Issues & Research
These pages separate campaign conclusions from the data and assumptions behind them. The goal is to show what the evidence supports, where uncertainties remain, and what policy questions should come next.
Main findings
The first two research topics examine whether Hawaiʻi is making full use of its existing housing stock and whether the economy is creating enough living-wage careers for the next generation.
Physical housing inventory and housing available to year-round residents are not the same thing. The research examines competing uses before accepting a predetermined new-construction target.
Current projections show substantially fewer living-wage openings than young people expected to enter Hawaiʻi’s workforce. Productive local industries can create work while reducing dependence on imports.
Explore voluntary residential reentry campuses where eligible people transitioning out of incarceration can temporarily live, earn a real wage, gain transferable skills, save for permanent housing, and contribute to legitimate agricultural and food-production operations.
The purpose is not cheap farm labor. The purpose is a structured pathway from incarceration to employment, independence, permanent housing, and successful reintegration while strengthening Hawaiʻi’s productive economy.
Read the Agricultural Reentry ProposalHawaiʻi should not rebuild agriculture around large quantities of low-wage manual labor. The goal should be to produce more food per worker by combining skilled people with automation, robotics, drones, sensors, precision agriculture, SI, and modern processing and logistics. Rice and kalo provide two useful case studies: rice shows how far mechanization can already go, while kalo shows where Hawaiʻi-specific engineering can reduce labor without unnecessarily replacing traditional cultivation systems.
Produce more food with fewer workers, and make those workers more skilled, productive, and better paid.
Read the Agriculture & Technology Proposal Rice & Kalo Case StudyResearch in progress
The Research section can expand as new data and source material become available.