Let’s keep our new kama’aina
What’s in store for our new Big Island residents who are heating up the real estate market? Almost 40% of this year’s sales through September have been to people from the Mainland, according to statistics reported by a real estate professional, on page one of Monday’s edition of West Hawaii Today.
“Citing the availability of remote work,” the report notes that a high proportion of buyers are selling their past homes and planning to make a permanent home here.
Will these new kama’aina stay? One can’t but help but wonder what magnetism might pull them “back home.” Their competing realities are family, dining variety, entertainment venues, shopping malls, educational opportunities, specialized medical care, ease of transportation to a wide variety of places, and peer-to-peer work relationships.
Will the weather and spirit of aloha outweigh enough of these?
Aloha encourages us to support our new friends. We can invite them to social events, fundraisers by non-profits, entertainment venues, church, and school programs and day care. We can be on call to recommend hard-to-get fix-it people, service providers and contractors, specialty retailers, medical professionals and veterinarians, small restaurants and bars, farm market vendors, and yoga teachers. We can invite them to come along on adventures around the island to places they might never find on their own.
And most importantly, we can encourage our new residents to broaden their social lives to include people who look different from them. The striking diversity of our Hawaiian people is a treasure that outweighs almost everything that might otherwise draw some back to a past life.
Niel Thomas
Waimea
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