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Bruce Voss hosts with Nick Ordway, Director of the Hawaii Real Estate Research and Education Center, examining Hawaii's housing market as the 1994 gubernatorial campaigns heat up. Ordway presents a sobering picture: despite a sluggish economy, the median single-family home on Oahu costs $350,000, and Barron's has called Honolulu's prices the most overvalued in the country. He argues that government is part of the problem—developers must navigate up to 30 separate permitting processes—but also part of the solution, crediting the Hawaii Housing Finance and Development Corporation's work. The state's 60/40 affordable-housing requirement, Ordway contends, has backfired by creating a glut of units whose qualified buyers cannot secure bank financing, while discouraging development for the gap group caught between affordable and market prices. Three developers—Gentry, Schuler, and Castle and Cook—now account for 91 percent of single-family housing production statewide, a concentration Ordway attributes directly to regulatory complexity. Callers raise water depletion in Central Oahu, the proposed Haseko marina's threat to the aquifer, and whether Hawaii's islands can even support current population levels. Ordway notes that agriculture, once 61 percent of employment in the 1930s, has fallen to roughly 2 percent, making the islands dangerously dependent on imports.
Transcript
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