That’s 2,200 new units needed every year.  How many affordables did we build in the last decade?  An average of 450 per year!  Instead of incentivizing landlords to build the needed inventory, your prescription would make the problem worse. According to the HUD guidelines the average renting couple in Hawaii, each making an average $14.50 per hour, can afford to pay about $1400 per month in rent.  That’s enough to cover the cost to build a $300,000 rental unit.  But the average rental unit costs $400,000 to build.  So there’s a $100,000 per unit gap.  Rent controls would make the disincentive that much starker. The state and the counties have to bite the bullet – they have to cough up the money to fill the gap.  For 22,000 units, that’s $2.2 billion.  Sounds like a huge number, but if we were to issue triple-tax-free bonds at today’s interest rates, the cost to amortize those bonds over 30 years would be in the range of $100 million per year – or about $380 per unit, per month.