Hawaii is notoriously expensive: How one Native Hawaiian family fought to keep their land

USA Today

17-07-2025

Sara Kehaulani Goo's family has owned land in Hana, Maui, for nearly 200 years. It was a gift from a Hawaiian king in 1848, but several years ago, they almost lost it all.
For generations, the Goos' land remained wild and untouched, yet historically significant. Hidden beneath the land's jungle overgrowth was the Pi'ilanihale Heiau, the largest heiau (temple) in Polynesia, spanning roughly two football fields.
In 2019, while working as a journalist in Washington, D.C., Goo received an email from her father saying the property taxes on the 10 undeveloped acres had skyrocketed over 566% from $300 to $2,000 in a year due to the government's satellite imaging revealing the land not being used for agriculture, a type of zoning with lower tax amounts. Although her grandparents had created a trust and set aside funds specifically to keep the land in the family, it would only cover a decade.
Thus began a four-year-long journey for her family – spread across the United States and multiple generations – to come together to find a way to keep their ancestral lands, chronicled by Goo in her newly released memoir "Kuleana: A Story of Family, Land, and Legacy in Old Hawaii."
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According to the County Department of Finance, aerial imagery taken every three years is used by Maui County to inspect properties for compliance with land zoning and reassessment of property taxes to fair market value. Some local families have said tax hikes within the past decade have made their long-time properties nearly unaffordable.
In Hawaiian, the word kuleana broadly translates to "responsibility" and "privilege," encompassing the idea that everyone has a role within the larger community. For Goo, it meant not only keeping the land in her family as a promise to her grandparents but also shedding light on the current displacement of Native Hawaiians who struggle to afford living in the notoriously expensive island chain – despite this being their homeland.
Meanwhile, the islands grapple with the development of more luxury condos and continued land grabs by the ultra-wealthy, with 37 billionaires owning 11% of Hawaii's private land, compared to 0.003% by locals, according to Forbes.
Housing is a complicated issue in Hawaii. Any real estate in the islands' finite amount of land can feel precious to the average local family as they contend with an influx of out-of-state buyers who purchase second homes or rental properties.
"My family's story was the story of land and what had happened to a lot of Native Hawaiians, and I would be kind of telling their story through our story, and that would be perhaps a story that would resonate with the bigger audience, and that was my goal," Goo told USA TODAY.
The price of paradise
Through the lens of her personal experience, Goo traces how the introduction of private land ownership and colonization by Europeans changed the course of history for Hawaiians. "My goal was to really tell a new, truer, more authentic story about Hawaii, because I felt that all the stories that I saw were written by Hollywood or they were written for tourists, and then neither of those quite felt accurate," she said.
Goo followed the paper trail starting from when King Kamehameha III gifted the original 990 acres to her royal ancestors, the Kahanus, up to when her father's generation is forced to navigate the modern legal system. On this journey, they face multiple rejections for reducing the taxes by what Goo called the "faceless bureaucrat."
This type of story, of local families trying to afford Hawaii or Native Hawaiians being displaced, is a familiar one.
While most view Hawaii as paradise, for many locals, living in the islands is a much more difficult reality. In Honolulu and Maui, the median sales price for a regular single-family home topped over $1 million, according to the 2023 Hawaii Housing Factbook by the Economic Research Organization at the University of Hawaii. Less than one-third of local households can afford just an average house, with multiple generations often living under one roof.
As a result, locals are pushed out of the islands. In 2020, for the first time ever, more Native Hawaiians were found by the U.S. Census to be living outside of Hawaii. A 2019 report by Kamehameha Schools found the high cost of living to be why 61% of Native Hawaiians have said they've considered moving from Hawaii. Goo, who is of the Native Hawaiian diaspora, having grown up in California, also explores what it means to connect with her Hawaiian identity in the book.
Hawaii's future
Over the decades, Goo's ancestral lands reduced from 990 to just 10 acres as members sold off parcels to sugar plantations or as they moved from Hana. "It's kind of a miracle that this little piece of land has been in our family, managed to survive all these years," she said. The land where the heiau sits is now stewarded by the National Tropical Botanical Garden's Kahanu Garden, with the heiau now restored following pressure from the family.
For many locals, the road ahead feels uncertain as Hawaii's cost of living only continues to rise, but Goo sees some glimmers of hope. "If more Native Hawaiians are behind that kind of government, that have those values and understand the value of Hawaiian land and Hawaiian hands, that does give me some measure of comfort," she said.
In 2021, Maui County passed the landmark Aina Kupuna law, introduced by Native Hawaiian Keani Rawlins-Fernandez, which gave tax relief to certain lineal descendants who were passed down ancestral Maui land at least three generations ago.
Still, the fight is far from over, with the next generation likely set to face another "version of modern-day control of land," Goo said.
"Unfortunately, that I will have to deal with, or my children, or their children will have to deal with," she said. "That's why it's important for us to keep our promise and keep the kuleana, what our commitment is and understand the context and the history, because we have to be ready."