Beachside at the Four Seasons Resort Lanai.

Larry Ellison’s Lanai Isn’t for You—or the People Who Live There

The Oracle billionaire is making his Hawaiian island more hospitable to the super-rich and pushing out families that have been there for generations.

In hindsight, Chris Andrus says, the Nobu opening was a bad sign. It was 2012. Andrus, a bald, goateed, self-proclaimed hippie, was living on Lanai, a Hawaiian island of about 3,000 people, helping an old friend start a woodworking company. Paradise was treating him well: The business was growing rapidly, and Andrus was in love with Lanai’s tightknit community. Then Larry Ellison, the eccentric co-founder of Oracle Corp. and the 11th-richest person in the world, bought it—the island, that is. The $300 million purchase came with 98% of Lanai’s 90,000 acres, plus the two Four Seasons resorts that provide most of its jobs, a significant chunk of its homes, and practically all its commercial properties. Overnight, Ellison became almost everyone’s boss, landlord, or both.

One of the first things Ellison did was build a Nobu, the definition of an ultra-high-end restaurant chain. (“Inedible,” he’s said of the cuisine he first found on Lanai.) Andrus was invited to the soft opening because Lanai Woodworkers had helped build the place. He met Ellison on his way to the bathroom and introduced himself by way of his handiwork, pointing to the hostess stand and wooden walls. Ellison shook his hand and told him, “We’re gonna do great work together,” he recalls. That was the last time they spoke. Two weeks later, Andrus was out of a job.

See, the space the woodworkers were renting came with Ellison’s purchase of the island, and the billionaire’s agents told Peter Franklin, Andrus’s friend and the owner of Lanai Woodworkers, he would have to either clear out or sell the company to Ellison. Franklin decided to sell so the shop would at least survive in some form, and the deal came with a job for him. There wasn’t one for Andrus, so at age 64, he became Lanai’s paperboy instead. Andrus says he knew the newspaper industry was dying—“No offense”—but he didn’t expect to be in as dire financial straits as he is today.

Andrus, shown here at his house, was almost kicked out of his home in the past year.
Andrus was almost kicked out of his home in the past year.

Wearing basketball shorts and a threadbare T-shirt with his right nipple peeking through, Andrus, now 73, leans back in a squeaky desk chair in his kitchen, the sun on his face. He says that shortly after he took over the paper route, Ellison’s hotels canceled the 150 newspapers they’d been having delivered each morning, cutting Andrus’s business in half. The hotels were getting iPads for their guests and didn’t need hard copies anymore. With his business continuing to suffer, he fell behind on his utility bills, and this January he received a notice from Ellison’s holding company, Pulama Lanai, terminating his rental agreement. Eventually, he turned to Catholic Charities to help him stay in his home.

So it goes on Lanai, where Ellison is a modern American king—incomprehensibly wealthy and powerful. Many residents both rent from him and work for him, and a provision in his residential leases states that if you’re terminated from a job with any of his companies, you can be kicked out of your home, too. Under Ellison, 30-day leases have become the norm for Lanai’s small businesses, as opposed to the five-year terms some were used to before.

Business Week cover
Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, June 13, 2022. Subscribe now. Illustration: Richard A. Chance

Ellison has invested serious money in renovation and construction projects on the island, and many residents have come to accept the trade-offs. (“He has the right to do whatever the hell he wants with what he owns,” Andrus says.) Yet the extent of Ellison’s control has left them with little say in Lanai’s future or their place in it. Gabe Johnson, who represents Lanai on the regional Maui County Council, points out that the government controls little public infrastructure. He’s been left mostly to haggle with Pulama Lanai over sidewalks and sewage lines.

Lanai has largely been in private hands since the 19th century, but Ellison, with a net worth of about $90 billion, is far wealthier than its last owner, fruit and vegetable magnate David Murdock, who has roughly $2 billion. “Two different animals,” says Butch Gima, a soft-spoken retired social worker with spiky graying hair. “Larry’s pockets are very, very deep, and he has many pockets, whereas Murdock, I think, had two.”

Over the past decade, and especially since the pandemic began and Ellison moved to Lanai full time, Gima and his neighbors have begun to see what $90 billion can do. Their once-sleepy island is now a common destination for yachts and private jets, as Ellison buddies such as Elon Musk drop by to visit. (Ellison sits on Tesla Inc.’s board and is one of the biggest outside backers of Musk’s rocky effort to buy Twitter Inc.) Tom Cruise has visited, which still gets people talking, and former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a Pilates class at the Four Seasons last year.

