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Explanation of illegal vacation rental business

I was asked by someone from the USA what is this illegal vacation rental business in Maui? The explanation was hard for him to grasp. If it was your home and you rented it out to someone for any amount of time, how did that become someone else’s business?

I had to explain this place is nothing like his America and that there was by design a severe lack of housing for the purposes of collecting super high rents and forcing people having to accept service industry jobs that pay 1970s wages or work monocrop agriculture. I told him each of these gazillion-dollar hotels/resorts with golf courses promised to build employee or low-income housing, and several did put up low-income homes that start around $700,000, but most just bribed council and planning commission members to let them off their obligations. This left a situation where people have to struggle to make ends meet so some try to rent out a room for some side money to try to survive but “Hypergreed Inc.” saw this being “successful” and passed “laws” making the privacy of our homes council business.

I told him most people on Maui drive slow in the left lane intentionally and do rolling roadblocks on major divided highways with huge median strips. He did not believe me, he insisted no one was that stupid or ever drove like that without getting shot or beat up. How wrong he was.

Donald “Federal Reserve” Brown

Haiku

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