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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

>Gov. Josh Green reported that residents are being approached about selling fire-damaged home or land sites by people posing as real estate agents.

> He said those people may have “ill intent” and issued a warning to scammers.

> “You would be pretty poorly informed if you try to steal land from our people and then build here,” Green said in a press release Monday.

How, exactly, is buying land from someone "stealing"? What is the "ill intent" that is being alluded to?

> “Does this benefit Maui moving forward or does it gentrify it more and hurt the local population?

I know Lahaina pretty well and, while it has lots of fabulous historical spots, it is (was) also a tourist trap with your typical Las Vegas style art, expensive clothing brands, etc.

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It's stealing (in the loose sense of the word) if they're underpaying and preying on the people who have just lost everything and may need cash quickly to make it through the next few weeks. It may not technically be stealing, but it's still ill intent, nefarious, and predatory.

I have this same intuition (also about payday loan lenders) but at the same time—-how do they get through the next few weeks?

If we are not going to help them through that do we have the right to criticize someone else that’s at least doing something even if it’s in an extremely greedy way?

> do we have the right to criticize someone else that’s at least doing something even if it’s in an extremely greedy way?

Yes.

If they pay market value for the land, then how is it stealing?

If I am going through a divorce and I dump my stock in a company to raise cash to pay my ex, is the buyer stealing from me? Even in the loose sense of the word?

Should we paternalistically prevent people from selling because they are desperate and we view the sale price as not enough, despite them wanting to sell?

The market tends to be incredibly inefficient after disasters.

So, yes, we probably should give them at least some short term assistance so they don't have to sell their most important asset at rock bottom prices. The banks get it, so should they.

I wouldn't call it "stealing", though.

The ill-intent is simply trying to capitalize in when families have endured tragedy of losing their homes to fire.

Whether there is ill-intent is true or not, the optics are bad. As it would be for anyone trying to conduct business off the back of a personal tragedy.

The ill intent is taking what used to be family owned housing and turning it into short term rental housing.

> The ill intent is taking what used to be family owned housing and turning it into short term rental housing.

Zoning regulations take care of that.

taking advantage of the emotional state of people that saw all their possessions in hashes is stealing, even if you went through legal processes.

There are a lot of negative sentiments in Hawaii because it was ultimately a island chain that was seized by force by the US and the natives never had any say.

A lot of that negative sentiment is building and going to explode one day because those of native origin are continuing to be pushed out of housing by the weathly from the US buying everything up.

Might is right. If they couldn't defend their land how can they say it's theirs?

> …was seized by force by the US and the natives never had any say.

Just like the rest of the United States.

Not really; this was more coup-y than usual. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_the_Hawaiian_King...

And the Hawaiian Kingdom existed for less than 100 years. It was formed by force when the other islands in the chain were conquered by the big island.

You can see how that's not quite the same thing, right?

I don’t?

Low-grade inter-tribal conflict over leadership, versus an external superpower annexing and then sending your kids into boarding schools thousands of miles away(https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-confronts-cultur...), banning your entire language for four generations (https://www.hawaiipublicschools.org/TeachingAndLearning/Stud...), and wiping out 84% of your population (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/04/06/native-ha...) are not remotely in the same realm.

I suppose coup-y is a slight improvement over genocide-y. Though I suspect that wouldn't have been much consolation to the native Hawaiians.

Native Hawaiians tend to consider what happened post-coup as a form of genocide.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-confronts-cultur...

Sure, but the point was that the US is all about taking by force. We even have a very nice term for it: "Manifest Destiny"

The argument generally is the case in Hawaii was particularly egregious, as Hawaii had an organized government with formal diplomatic relations with many countries, including embassies in Great Britain and France.

Hawaii, along with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, are examples of areas of significant escalation of the U.S. expansionist history through the overthrowing of recognized governments. It's all bad, but these are just a different type of bad.

Does diplomatic relations make the difference? Seems like splitting hairs. Read about what happened to the native populations which had established hierarchies and relations with each other throughout the continent and it looks no different to my eyes than what happened to the Hawaiians.

Yes, having formal diplomatic relations in the late 19th century with major Western powers to other nations is a significant difference. This is very different than say, France having tribal relations in an influence fight with British Colonial expansionism 150 years prior to the overthrowing of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

Again, it's all bad, this is just a different kind of bad.

> There are a lot of negative sentiments in Hawaii because it was ultimately a island chain that was seized by force by the US and the natives never had any say.

I am very well aware of this.

It should be noted, however, that Lahaina's population is not really predominantly "native Hawaiian" in that sense.

Hawaii is only 6-10% native. Do they all live in that area?

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