Beth Fukumoto: Drop The Defeatist Attitude When It Comes To Housing

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When my husband first came to Oʻahu, I introduced him to more than just Spam musubi, shave ice and the North Shore. I made sure he knew about all of the issues that keep me up at night.

Parents watching their kids leave because a starter home here is more expensive than a mansion elsewhere. The exorbitant cost of milk and eggs. Our potential to lead innovation on clean energy and sustainable agriculture.

He listened to all of it. For the most part, he likes my rants, though we have implemented a “no fiscal policy after midnight” rule, and I appreciate his opinions. But when I described our homelessness crisis as “chronically unsolvable,” he gave a simple response that was as infuriating as it was truthful: Homelessness is a policy issue. We can decide to solve it, or we can decide not to.

That response has stuck with me, which is probably why Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, “Abundance,” keeps rattling around in my head. I don’t think it breaks new ground for those who’ve been in the policy trenches.

And, if you’re one of the people exhausted by the sudden glow-up of the “Abundance Bros,” I’m with you. People who work on these issues have been saying versions of this for years to no avail. Still, it offers a clean, easy-to-understand approach that we can apply to our biggest crises.

We keep telling ourselves a story of scarcity — of what we can’t do, of what we don’t have, of what we must protect. The opposite mindset would be abundance, which Klein and Thompson define as having enough of what we need to improve our lives.

Don’t Fear Imperfect Steps

Working toward gaining abundance instead of solving scarcity could help us stop focusing on how to divide the dwindling resources we have and spend our time finding ways to get the resources we need. Especially when we’re talking about issues like housing, homelessness and clean, affordable energy.

If you strip abundance down to its working parts, there are a few lessons that we can use to reframe how we approach our state’s biggest problems.

First, policymakers need to remember that legitimacy comes from finishing things, not perfect processes or good intentions. Every politician promises to tackle the housing crisis, and voters have stopped believing it’s possible. The only way to fix that is to actually build more houses. And, progress can only be measured by the number of local families who can afford a place to live.

Second, implementation matters as much as invention. If we want affordable, clean energy, we know what works: modernize the grid, add storage and smooth demand. We can keep waiting for a breakthrough that makes these solutions miraculously cheap, or our state can invest in the upgrades we know we need and already understand. So, line up the capital and measure success by clean energy technologies adopted and household bills falling.

Third, be a bottleneck detective. Not every chokepoint is the same, and one-size-fits-all ideology won’t cut it. When Gov. Josh Green used an emergency proclamation on housing to suspend land-use and review laws, some saw overdue urgency, others saw an alarming bypass of due process. He later scaled back exemptions, dissolved the special working group and folded duties into the Hawaiʻi Housing Finance and Development Corp.

That whole saga wasn’t tidy, and it’s now being tested in court. But it did what “Abundance” asks: name the bottleneck, try to move it, then adapt. We can debate the tool, but that proclamation made sure we couldn’t ignore the problem.

The Right Kind Of Boring

Since the governor’s initial proclamation in 2023, the Legislature has done significantly more to move housing and land-use reform through the regular order. Last year’s bills laid the groundwork for accessory dwelling units and office-to-residential conversions.

This year, lawmakers put more low-interest capital into building below-market rentals and encouraged higher-density, transit-oriented projects, while trimming review delays at the Historic Preservation Division by clarifying what truly merits historic scrutiny and allowing temporary consultant help. These aren’t silver bullets. They’re the right kind of boring, tailored changes, and we need more of them.

Hawaiʻi will always have real constraints: limited land, sensitive ecosystems and cultural sites that deserve protection. The abundance lens doesn’t ask us to bulldoze those values. It asks us to retool how we uphold them.

If we can trust licensed architects to design a 100-unit building, we can trust them to self-certify a bathroom remodel after 60 days of silence from a backlogged department.

Keep the reviews that protect the environmental and cultural resources at risk, but adapt processes to ensure that local families can still afford to live here and enjoy those resources.

Get out of our own way where it’s safe to do so. If we can trust licensed architects to design a 100-unit building, we can trust them to self-certify a bathroom remodel after 60 days of silence from a backlogged department.

Stop trying to solve 10 goals at once and instead deliver the one thing a family needs right now: a front door they can afford. Then, do the next thing. And the next.

So here’s my ask, to myself as much as anyone: Can we retire the reflexive “we can’t”?

Let’s ask the abundance questions that Klein and Thompson pose out loud, “What is scarce that should be abundant? What is difficult to build that should be easy? What inventions do we need that we do not yet have?” Then, do whatever it takes to grow, build and improve so we can deliver what local families need to thrive.