This was the scene at the end of Kahala Avenue in front of Waialae Beach Park this morning. It was a very typical morning.
The house in the background, which sits on about 1/3-acre of land, sold at the beginning of 2019 for a reported $5,283,000. The buyer is a Japanese company based in Hokkaido, Japan. The company director who signed the deed made the news less than two years earlier by paying $22 million for a condominium in the Park Lane condominium at Ala Moana Center.
The house boasts two floors with total living area of 9,351 square feet. It has 14 rooms, including four bedrooms, five bathrooms, and two half baths, according to real estate records. It seems to be a corporate investment in Hawaii real estate.
Back to the beach park. The small red car has been parked across the street in front of the $5.28 million house for months. It is home to a man who would otherwise be considered homeless. It’s his bedroom, his living room, his storeroom, and his workshop. I’m not at all sure how he survives. I can’t say he has nothing, because his car appears to be stuffed with, well, stuff. But I think it’s fair to say he has very, very little. He moves the car from one parking space to another in the same short block to avoid being ticketed by police. But he is somehow surviving.
The Yin and Yang of our modern life.
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At least your red car has an occupant! The one in our neighborhood (also a red vehicle) has been parked in the same place since December, with multiple citations attached to the wipers. Special duty police posted here for highway construction every week day (I know, you’d think they’d do something to help, right?) have also commented on how that abandoned vehicle hasn’t been stripped yet.
It is painful to watch and hear what is happening, not just here, but throughout the nation. Minor correction. I assume you meant $5,283,000 in the second paragraph.
Thanks for the edit. I welcome all editing suggestions. How I miss the old days of having copy editors!
One of the great disgraces of our country is wealth inequality. We have enough resources that no one should be homeless or go hungry, so it is a shame that the tax the billionaire proposals by some candidates will in reality go nowhere.
This is America. I don’t envy “the rich”. Why do so many of you?
Maybe the people living in all these red cars didn’t take life seriously the first time around. -Remember high school? Where do you think a bunch of those clowns ended up? In red cars with you feeling sorry for them.
Article X, Section 5 of the Hawaii Constitution says that State lands are to be used for “home and farm ownership to the widest extent possible in accordance with applicable law.” Twenty private landowners (who could lose their land to eminent domain if they lease it for residential use), the Counties, the State, and the Federal government, own most of the land in the state. About 96% of Hawaii’s land is not zoned for residential construction. Prince Kuhio’s 203,000 acres for the native Hawaiians has, nearly 100 years later, still not been distributed to them …. 28,000 remain on the waiting list. Homelessness and elite possession of prime real estate is not a bug, it’s a feature, yet our Constitution requires otherwise. When will this change?
There is nothing that will ever prevent or solve wealth inequality for goodness sake – even (and perhaps ESPECIALLY) in socialist/communist regimes. They all have a favored group the difference is those who run the government and take your money in the socialist model are the same group. Period. It is fact. The shame and disgrace is not income equality – it is a person who is reduced to live in their car. I have a place to live as most of you. I do not have a 5 million dollar mansion. I can live with that. So what is wrong with the picture is those who do not have enough to have a home or dwelling to live in. The shame is not that some people are rich. The next step in this is that we should all pitch in and give Ian a trip to Venezuela. There you can find disgrace. What was once a prosperous country by SA standards is now a place where you will find the rich and favored rulers and most of the rest in squalor looking for something to eat. So somewhere over there are perhaps thousands of cars serving as homes with the addition of nothing to eat. We should not tolerate the sorrow of even a few not having homes – but we are sure a lot better off. I don’t want rich peoples money. I don’t need it. And those who need help need simply that – help. All the wealth in America would not buy everyone a house to live in.
Aloha, New GENSHIRO K?WAMOTO-San,
Please adopt me! And care for my as you would your pet!
Dogs and cats have better cherished lives than most Kanaka’s in Hawaii! Mandatory, National Pet Health Care Insurance – “Mazie Cares” (NPHCI-MC) Has been introduced in Congress! Along with Pet Equal Rights Amendments. With full Federal Pet Civil Justice Rights movement All.
Animal wealth equity, THY NEIGHBOR NOT COVETED EQUALY BY HUMANS! Wait, more human competition to soon to follow Mr. Roboto & Mrs Hotsushi! You won’t let her go, save pets first!
But who is happier? I bet the guy in the red car. When you dont value thing you value relationships and how you treat others
Seriously doubt the guy in the red car is happier. Really?
“INEQUALITY”
i have NO idea what this implies.
No one has said it yet, but the car full of belongings in the elite neighborhood of Kahala is even more striking because exclusionary zoning contributes to the dire housing situation that exists in Hawaii and elsewhere.
Some of y’all want to believe putting lots of housing where it doesn’t exist (like where there is no residential development) is a good solution. Why? It means you also have to extend infrastructure there if it doesn’t exist or is insufficient for accommodating lots of people.
We COULD do infill housing or allow more density where there already is residential except some very privileged people cannot fathom taller buildings near their single family homes. THIS to me is the travesty – the selfishness of people who live in multi-million dollar properties who believe the greatest tragedy is less expensive housing showing up in their neighborhoods.
People’s abilities are not equal but opportunity is or should be. It’s what you do with the opportunities presented to you.
“The house boasts two floors with total living area of 9,351 square feet. It has 14 rooms, including four bedrooms, five bathrooms, and two half baths, according to real estate records. It seems to be a corporate investment in Hawaii real estate.”
Corporations do not buy houses as an investment, they buy houses as an amenity for their executives.
Why is inequality in outcomes such a bad thing…the key is equality before the law, everyone treated equally with regard to their behavior.
The relentless critiques of ‘inequality’ betray a presumption that envy is an admirable sentiment and that private property ought to, by rights, be taken from those who have and given to those who have not, regardless of the effort to earn one’s way in the world.
Poor people all over the world hanker to come to this ever-so-unequal country ….. which, by protecting private property, treating all as equal under the law, and fostering enterprise, has become wealthy beyond all historic norms. The guy in the car is actually a lot better off then millions, likely, billions, of people on earth…and he’s obviously not emigrating.
People vote with their feet. Inequality is a feature, not a bug, in a free society. People are not equal. We endeavor to treat them equally, with dignity and civil rights. But the only way to make them actually ‘equal’ in possessions and property would be to coerce others to provide things that haven’t been earned.
Nevertheless, State and private ownership of vast tracts of land, monopolies in shipping, oligopolies in health care, and locked-in public service union organizations controlling 40% of the vote, and laws and codes encumbering enterprise….mean some of this bad inequality is much worse than it need be.