Post-remodeling, Four Seasons stays can cost thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars a night
Post-remodeling, Four Seasons stays can cost thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars a night.

On one hand, Ellison’s wealth means he can invest more in the community than Murdock did. He’s renovated the pool and the movie theater, and he kept much of the island on payroll for months during the pandemic. On the other hand, his control has steadily tightened. Since the purchase, he’s bought up dozens more homes and businesses, including the island’s main grocery store and its lone gas station, community newspaper, and non-Four Seasons hotel. Ellison’s development plans tend to be secretive. Most locals have only heard that he intends to make the island “sustainable,” with little explanation of what that might mean.

Most of the more than 30 Lanai residents interviewed for this story say that because there are no real alternatives to Ellison’s control, his decisions carry the force of law, with a minimum of discussion and hardly any due process. Lanai’s small businesses are sputtering, and even by US standards, the island’s housing shortage is extreme. There’s only one home for sale as of early June: a beachfront estate for $7.9 million. The median household income is $59,000, but it appears to be climbing as richer residents move in. Locals whose families have lived on the island for generations, often sharing homes with parents and grandparents, are leaving as Ellison’s construction workers and Four Seasons employees fill practically every available bed.

Ellison didn’t respond to emails requesting comment for this story. Pulama Lanai declined to comment or make its president, Kurt Matsumoto, available for an interview. Instead, a spokesperson sent a list of community members to talk to. Ellison’s supporters say Murdock let much of the island go to seed and the new owner is building it anew, shinier than ever. “He’s amazing,” says Gail Allen, who owns a gift shop in town and manages rental properties for Ellison’s visiting employees. “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, please.”

Others are afraid that there’s no clear way to stay on Ellison’s good side and that their way of life is ending. “When they buy this business or take over this business, it doesn’t seem like much,” Gima says. But the changes have added up. We’re sitting in Dole Park, the sort of town square of Lanai City, 1,644 feet above sea level. The altitude and the Cook pines, which look like Christmas trees stretched higher than 100 feet, make this part of town feel more like Lake Tahoe than Hawaii. Yet there’s only so much room to roam. In this version of gentrification, you don’t just get pushed farther out from the city center. You get pushed out into the sea.

Life With Larry

A tour of Ellison’s Lanai

HAWAII

Lanai

This is Lanai, Hawaii's sixth-largest island.

Larry Ellison owns 98% of it—everything except what's shown here in black.

Lanai City

Lanai Airport

This is Lanai, Hawaii's sixth-largest island.

Larry Ellison owns 98% of it

everything except what's shown here in black.

Lanai City

Lanai Airport

This is Lanai, Hawaii's sixth-largest island.

Larry Ellison owns 98% of it

everything except what's shown here in black.

Lanai City

Lanai Airport

This is Lanai, Hawaii's sixth-largest island.

Larry Ellison owns 98% of it

everything except what's shown here in black.

Lanai City

Lanai Airport

This is Lanai, Hawaii's sixth-largest island.

Larry Ellison owns 98% of it

everything except what's shown here in black.

Lanai City

Lanai Airport

Ellison owns the two Four Seasons resorts

that drive Lanai's economy. Rooms here cost

thousands of dollars a night.

Ellison owns the two Four Seasons

resorts that drive Lanai's economy.

Rooms here cost thousands of dollars

a night.

Ellison owns the two Four

Seasons resorts that drive

Lanai's economy. Rooms

here cost thousands of

dollars a night.

Ellison owns the two Four Seasons

resorts that drive Lanai's economy.

Rooms here cost thousands of

dollars a night.

Ellison owns the two

Four Seasons resorts

that drive Lanai's

economy. Rooms here

cost thousands of

dollars a night.

Ellison’s holding company has many

of the commercial properties on

30-day leases—a precarious

arrangement for local businesses.

Lanai City

Ellison’s holding company has many of

the commercial properties on

30-day leases—a precarious

arrangement for local businesses.

Lanai City

Ellison’s holding

company has many

of the commercial

properties on

30-day leases

Lanai City

Ellison’s holding company

has many of the commercial

properties on 30-day leases

—a precarious arrangement

for local businesses.

Lanai City

Ellison’s holding company

has many of the

commercial properties

on 30-day leases.

Lanai City

Four Seasons

Ellison's Sensei resort

The other Four Seasons used to

be a frequent hangout for locals,

but now the only residents around

are usually employees.

