Consider This from NPR - A Billionaire's Land Purchases In Rural Hawaii Have Locals Worried

Episode Date: March 31, 2024

Hawaii is no stranger to extravagant homes owned by the super-rich. But when a tech billionaire started buying up land in Waimea, a small, rural town on the Big Island, the community got curious - and worried. Locals fear it will become even more difficult for Native Hawaiians to afford to live in Waimea and buy property. In Hawaii, the average home price is close to a million dollars. Who's purchasing all this land in rural Hawaii and how will it affect the already high cost of housing in Waimea?For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

A mystery has been brewing in the small Hawaiian ranching town of Waimea. Housing is scarce in this working-class town of 10,000 people. It's a tight-knit community with a large native Hawaiian population that holds their culture close. But a newcomer has been quietly buying up hundreds of acres of land there, and no one's really sure why. I'm here on a grassy, overgrown dirt road flanked by rainforest. It's in the mountain town of Waimea on the big island of Hawaii. I'm walking with resident Clemson Lamb and we've reached an impasse on what seems to be a public road. I don't know why there's a no trespassing sign on this. This here is under 24-hour video surveillance. It's probably taking a picture of me right now.

That's NPR reporter Dara Kerr, who went out to Waimea and talked to residents there about the massive land purchases. Oh, they bought these too, also? Yeah, yeah. Mmm, whoa. All the locals know that it's Salesforce CEO and billionaire Mark Benioff who's behind the land buys, but they have questions. Like, how much land has he really bought? And what's he going to do with it? And will it drive up housing costs in the community? Your destination is on the right. Eventually, Benioff got word that Dara had been poking around town, so he reached out to her. Good morning. We're expecting you. I'll go ahead and buzz you through. Thanks.

And they eventually met at the Waimea house that he calls his office. Hi, Darren. How are you? Good. How are you? I want to come and... A big reason why there was so much mystery around who was buying the land and what they were going to do with it is because Benioff purchased most of it through anonymous LLCs, limited liability companies. So I found a bunch of LLCs that lead back to you.

Do you mind if we go through them and you can say what you're doing with the land? I wouldn't be able to go through all of them, but I can tell you we don't hold any major land. Benioff doesn't dispute that he is behind the land purchases, but he does dispute rumors that he's building a Salesforce campus in Waimea. There's nothing owned by Salesforce in Hawaii. There never will be. Unfortunately, let me tell you the reality

of Waimea and Hawaii. We wouldn't be able to do it. There isn't enough land and there isn't enough housing. Benioff is paid above current market value in the majority of his purchases, according to public records, which worries locals about even higher housing prices in an already sky-high market. The median home price in Waimea topped a million dollars in January. What young couple can afford that? Seriously, the answer is nobody. That's Hawaii State Senator Tim Richards. His family has lived in the area for over a hundred years. Why is it so hard for people to make it here? And I think if we don't pay attention to that, we're going to lose the fabric that makes Hawaii Hawaii, which is that next generation coming up.

Consider this. Land in Hawaii is scarce, and the people who are from there are being driven out. With billionaires like Mark Benioff buying large swaths of that land, where will the next generation of Hawaiians go? From NPR, I'm Scott Detra. It's Consider This from NPR. Plenty of tech billionaires own land in Hawaii, mostly coastal mansions and gated communities. But billionaire Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff has been buying property in a rural residential town. Waimea sits in the mountains of Hawaii's Big Island. It's home to a large population of native Hawaiians, and it's mostly working class. Locals have been watching as Benioff has bought hundreds of acres in a place

that's already short on housing. NPR reporter Dara Kerr spoke to 18 locals there and went on a winding reporting journey that took her into one of the houses Benioff owns to speak with the man himself about what he's been doing with all that land. Hey, Dara. Hey, Scott. You know, reporters are normally the ones digging up stories, but I understand this one came to you. Tell me about how you started working on the story. I wasn't actually looking for this story. Last fall, I was visiting my family on the Big Island, and I started hearing that Mark Benioff had been buying a bunch of land in Waimea. So I know Waimea well. I went to elementary school there for a bit as a kid, and my family has long ties to this town, and I go back all the time. But this time when I was

there, the big talk around town was this land being bought by Benioff. As a tech reporter, I know exactly who Benioff is. He's the co-founder of Salesforce, which is one of the biggest software companies in the world. And all of this just got me really curious. On the island, everyone knows he has this mansion down by the beach, but since the pandemic began, people were saying he went on a buying spree up in Waimea, which is not a fancy, glitzy town. And there was all this mystery and secrecy about what was going on. Here's how a resident, Mike Donahoe, put it. A wealthy individual comes in and they acquire property or multiple properties, large land holdings.

And, you know, the people that have been there for quite a while, they get a little nervous about that. So in the absence of information, you know, the blanks get filled in. And now it's something like 600 acres in this town. Give us a sense of what Waimea is like. It's a cattle ranching town and is known as the birthplace of the Hawaiian cowboy, who are known as the Paniolo. So it has this ranching and cowboy culture. The rodeo is a big thing there. When I was a kid, there were no stoplights in town. Now there are three, so it's still really small, but it's grown. And since the pandemic, it's gotten really expensive to live in

Waimea, with housing prices up nearly 90%. Yeah. And then, you know, it seems like, like you said, it was known that Benioff was behind these purchases. You said you talked to 18 people around the town. Interestingly, almost none of them wanted their names shared. Why was that? So there's a saying in small town Hawaii called no talk stink. It basically means you don't criticize people in public. I ran into a lot of no talk stink in my reporting. And people are also just really nervous to speak with me on the record and possibly get on Benioff's wrong side. He holds a lot of sway.

