Hawaii’s governor wants to have the state take over Lahaina’s burned lands
The devastating fire in Lahaina, Hawaii, left behind a swath of horrific destruction, everything from known lives lost to as-yet-unknown lives lost to massive property damage. It is a true disaster and a serious crisis. And true to the Democrat mantra, the state’s Democrat governor, Josh Green, already has plans not to let that crisis go to waste.
I must admit that I’ve kept an emotional distance from the horror in Hawaii. When I realized this, I wondered if I had somehow wandered into sociopath territory without realizing it. How could I be unmoved? However, as the news has unfolded, I’ve understood why I was insulating myself a bit.
Moving with their usual warp speed, Democrats have been following Rahm Emanuel’s dictum that “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Most obviously and inevitably, they’ve been blaming climate change for a disaster that almost certainly had its roots in an invasive grass combined with poor maintenance. (Poor maintenance was also behind the California fires that were used to push the climate change agenda.)
Image: Lahaina fire damage. YouTube screen grab.
However, Governor Green, a northeastern Democrat, has another idea for using the disaster to further Democrat goals: He’s contemplating having the state take over the land and turn it into a worker’s paradise:
I’m already thinking about ways for the state to acquire that land so that we can put it into workforce housing, to put it back into families, or to make it open spaces in perpetuity as a memorial to people who were lost. We want this to be something that we remember after the pain passes.
And yes, I know that Green also talked about making it available to the families who lost everything, which will certainly be better than the $700 per household that the Biden administration is proposing (the dregs left over from financing Ukraine, I guess). And an “open space” is always nice, but not a lot of people can live there.
No, the real issue is that bit about “workforce housing.” I’d like you to think about a single government housing complex in America that hasn’t turned into a complete and utter disaster rife with crime. In San Francisco, my one-time hometown, some of the public housing complexes in the Bayview-Hunters Point district, which become black enclaves during WWII because the shipyards building liberty ships were located there, were so terrible that they were simply demolished. That area of the city has been the focus of government-funded “rehabilitation” forever, but it never works. The area is still crime-ridden.
Every reader has the same stories about the government housing in his or her community. Because the tenants in this housing have no buy-in, they have no incentive to maintain the community. The community degrades, and crime moves in. It’s inevitable, and that’s what Governor Green wants for Lahaina, one of Hawaii’s oldest and most charming communities.
By the way, Hawaii could use some land reform. Currently, most of the land is owned by a few owners, including super-rich people like Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah, and the Obamas, and it looks as if the burned-out residents’ land is at risk. It would be a better state if these practically feudal land systems changed, but it sure won’t change if Governor Green exercises a government power grab to build a worker’s paradise.