How are you feeling about the trajectory of a society known for aloha? I’m concerned.
I grew up in Ewa Beach when housing inventory was rising and it wasn’t a huge stretch to rent or buy a home. Since then, and especially over the past 15 years, I’ve watched the cost of housing soar while wages practically flatlined. Now, many who grew up here can’t stay. Nor can many newcomers remain afloat. Even many who have a home wonder if their children will manage to afford one.
There were far fewer who were homeless back then. Those who think “the homeless” are simply lazy, drug-addled or mentally impaired ignore the fact that for many of us, a home has become unaffordable. Many who live from paycheck to paycheck are just one health challenge, layoff or bad decision away from joining the “riff-raff” that “plagues” our islands.
Last week, some of “them” were us. Next week it could be your neighbor’s kid, your uncle who drinks a bit too much, perhaps your mom who never quite got over your dad’s passing.
A housing market increasingly available to only the wealthy is reshaping our islands. I’m seeing our responses to the affordability crisis erode aloha as a me-first culture emerges. Honolulu’s streets are getting meaner.
I see it in how we now run yellows — even reds; how we avoid eye contact and smile less; how we’re angry at tourists in our favorite spots. Our economic crisis is going cultural: we’re becoming just another place where people care only for themselves. We’re losing the thing that keeps many of us here: a culture of aloha where people routinely care for and help one another.
To stem the decline of aloha we must embrace three truths. First, it’s we, through our actions, who create our society. How we treat each other defines Hawaii.
Second, island resources, especially land, are limited. We must use resources creatively and mindfully if there are to be enough for a growing population.
Third, if we don’t collectively and individually take responsibility for these truths, we’ll lose what makes Hawaii special.
To change our trajectory, we need a social contract that says living here carries certain responsibilities. Striving to act, for example, with compassion for others. Sharing resources with the less fortunate.
Of all the affordability gap’s challenges, nowhere is society’s response more problematic and cruel than in how we treat the homeless. I’m no expert on what creates homelessness or arises from it, but several years ago I went homeless to learn what it’s like. It’s humiliating, exhausting, terrifying, dehumanizing.
My conclusion from that experience: It’s time to reassert our aloha.
We must resist euphemisms like “compassionate disruption” that disguise actions that make it even harder for the homeless to maintain a semblance of normal life. We must welcome affordable housing in our neighborhoods. We must be willing to live in smaller homes for example, to provide more space for others. We must stop “sweeping” people from place to place. It solves nothing. We must share public resources — parks, for example — with those who need them. We must stop criminalizing the inability to afford a home. We must address the way unaffordability puts our neighbors on the streets or on the brink.
While concerned, I’m hopeful. When much of the world descends into cruelty, we can strengthen the thing that’s always set us apart: aloha. We’ve always come together to face crises, and we’ve always shown aloha for each other. We should realize that helping homeless neighbors actually does something for ourselves — it creates the aloha we need to live and breathe.
Alani Apio is a community consultant, writer and artist.
