Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 40, Number 6, 1 June 2023 — The House Refusal to Hear OHA's Bill was “Red-lining” [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

The House Refusal to Hear OHA's Bill was “Red-lining”

We tend not to think about "red-lining" in Hawai'i. But the recent legislative session and some unearthed history make me think it's time we recognized how that concept operates here. Red-lining is a real estate practice in whieh puhlie and private housing industry ofhcials operate in a way that denies certain communities access to loans or financing because they are deemed "high risk" on

the basis of their ethnicity. Thanks to scholar Tina Grandinetti's essay in Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai'i (edited by Hokulani A. Aikau and Vernadette V. Gonzalez. Duke University Press, 2019) we learn that a 1982 draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) of the Housing and Community Development Authority (HCDA) said this: "New Kaka'ako residents are expected to be predominantly Caucasian and Japanese...Because they tend to have lower incomes, Part-Hawaiians, Filipinos and most other ethnic groups are not expected to be represented in proportion to their share of 0'ahu's population." She tells us that "while the existing community In Kaka'ako was a mixed plate of Japanese, Chinese, Hawaiian, and Filipinos, the two new condo towers housed predominantly haole (Caucasian) residents and a large number of Japanese residents." It is clear to her that "HCDA had decided that effective development would be defined by profit and investment even though it knew that this would bring drastic changes to the neighborhood." HCDA might as well have hung a banner outside Kaka'ako that said "Hawaiians not weleome." Grandinetti concludes that "Kaka'ako planners had effectively decided that a successful development was a profitable one. In so doing, they deemed Kānaka Maoli and working-class families as undesirable." HCDA's requirements exclude those who most desperately need housing - ffom essential workers, to teachers to poliee ofhcers. "Roughly 75% of housing demand comes from low ineome house-

holds, but they are not served by HCDA and are left out of the growing community in Kaka'ako." This disdain for Kānaka Maoli and working class families was reflected in the behavior of Speaker Saiki and Sen. Moriwaki who, despite being repeatedly briefed on OHA's plans for Hakuone, feigned ignorance. They bought into and supported the campaign of disinformation conducted by the so-called "Friends of Kewalos" who had

also been given the courtesy of meetings with OHA executives and the Chair of the Board of Trustees. The message we heard loud and clear was that we, the Indigenous people of these islands, were literally obstacles in the way of the settler colonizers. Or as the Speaker himself said, housing on Hakuone might interfere with the "viewplanes" of those living in the luxury eondos. As Professor Emeritus Jonathan Okamura pointed out in his eolumn in Civil Beat, "settler colonialism" is no longer confined to academia. It has been brought vividly to life in the treatment accorded to OHA this past legislative session. Okamura explains that "settler eolonialism is a system of power and control by a resident racial or ethnic group over a native people in their homeland." He cites fellow scholar Candace Fujikane who describes Asian settler colonialism as "a constellation of the eolonial ideologies and practices of Asian settlers in Hawai'i." Okamura notes that "the ideologies include racism and the practices consist of institutional discrimination." We saw both at work in the denial of a hearing for OHA's bill in the House, and in the refusal to fund OHA in ways that the Senate saw as justified. But OHA and the Indigenous peoples of these islands will not take this disrespect lying down. We will respond. And we will prevail. Our research shows that people of goodwill of all ethnicities support our fight for justice even if the Speaker does not. ■

Mililani B. Trask VICE CHAIR Trustee, Hawai'i lsland