It’s Hard to Believe Now, but 30 Years Ago, Hawai‘i Had an Oversupply of Housing
That’s when the state was mired in a decadelong recession triggered by Japan’s economic bubble crash (1991), a U.S. war (Desert Storm, also 1991), and Hurricane Iniki (1992). By the mid-1990s, “there was standing inventory of unsold homes,” says Stanford Carr, CEO of Stanford Carr Development. “We were in that predicament, as were all the major homebuilders here. We came off from doing 20 houses a month. Everybody was doing like a house a day, till it came to a screeching halt.”
Today, the state is at least 64,000 housing units short, according to Carr. The problem is not exclusive to Hawai‘i: The U.S. has a nationwide shortage of at least 1.5 million housing units, according to the National Association of Home Builders, and more than half of the overall inflation in the economy has been due to the rising costs of housing. But Hawai‘i’s housing costs are the highest in the nation…