Socio-Economic Spactiality in Honolulu
An economy is built upon the people that inhabit a place, the rules and laws that govern of a people in a place, and the place that conversely guides their actions. Social and economic inequity takes hold when people exploit or even create new rules and laws to restrict some people from places that may be economically advantageous. This can come in the form of locating social services including educational, healthcare, and social assistance at a distance from their users; creating a sprawled urban landscape that pushes the citizens that do not have an economic choice further outside of the urban economic center; and even the creation of laws that blatantly favor one group of citizens over another. In following pages, this paper will describe and analysis economic and socio-economic theories that attempt to encapsulate the behavior of 20th century American cities. It will then relate those theories to the current stat of affairs and the history of Honolulu, Hawaii.
Economic Structure and Shifts
According to the Economic Base Theory espoused by urban planner Robert Murray Haig, “the foundation of support for a city came from the sales of goods or services outside of the community” (Hartshorn 1996). This kind of exportation was known as basic while internal economic activity was considered non-basic. According to Haig, for an urban society to thrive there needed to be more basic economic activity then non-basic. During the late 1920s, when this economic theory was beginning to inform upon policy decisions Honolulu was the United States’ most isolated territory.
The main basic industries of the city during this time were sugar cane and pineapple. However, because of the island’s geographic isolation exporting these goods to the mainland was a costly and timely affair. This raised the cost of the exportation, and therefore limited the amount that could be sold. Conversely, importing materials to grow the industry and the city’s economic strength on a whole was equally difficult and costly. Therefore, in order to create a profit, costs had to be reduced. The sugar barrens, and later the Dole Corporation accomplished this by importing large amounts of unskilled labor from China, Japan, and the Philippines to work the fields. Flooding the market with labor meant they could lower wages to reduce cost. This practice added to the racially and ethnically charged discrimination policies that would fuel Honolulu’s economic growth for over half a century (Kuykendall 1926).
As time moved forward technology, society, and their built economy all became increasingly complex. As the world entered the jet era, and the information age after that, ideas and places became easier and easier to access. David Harvey, an urban geographer describes in his theory of “circuits of capital” how the
complexities of the modern geo-political era have influences on how a single urban economy develops. This is especially true for a city like Honolulu whose geographic isolation puts it almost in as much economic play with the raising powers in eastern Asia (particularly China, Japan, Korea) as it does with the mainland of the United States of America (Kaplan, Wheeler and Holloway 2009).
The first circuit deals with the idea of basic and non-basic exports. With Honolulu being easier to access, it was no longer necessary to produce only cash crops like sugar cane. Therefore, information, tourism, and military infrastructure became the largest industries of a modern 21st century Honolulu. The secondary circuit of capital Harvey discusses deals with the idea of fixed capital assets. Shortly before Harvey wrote his theory, the Regan administration signed into law the Plaza Accord that reduced the value of the United States dollar in relation to the Japanese Yen. The purpose of this was to spur international investment from the growing East Asian economies. This effort worked, and millions upon millions of Japanese yen were invested into Honolulu’s fixed capital assets like power and utility infrastructure that allowed them to invest billion in consumption fund assets like the highest valued pieces of the housing market. This saturation of Japanese Yen into the Honolulu economy inflated the cost of living in the city, and because there was not the legislative structure to support the historic residents, many found themselves to be pushed outside of their homes, in a sort of real estate limbo (UHERO 1998).
Harvey’s tertiary circuit of capital deals with the investment of both private and public funds into social expenditures (i.e. education, healthcare, welfare, defense). In recent years investment in the University of Hawai’i system has encouraged continued cross-investment between Asian countries and the United States due to its thriving East – West Center. Although still focusing on the economic powerhouses of China, Japan, and Korea, the East-West Center has developed an online tool to promote sharing, understanding, and investment with ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations). Economists are also hoping this will translate into additional tourists who continue to visit Honolulu for its natural beauty as well as its retail (inexpensive when compared to the import tariffs taxing American brands in Asian nations), which is reduced due in part to there no sales tax policy (Kaplan, Wheeler and Holloway 2009).
Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration Structure and Shift
Just like other great examples of great American cities, the City of Honolulu is a melting pot of the cultures that have come here to find a better way of life for their families. Uniquely positioned, Honolulu’s population demographics reflect those of the railroad, sugar cane, and pineapple laborers of the 19th century; a milieu of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Vietnamese, Polynesian, Micronesian, and native Hawaiian. However, without the recent exception of the Japanese, who invested heavily in infrastructure and real estate in the 1980s and the Chinese, who are poised to surpass the Japanese in new investments by the end of the decade, many of the Asian populations have experienced immense racially fueled economic prejudice during their multiple generations on the island.
Racial segregation has many implications for quality of life. Drier states that “economic segregation is motivated not just by status concerns, but also by the knowledge that better neighborhoods offer many practical advantages. Homes appreciate more and the schools are better. Wealthy neighborhoods have cleaner air, lower property tax rates, and superior public services” (Dreier, Mollenkopf and Swanstrom 2004). Many of these neighborhoods that now receive the better public services stem from the acquisition of land in known as the Great Mahele of 1848. In this instance a group of white missionaries convinced the standing monarch by acting as political liaisons with opposing imperialistic nations to naturalize them as citizens. This citizenship allowed the missionaries to draw up deeds to land, which enabled them to develop it into the sugar cane and pineapple plantations that changed the face of the Hawaiian economy. Furthermore, this new economic power held by the white missionaries, of which was taken from the native Hawaiians eventually led to the unlawful seizing of the Hawaiian Islands as an American Territory in 1901 (Kuykendall 1926).
Poverty and Social Class Structure and Shifts
The trend in socio-economic centrality has shifted dramatically outwards in the largest mainland urban centers since the mid 20th century. With the proliferation of the automobile and the rise of the middle class in post World War II America, this shift has led to secondary, and even tertiary ring suburbs housing the bulk of the city’s purchasing power. However, as the United States moves into the new millennium, we are experiencing growing income inequality and a shrinking middle class, which in time will be unable to sustain its cost of living on these new green field developments. This section will follow how Honolulu has, and has not followed these mainland trends over the last sixty years (Kingsley and Petitt 2003).
Honolulu, though a bustling urban capital for the Kingdom of Hawaii, did not begin to resemble the city it is today until the early 1960s when, as a new state (1959) federal funding allowed for the building of a brand new ‘interstate’ highway system to promote the use of automobiles as the primary source of transportation in the city. However, this policy though good for the automobile industry, was not in the best interest of the city’s inhabitants. As stated above, because of the island’s geographic isolation, importing cars and the necessary gasoline to fuel them is inordinately expensive, and making this the primary source of transportation by closing the electric streetcar system raises the cost of living in the city for the sake of unreasonable policies founded upon by unguided politicians (Honolulu.gov 2012).
The Urban Institute report states that after the 1980s, the middle class began to rebound, income inequality began to lessen, and there was less income segregation in the largest American urban centers. Unfortunately, the city of Honolulu, which relies as much on investment from the Asian markets as it does from the American mainland, did not experience this kind of rebound. In the 1990s the pan-Asian markets spiraled into a deep recession follow the heavy trend of real estate investment of the late 1980s. This slowing down of Asian capital coming into Honolulu’s coffers, while leading to re-stabilizing of the city’s housing market, meant less jobs in the tourism industry, which was now the largest employer of unskilled workforce in the city. This led to an even higher income inequality gap and geographical separation of the classes, as more and more of Honolulu’s poor found their way to the public housing projects built on the city’s periphery in the high heat of the volcanic valleys (UHERO 1998).
Are there Health Risks?
There is a major question as to what is the standing effect of economic influence on a people in a city. Does income inequality really affect quality of life at a systemic level or can the cycle be broken from within. To close the argument, I’d like the reader to consider the weathering hypothesis as described by Jason Corburn in his latest publication “Healthy City Planning”. In this work Corburn postulates that human weathering occurs when there is a level of stress on the body that is continual, as is seen when communities encounter deplorable acts of economic inequality and racism. Where in a ‘normal’ situation, the body builds an Allostatic load to deal with the stress, but that load is released when the stressful moment has passed. In the case of income, economic, and racial inequality, that allostatic load is always building which can result in overweight hypertension, CVD, stroke, diabetes, asthma, and other immune system diseases. To fight the effects of the weathering hypothesis we must change our social structures, to let us identify and act on key areas of growth in urban health justice (Corburn 2013).