Four Seasons

Ellison's Sensei resort

The other Four Seasons used to

be a frequent hangout for locals,

but now the only residents around

are usually employees.

The other Four Seasons

used to be a frequent

hangout for locals,

but now the only residents

around are usually

employees.

Four Seasons

Ellison's Sensei resort

The other Four Seasons used

to be a frequent hangout for

locals, but now the only

residents around are

usually employees.

Four Seasons

Ellison's Sensei resort

The other Four Seasons

used to be a frequent

hangout for locals, but

now the only residents

around are usually

employees.

Four Seasons

Ellison's Sensei

resort

This black part is the airport, and Ellison's company is

planning to build an industrial park nearby.

It also proposed a tennis academy, desalination plant,

university and film studio. Meanwhile, the island has

only one home for sale—for $7.9 million.

This black part is the airport, and Ellison's company is

planning to build an industrial park nearby.

It also proposed a tennis academy, desalination plant,

university and film studio. Meanwhile, the island has

only one home for sale—for $7.9 million.

This black part is the airport, and Ellison's company is

planning to build an industrial park nearby.

It also proposed a tennis academy, desalination plant,

university and film studio. Meanwhile, the island has

only one home for sale—for $7.9 million.

This black part is the airport, and Ellison's company is

planning to build an industrial park nearby.

It also proposed a tennis academy, desalination plant,

university and film studio. Meanwhile, the island has

only one home for sale—for $7.9 million.

This black part is the airport, and Ellison's company is

planning to build an industrial park nearby.

It also proposed a tennis academy, desalination plant,

university and film studio. Meanwhile, the island has

only one home for sale—for $7.9 million.

Source: County of Maui's Real Property Tax Assessment website and Google Earth

Lanai’s unusual ownership structure originated with a Mormon missionary who bought huge chunks of the place starting in the 1860s. Control of the island passed from one family to another until 1922, when James Dole bought it for $1.1 million and began transforming it from a small ranching community into the world’s largest pineapple plantation. The seven-decade pineapple era is still memorialized everywhere in signs and murals. People here say there remains a “plantation mentality” that leaves residents afraid to criticize those in charge.

The upside is a legacy of strong community ties. Workers, many of them Filipino and Japanese immigrants, would lean on one another during their long days under the hot sun. Even today, everyone seems to know everyone else, kids refer to adults with no blood connection as aunties and uncles, and enormous birthday barbecues are a weekend rite.

Murdock acquired the island via Dole Food Co.’s corporate parent in 1985. He’s the one who oversaw the closure of the struggling plantation and the construction of the two hotels that are now Four Seasons resorts. For many people, the transition was difficult. Murdock was a polarizing character—impatient with pineapple pickers who were retraining as waiters, bellhops, or maids, and known to get into screaming matches with people at community meetings. Murdock didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In the end, even he couldn’t afford the island. Over his decades in charge, the hotels grew run-down, the community pool began to look uninviting, and a last-ditch play to install hundreds of energy-generating wind turbines went nowhere. Then came Ellison.

The Oracle co-founder, now 77, was born in the New York City borough of the Bronx and raised by an adoptive family in Chicago. He built Oracle into a roughly $200 billion software company. Today he’s a Republican megadonor (the Washington Post reported last month that he participated in a call with a Trump attorney strategizing ways to challenge the former president’s election loss in 2020) with a penchant for six-figure cars and eight-figure mansions. He has spent almost the price of Lanai on a year’s worth of financing the America’s Cup yacht race. In the business world, he’s known for his ruthlessness and ego. During Microsoft’s federal antitrust trial, Oracle admitted to hiring private investigators to seek incriminating evidence against its rival, including a PI firm that tried to pay janitors to hand over the trash a pro-Microsoft trade group threw away. “Our job is to hurt Microsoft,” Ellison said at the time. He’s fond enough of repeating the quote “It is not sufficient that I succeed—all others must fail” that it’s often misattributed to him instead of its generally accepted originator, Genghis Khan.

Illustration
Illustration: Richard A. Chance

Ellison’s love of Hawaii dates to his childhood, when he flew over the islands and found himself enthralled by their beauty, says David Agus, a partner with Ellison in Sensei, a nascent chain of wellness resorts. Other Silicon Valley billionaires, including Mark Zuckerberg and Salesforce Inc. co-Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff, have also invested heavily in Hawaiian real estate, but Ellison is the only one who owns an island outright. “When this became available, he got very excited,” says Agus, a doctor who treated Steve Jobs, Ellison’s late best friend, for cancer.

