One initiative is to help seniors stay in their homes
The city of Atlanta has officially announced an initiative to help seniors stay home despite seniors’ spikes in property taxes.
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- The family of Sarah Kehaulani Gu, who owned land in Hana, Maui for nearly 200 years, lost it almost to the property tax hike.
- The tax hike was caused by satellite images that revealed that the land was not used for agriculture.
- Goo’s memoir, “Cleana,” records the family’s battle to preserve the lands of their ancestors.
- The book also explores the movement of native Hawaiians with rising costs of living and land grabs by the ultra-rich people.
Sara Khaulani Goo’s Family has owned land in Hana, Maui for nearly 200 years. It was a gift from the king of Hawaii in 1848, but a few years ago they almost lost it.
For generations, Goose land remained wild and untouched, but historically significant. Hidden under the overgrowth of the land’s jungle was the Pi’ilanihale heiau, the largest heiau in Polynesia and spanning around two soccer fields.
In 2019, while working as a journalist in Washington, DC, Goo received an email from his father. The 10-acre acre property tax revealed land not used for farming, land not used in low tax zoning, and he received from his father that 566% annually rose from $300 to more than $2,000 a year. Her grandparents created trust and secured funds to keep the land in their family, especially the ones that only covered 10 years.
Therefore, her family began a four-year journey to come together to find ways to maintain her ancestral land in her newly released memoir, “Cleana: Stories of Old Hawaiian Family, Land, and Heritage.”
According to the county Treasury Department, aerial images taken every three years are used by Maui County to inspect properties for land zoning compliance and reassessment of property taxes to fair market value. Some local families say that within the past decade tax payments have barely gained long-standing wealth.
In Hawaiian, the word cleana is widely translated into “responsibility” and “privilege,” enveloping the idea that everyone has a role within a larger community. For Goo, it not only maintains her family’s land as a promise to her grandparents, but sheds light on the current displacement of Native Hawaiians who can afford to live on the infamous, expensive island chain.
Meanwhile, the islands are working to develop more luxurious condominiums and continue to grab land by ultra-rich people, with $3.7 billion owning 11% of Hawaii’s private land, while locals cost 0.003%.
Housing is a complex issue in Hawaii. The island’s finite amount of land real estate is fighting against an influx of out-of-state buyers buying a second home or rental property, making it a valuable feeling for the average local family.
“My family story is a story of the land, what happened to many native Hawaiians, and I’ll tell their stories through our stories. It’s probably a story that resonates with a larger audience, and that was my goal,” Goo told USA Today.
Prices in Paradise
Through the lens of her personal experience, Goo tracks how Europeans’ introduction of private property ownership and colonization have changed the course of Hawaiian history. “My goal was to really tell a new, more true, more authentic story about Hawaii because I felt that every story I saw was written by Hollywood or for tourists,” she said.
Gu continued on to the Paper Trail from when King Kamehameha III gave the original 990 acres to her royal ancestor, Kahanus, to her father’s generation forced her to navigate the modern legal system. On this journey, they face multiple refusals to reduce taxes by what Goo called “faceless bureaucrats.”
This type of story is a familiar story about a local family that Hawaiian and native Hawaiians seek to evacuate.
While most Hawaii is considered a paradise, for many locals, living on the island is a much more difficult reality. In Honolulu and Maui, the median selling prices for regular detached homes exceeded $1 million, according to the 2023 Hawaii Housing Fact Book by the University of Hawaii Economic Research Institute. Less than a third of local households can afford only the average home, with multiple generations often living under one roof.
As a result, locals are driven off the island. For the first time in 2020, it was discovered that more native Hawaiians live outside of Hawaii by the US Census. A 2019 report by Kamehameha Schools found that the high cost of living is the reason why 61% of native Hawaiians said they had considered moving from Hawaii. Goo, an indigenous Hawaiian diaspora who grew up in California, also explores the meaning of connecting with her Hawaiian identity in her book.
The future of Hawaii
Over the decades, the land of Goo’s ancestors has dipped from 990 acres to just 10 acres as members sold their parcels to sugar plantations or moved from Hana. “It’s a miracle that this little land was in our family and we managed to survive for years,” she said. The land where Heiau sits is now managed by the Gardens of Kahanu, the National Tropical Botanical Garden, and now Heia has recovered after pressure from his family.
For many locals, the cost of living in Hawaii just keeps rising, so the road ahead feels uncertain, but Goo sees a faint glow of hope. “If more Native Hawaiians are behind such governments, they have those values and understand the value of Hawaiian land and Hawaiian hands, that gives me some comfort,” she said.
In 2021, Maui County passed the groundbreaking Aina Kupna Act introduced by the Indigenous Kini Rollins Fernandez in Hawaii, which gave tax cuts to certain direct descendants who were handed over their ancestors’ land at least three generations ago.
Still, the battle is far from the end, and the next generation is likely to face another “modern land control version,” Goo said.
“Unfortunately, I’m sure I’ll have to deal with things, or my kids, or those kids, will have to deal with them,” she said. “That’s why it’s important to keep our promises and keep Cleana alive, to understand the context and history because we need to be prepared.”
