Why Hawaii's Cost of Living Is Building a Ninth Island in Nevada

Why would the cost of living in Hawaii build a community in the Nevada desert? The video opens in downtown Las Vegas, on a hotel named for Californians who could drive in, whose rooms were filled for decades from somewhere else entirely: the islands. Beside it sits a second puzzle. The distance between island prices and the rest of the country has hardly moved in generations, and yet the departures for the mainland belong to recent years. It starts with the map: islands supplied by sea through Honolulu, and the question of who held the ground in the 1960s. It then goes back to Hilo in the 1930s, to the Palace Amusements of Hisakichi Hisanaga, remembered by former television host Hari Kojima, and follows the road that opened between the islands and Nevada, from Waikiki and Honolulu to Henderson, Reno and the hotels of downtown Las Vegas. Closer to the present, it looks at Oahu's housing, at Clark County, and at the island businesses that took root in Las Vegas, among them Herb Yamagata's. It draws on Carl Bonham and Steven Bond-Smith of the University of Hawaii's economic research organization, UHERO, on Perry Arrasmith of Housing Hawaii's Future, and on reporting from the Star-Advertiser and Hawaii News Now, before asking what the Ninth Island really measures. 0:00 A Las Vegas hotel's unlikely guests 1:19 Islands, ships and who held the land 2:48 The decisions that paved a road 4:49 A turn back toward the islands 6:47 Did any law make homes cheaper? 8:02 What waited at the other end 9:35 Did the road hold up? 11:14 What the Ninth Island really measures Watch next: Hawaii Has Eight Big Islands… So Why Is Everyone on Oahu    • Hawaii Has Eight Big Islands… So Why Is Ev...   Fifty State Ledger sets the American states side by side and asks why each one grew, emptied or settled the way it did. Each video works through the ground, the resources, the history and the decisions behind a state's shape, following the map and the record together. Subscribe to Fifty State Ledger to follow the ledger state by state.