In one of his early interviews about buying Lanai, on CNBC’s Closing Bell in 2012, Ellison spent almost as much time speculating about the possibility of buying the Los Angeles Lakers, but he said his commitment to the island’s community was strong. “Lanai is a very interesting project,” he said, smiling in a black shirt, black jacket, and black pants. He spoke casually, legs crossed, as if about his plans for the weekend rather than a community of thousands. “What we are going to do is turn Lanai into a model for sustainable enterprise,” he went on. “We are going to support the local people and help them start these businesses.”

“Amazing,” the interviewer responded.

A decade later, residents tend to treat these promises as punchlines. “Hawaiians have a word, it’s called waha—bullshit,” says Alberta de Jetley, laughing. De Jetley, a retired journalist who’s lived there on and off since 1951, sold the community newspaper to Ellison in 2019 and now gives private island tours. “You’re just patting people on the head and giving them what you think they want to hear,” she says. “You could start a small business, but where are you gonna put it?”

Ellison hasn’t offered the public many details of his master plan. As far as sustainability goes, he’s added a Tesla supercharging station and a hydroponic farm and enlisted academics to do things like track rainfall. Sustainability, however, can have a lot of different meanings. Agus, Ellison’s partner in Sensei, says the term is meant to be a catchall that includes education and the overall local economy as well as food and energy. “He wants to take the island and make it remarkable for the people who live there,” Agus says, “and also for the people who visit.”

The remains of a church and schoolhouse that looked out over Lanai City
The remains of a church and schoolhouse that looked out over Lanai City.

Ellison has never made himself available to the community to discuss the island’s future or their concerns, so most Larry sightings these days amount to glimpses of his orange Corvette. Solomon Pili Kaho’ohalahala, a native Hawaiian and seventh-generation Lanaian who represents his island on the advisory council for Hawaii’s humpback whale marine sanctuary, has asked to speak with Ellison about conservation more than once over the past decade and gotten nowhere. “I’ve been waiting now for 10 years to have a conversation,” says Kaho’ohalahala. He’s unimpressed with what Ellison has done so far, noting that the out-of-control deer population is damaging the local ecology and that surrounding coral reefs are taking serious damage as mud from the island slides into the Pacific.

When locals complain about Ellison’s influence on community businesses, they’re usually telling two kinds of stories. In the first kind, he uses his influence to shrink or shutter without explanation the businesses that rent from him. This is what happened to Lanai Woodworkers. In 2019, about six years after Franklin gave up control to Ellison’s company, Pulama closed the wood shop with no explanation, leaving him jobless and living in fear of being forced out of his apartment. “You’re always holding your breath,” he says.

“I’ve been waiting for 10 years now to have a conversation”

The other kind of story involves an Ellison property introducing its own version of the small business’s service and burying the mom and pop. That includes the local rental car business (Ellison now has his own) and a beloved poke market, which couldn’t compete with prices at a grocery store that Ellison runs. That last one stings extra hard: “I didn’t eat poke for two years,” Andrus says. Many residents fear for the survival of the locally owned grocery.

Nick Palumbo, who grew up on Lanai, ran a surf school at the Four Seasons until Ellison’s company took over and changed the terms of his contract. The new deal would have cut Palumbo’s pay by 40% (Pulama wanted 91% of the lesson fees) while forcing the instructor to take out an annual insurance policy that was five times as expensive as his old one. The hotel also insisted that Palumbo wear a Four Seasons uniform. “Like I take out all the liability for them, and I’m still just their employee,” he says. “It was frustrating.” So he moved his lessons to the Big Island. He says he wants to return to Lanai but doesn’t want to work for Ellison.

Few residents whose small businesses have suffered one way or the other will speak on the record. Some cite nondisclosure agreements in their leases; some who’ve lost a business still have a different one that rents space from Ellison’s holding company, as almost all the island’s stores do. But their fortunes can change quickly. Earlier this year Cafe 565, one of the few remaining restaurants in town, closed after more than a decade. Owner Kelly Matsumura, who also rents the space for the town laundromat from Pulama, declined to comment.

The 30-day lease policy for commercial tenants, besides making things scary for existing small-business owners, has sharply limited the ability of new businesses to open on Lanai. No bank that serves the area will lend startup capital to a business with a 30-day lease, says David Daly, director of the Maui Economic Opportunity Business Development Center, whose remit includes Lanai. “It’s not hard,” he says. “It’s impossible.”