He knows town leaders and government officials. Waimea is a small town and he's a powerful person. Let's step back for a minute and talk a bit more about him. For people who aren't tech reporters and aren't as familiar with Mark Benioff, what kind of guy is he? What's his reputation in the tech world? Benioff has cultivated this image of himself as a benevolent billionaire. Besides Salesforce, he also owns Time Magazine and the messaging app Slack, too, that we use every day. And he has this reputation of giving away a lot of money. In San Francisco, where he's from, his name is on several hospitals he's donated to.

He's also seen as this fun guy who hangs out with rock stars. He's friends with Bono and Neil Young. He's hosted the front man for Metallica in Hawaii. He's also very much known for his love of Hawaii. He even has two Hawaiian friends who he calls his spiritual advisors. Here's him describing his feelings for Hawaii. I came to Hawaii for the first time and fell in love. I fell in love with the people, what we call here in Hawaii, ohana. I fell in love with the people, what we call here in Hawaii, Ohana.

I fell in love with the land, we call Aina. And of course, I fell in love with the Aloha spirit. And that's a clip there from your interview with him. You were in the process of reporting on this and getting more details about how these purchases were taking place. He got word you were poking around town and he reached out to you. Is that right? That's exactly what happened. And that's when I got to know a different side to Mark Benioff.

For one thing, he started texting me all the time. The focus of his texts were all about the philanthropy that he's doing in Hawaii. And without my asking, he also connected me with people who know about his donations so I could talk to them. The whole thing really felt like a pressure campaign. And it led to this eventual meetup and interview, right? Yes. After a few weeks of us texting, I went back to Hawaii for an in-person interview. But a couple of days before I met him in person, a colleague at NPR told me he got a text from Benioff. Benioff was asking for intel on my story. Then that same day, Benioff called me and demanded to know the title of my story. As you know, Scott, that's not something we do in the news business.

And towards the end of that phone call, Benioff indicated he knew the exact part of the island where I was staying at my family's house. When I asked how he knew, he said, it's my job. You have a job and I have a job. And that just, it really unnerved me. Yeah, that makes sense. So you finally met in person, how did it go? When I first arrived, I saw his white Humvee parked out front and I was met by his two golden retrievers, whose names are Brandy and Honey, and his two personal assistants, who he called Kendall One and Kendall Two. I will say, this is actually the first thing I saw about this story when it was posted, was online chatter about Kendall One and Kendall Two. Just to clarify, there were two personal assistants both named Kendall? Yes, they had the same name, and it was a man and a woman.

So after I met them, Benioff walked me around the house, which he uses as an office. He doesn't live there. For most of my interview, when I asked why he was buying in Waimea, he would deflect his answers and talk about his philanthropy. And during my interview, I was really trying to get to the bottom of why all the secrecy and why the anonymous LLCs. And let's just peel that back a little bit because this is a key part of the story. Tell us how you found out that he was behind these LLCs, behind these purchases. Right. So everyone in town knew he was buying property, but they didn't really know the scope. So I started scouring county property records looking for clues. And I found more than 30 land parcels with the same mailing address in the San Francisco Bay Area.

That was my main clue. These parcels were bought under six separate anonymous LLCs, so he went to some lengths to remain secret. It's common for wealthy people and corporations to want to keep their land purchases private. There's no law against it, but it can make it really hard to figure out who is behind large land purchases. Benioff, when I spoke to him, told me that his anonymity was always to preserve the privacy of his family. You said before that he kept wanting to turn the interview to his philanthropy. It is fair to say, though, he's given away a lot of money and land to the local community, right? Yes, he's donated a lot across all of Hawaii. On the Big Island, he's given millions to the fire department and search and rescue, and he's given to

environmental projects in the public and private schools. He's also donated five parcels of land to an affordable housing project near Waimea. The plan is to build about 40 affordable homes there. But once I got a better picture of the scope of what he bought, I could see it wasn't all about philanthropy. When I looked at all of his properties, the vast majority of what he's bought seems just to be for him and his family, which in total is about 24 parcels of land. Let's get back to Waimea here and what's really at stake for the people who live there and all of this. Yeah, the people in Waimea still seem really concerned. More Hawaiians live outside Hawaii now than on the islands. And in Waimea, locals worry this

trend will continue as the cost of living skyrockets. Over the past few years, Benioff has taken a lot of land off the market. So while people may appreciate his donations, many locals are scared they could be priced out of this place that has been their home for generations. One person I spoke to told me, at what point does Hawaii not become Hawaii anymore if no Hawaiians are here? And just to bring this all back, like we said at the beginning, it's certainly nothing new for tech billionaires to be buying land in Hawaii. But there are bigger questions here of how you can better protect locals from extremely wealthy people buying up what sounds like, you know, tons and tons and tons of land. Yeah, there is.

Hawaii has a really long history of outsiders buying land and pushing out local people. And as we can see, it's still happening today. There are no laws against buying land, so it's a tough situation. The people I spoke with in Hawaii say the ultra-wealthy need to understand that what makes the island so desirable is not just the land they're buying for themselves. It's also the people who've made Hawaii the place that it is. That was NPR's Derek Kerr. And stick around because your next listen is Trump's trials from NPR, which I also host. In the latest episode, I speak with former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer

about what he sees as a dangerous trend in the judiciary. Today's episode of Consider This was produced by Janaki Mehta and Brianna Scott. Breyer about what he sees as a dangerous trend in the judiciary. Today's episode of Consider This was produced by Janaki Mehta and Brianna Scott. It was edited by Jeanette Woods and Pallavi Gagoi. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.