Lingle brings homestead hopes

By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer

The Department of Hawaiian Home Lands is a victim of its own success in recent years, and of its past failures.

Ted Kinimaka was initially discouraged by the long waiting list for homestead land. But he joined the list in 1986 and was able to buy a home in Papakolea. Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Advertiser

Agency director Raynard Soon, who plans to leave his post at the end of December, expects that the coming tide of changes will help Hawaiians.

"In general we were happy with the emphasis that the governor-elect has been giving to Hawaiian issues," Soon said. "The Hawaiian people are going to hold her to that."

And there are a lot of them watching Gov.-elect Linda Lingle. Nearly 20,000 qualified Native Hawaiians — those whose ancestry is at least half Hawaiian — are still waiting for fulfillment of the homestead promise. It's a number that climbs every year, despite the vastly accelerated pace of housing development.

Soon said that when prospects for homesteaders started improving in the late 1980s, an increasing number of Hawaiians began feeling hopeful enough to apply.

One was Ted Kinimaka, now retired from the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard. After four years in the Air Force, Kinimaka moved back to the Islands in 1966. Discouraged by the lines of Hawaiians who already had waited 30 years or more, Kinimaka waived his right to apply for a homestead and qualified for a Hawai'i Kai home on his own.

In 1986, when the commission omitted the ban on applicants who already purchased homes, Kinimaka and his two sons joined the list. The elder Kinimaka clocked in past the 6,000 mark on the O'ahu list.

It's a testament to the difficulty many Native Hawaiians have qualifying for a mortgage that Kinimaka rocketed up through the list to buy one of 87 homes in Kalawahine Streamside, one of the newer subdivisions in Papakolea.

"We were really fortunate," he said. "I still feel like I got the birthday gift. I'm thankful."

The mission to restore Hawaiians to their land through leased homesteads dates to the signing of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1921. In those eight decades, however, only about 7,200 leases have been awarded, including those for agricultural and pastoral uses, as well as for residential lots.

Most of that failure stems from a lack of money to develop the homes, an impoverishment that was erased in 1994. That's the year the Hawaiian Homes Commission was awarded a $30 million annual cash settlement from the state, to be paid over 30 years as compensation for state lands that, under a strict reading of the federal law, should have been homestead property.

The department has used this money to build, or help lessees build, more homes in the past decade than in the previous 70 years. Between 1921 and 1991, 2,529 units were built; since 1991, that tally reached 3,308, Soon said.

And yet the pace has not quickened enough to surpass the number of new applicants every year. In one attempt to reduce the waiting list, Soon said 2,500 "paper leases" were issued in the late 1980s for lots, many of which were not ready for building; this gave beneficiaries something their children could inherit should they die before a home could be built.

"But when they moved off the list, more people jumped on it," he said. "There was a point where we had over 1,000 (new applicants) in a month ... people were coming out of the woodwork."

Meanwhile, many of the applicants on the list for the decades of little development grew older and less able to qualify financially for homes as their earnings declined into fixed incomes, said Jobie Yamaguchi, deputy to the chairman.

Two years ago, Yamaguchi was assisted by two student employees (Kui Keliipio and Dre Kalili, now attending George Washington University) in doing a study of applicants who have been waiting the longest.

The survey included the top 100 on each island's list and revealed that all the applicants had received at least one offer of a lot; the average per applicant in the sample was seven or eight offers, according to the survey.

Still, there are those who seethe privately, and even publicly, about their lack of movement off the list. One case, originally filed in 1999, awaits a ruling by the Hawai'i Supreme Court, said Carl Varady, one of the attorneys in the case.

Varady represents plaintiff Dianne Boner; her co-complainants are Leona Kalima and Joseph Ching, Native Hawaiians who are alleging breaches of trust by the home lands agency, including delays in processing their applications for homesteads.

While he waits for the decision, Varady has an eye on the office of Lingle, who has pledged, among other things, to reinstate the department's Individual Claims Review Panel.

"I haven't set up an appointment to meet with her," Varady said. "But this would be an apt time to do that."

Although he is the lame duck agency chief, Soon feels certain that staffers are ready to work with a new administration.

"The people around here are willing to push ahead," he said. "They're anxious to see what her emphasis will be in putting as many Hawaiians on the land as possible.

"If she can help us gain the resources necessary to achieve an even greater rate of acceleration, I say great."

Nobody at the department needs convincing that giving Hawaiians a piece of their native land is the prime directive, Soon said.

"We were the group that lost our language, our religion, lost a lot of our culture," he said. "Maybe the most important thing we lost was language, but when we lost our land, you had Hawaiians walking the streets of Honolulu with stooped shoulders.

"The land is kin. If you lose the land, you lose the sense of who you are, and you feel you have no place — here, or anywhere else."

Reach Vicki Viotti at 525-8053 or vviotti@honoluluadvertiser.com.