There are exceptions to the 30-day policy. Kert Shuster, who received a five-year lease to open a pharmacy on Lanai in 2015, was one of the people Pulama recommended I interview for this story. “It took a while to gain their trust,” Shuster says of Pulama, but he did so by answering their routine calls. The company ended up relying heavily on him for the island’s Covid testing. This is a running theme, according to another business owner, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. You’re safe as long as Pulama needs your services.

Ellison’s larger projects are often framed as community improvements, but can seem to many to come out of nowhere and change or disappear just as quickly. For years, locals were promised a 150-unit housing project that would include homes for purchase, but then Pulama abruptly announced they’d all be rentals instead. So far, the holding company has nothing to show for some of its flashiest promises, including that it would build a tennis academy, a desalination plant, a university, and a film studio.

The net effect of all these reversals is that many residents no longer take Ellison’s company at its word. The anxiety has spiked since he moved to the island in 2020. The changes to Lanai have seemed to accelerate.

Most months, Pulama holds a community meeting via videoconference to update islanders about various issues or projects, including the latest on deer overpopulation, the housing project, and, in April, the Montessori school. That meeting was about a month after Pulama had torn down a local landmark known as the Purple Church, which it bought in 2021 for about $1.5 million. The community had heard little but rumors about the plans for a new preschool since late last year, when a company called Xplor Education Inc., which also teaches some SpaceX employees’ children in Hawthorne, Calif., posted a job for a Montessori teacher, with the location listed as Lanai. Some residents were still mad about the Purple Church. An Instagram user posting under the name @lanaicomedy was circulating a quasi-meme of the half-destroyed building overlaid with these words: “When you’re a billionaire and just don’t give a f–––.”

The community meetings aren’t framed as dialogues. In most cases, company representatives just tell the assembled residents what they’re already doing, followed by a Q&A. At the April session, business proceeded as usual: First, it was established that, yes, a Montessori preschool is in the works, with plans to open sometime this year. Then an Xplor rep summarized the history of Montessori teaching principles, which favor hands-on, tactile learning to develop natural interests over rote curricular readings. The rep introduced the two lead teachers, talked through the application process, and said that tuition would be $895 a month.

Butch Gima, who says Lanai was much different when its owner had a mere $2 billion.
Gima says Lanai was much different when its owner had a mere $2 billion.

Gima, the retired social worker, typically asks the first question at the Q&As, and sometimes the second and third. This time, he asked whether anyone had contacted the existing public school, Lanai High and Elementary School, to make sure the schools’ curricula would sync up and that future Montessori graduates wouldn’t leave their fellow first-graders in the dust. (No contact yet, a Pulama rep said.) Things got more heated when attendees began asking whose kids, exactly, the new school would be for.

Linda Kay Okamoto, a local real estate broker, asked what Xplor’s student diversity stats looked like and how the company would be able to accommodate the many islanders who learn English as a second language. One of the teachers, Susan Book, replied that diversity was important to her and that she’d spent 16 years teaching at a school in Saipan in the US-controlled Northern Mariana Islands where, as a White woman, she was “a minority myself,” she said. Book didn’t respond to a request for comment; a representative for Xplor declined to comment.

It can be hard to pin down how responsible Ellison is for the shifts on Lanai. But he does, of course, own the place, and some residents are happy if he’s taking it upscale. “This is utopia,” says Allen, the gift shop owner.

The change in tourists might be the most striking. Ellison has given his two Four Seasons resorts a $75 million face-lift, and the suites at the oceanside resort, which can run tens of thousands of dollars a night, are now straight out of White Lotus, the HBO series about uber-wealthy, high-maintenance guests at a luxury Hawaiian hotel. There are tiki-torch-lined walkways, cocktail-fueled sunset cruises, and healing spa treatments that cost as much as $750 a pop.

New housing under construction; the island’s housing crunch is so extreme that as of early June the only home for sale cost $7.9 million
New housing under construction; the island’s housing crunch is so extreme that as of early June the only home for sale cost $7.9 million.

At the beach on a recent Saturday, the Four Seasons guests are lined up uniformly on white loungers under white umbrellas, reading or scrolling through their phones. A man in a lounger is reading Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s antivaccine book, The Real Anthony Fauci. (Employees are required to be vaccinated against Covid, but guests are not.) Little noise comes from that side of the beach. The side of the beach that’s full of locals and day-trippers is bustling by comparison. The group is more diverse, and mismatched umbrellas, tents, and towels are the norm. Picnics are spread out across wooden tables, and Hawaiian music blasts from speakers as kids run around wrestling in the sand and swinging from tree branches.

