of the box” to come up with one big move that could make a difference over the next 100 years. On Monday, at a meeting of the Hawaiian Homes Commission, he outlined their proposal: a resort-casino on Native Hawaiian land.