Up at the Sensei spa retreat, closer to Lanai City, there’s a Jeff Koons sculpture in a lobby whose bathrooms feature heated toilet seats and high-tech bidets. There’s a second Nobu just past the sculpture, where the rib-eye costs $65 and the waiters bow after dropping off your order. This is the first of Ellison and Agus’s Sensei resorts, which focus on wellness and living longer. Ellison is a major donor to anti-aging and oncology research, including Agus’s. This year they’re planning to open a second Sensei in the California desert, near where Ellison puts on an annual pro tennis tournament. “In today’s world, we can use data to prevent disease, and the best way to achieve longevity, you should prevent disease,” Agus says. “We’re not selling a vitamin. What we’re selling is the ability of an amazingly trained staff.” The hotel that Sensei replaced was once a local hangout, but now employees are the only residents typically found there.

Hotel guests, on the other hand, sometimes find their way into locals’ space. One Sunday in March at a church near Sensei, a visitor sits in the back and, asked to introduce himself, gets a warm welcome when he says his wife is getting a massage and his only options were the church or the bar. Other guests aren’t remembered as favorably.

Tom Cruise’s visit, shortly after Ellison bought the island, still comes up a lot. Eight residents, including de Jetley and Palumbo, recounted the story of when Cruise visited as a guest of Ellison’s son, David, whose production company, Skydance Media, produced the current blockbuster Top Gun: Maverick, as well as other films starring the actor. They say Cruise flipped and totaled one of Ellison’s cars while driving on some of Lanai’s mostly unpaved roads. (Calls and emails to Cruise’s and David Ellison’s representatives, including to a spokesperson for Skydance, weren’t returned.) A person who saw the destroyed car, a Toyota Land Cruiser, and who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, says Pulama employees were called to clean up and recycle the wreckage. This person says there are no police records of the incident because it occurred on private land, no one was reported injured, and Ellison owned the tow truck. Until now, it never appeared in the press. One former Four Seasons employee on Lanai, who asked not to be named because of an NDA, says they were once suspended from their job merely for mentioning that Cruise was ever on the island. The Four Seasons declined to comment.

“My biggest worry, worst-case scenario, is that the island becomes this playground for only the rich”

Even with all that’s happened over the past decade, locals mostly agree that it could be worse. Many had feared that Murdock would sell the island to multiple people, in which case each owner might have developed individual parcels, oversaturating Lanai with development and tourists like the rest of Hawaii. And if Ellison had wanted the whole place to himself, he could have simply closed the hotels and let the economy run dry.

Michelle Fujie, who grew up on Lanai, worries about what the island’s future holds for locals.
Fujie grew up on Lanai and worries about what the island’s future holds for locals.

While this doesn’t seem like the plan, many residents worry that their time on Lanai is growing short. A handful of young families recently moved away, including Palumbo, who left during the pandemic. Those who’ve left tend to say they made the decision in part because even compared with a few years ago, the island didn’t feel like home anymore.

Michelle Fujie, a high school math teacher who grew up on Lanai, is engaged to another local, but they don’t live together because they can’t find an affordable house big enough for them and their three kids. If they ever leave the island, she says, they might never be able to afford to return, so she and her fiancé would like to rent one of the apartments in the new development Ellison is building. She was committed to buying something for a while, but at this point, with the wedding approaching, she’s getting desperate. “We’ve got to think about ways that we’re going to merge our family,” she says. Renting, “right now, would be a solution.”

The units will all be fully furnished two bedrooms, which has left islanders wondering who the target tenants are. “It’s telling us, the people who live here, ‘These aren’t for you,’ ” says Johnson, the county councilman. “Furnished means it’s gonna be more off-island construction workers, off-island hotel workers, off-island folks.” The @lanaicomedy post on the housing project features a picture of Mao Zedong and jokes that each home will come with a photo of “the projects benefactor [sic]” for residents to greet each day when they get home.

The account’s posts resonate with Fujie. “My biggest worry, worst-case scenario, is that the island becomes this playground for only the rich,” she says. She does believe Ellison has been good for the community overall, but can’t tell whether he sees her home as more than just another plaything. “As an educator, this is where I get super emotional about it,” she says, choking up a little. “You would think that we would want our students to graduate and aspire to be more than just somebody’s servant.”