It has been eight years since our state Legislature declared that Hawaii has a housing affordability crisis. So what has changed in the last eight years to help alleviate the problem?

Very little. In fact, our supply of moderately priced housing continues to shrink, with fewer options available in the for-sale market and increasing rents in the rental market.

The Honolulu Board of Realtors announced that the median price of a single-family home on Oahu set a new record of $719,500 in November. Can the average Jack or Jill afford a home at this price? No. Can our children afford a home at this price? Likely not. Will our grandchildren be able to sustain an island lifestyle if we continue to do the same things we have been doing to provide affordable homes? Absolutely not.

According to the 2011 Hawaii Housing Planning Study initiated by the Hawaii Housing Finance & Development Corp., as many as 50,000 new housing units need to be built between 2012 and 2016 to meet new demand. About 20,000 of those units are needed for households with incomes less than 80 percent of the area median income (AMI), which translates into $66,080 for a family of four in 2014 (AMI is adjusted annually).

We need to build more housing in general, but just building more has not made home prices or rents affordable. Demand is far too great compared to supply.

We need to link growth directly with a supply of modestly priced, for-sale and rental housing. Inclusionary zoning (IZ), which has been employed by more than 400 municipalities nationwide, can help.

IZ policies require that developers designate a portion of the housing they produce for low- or moderate-income households. These policies are tailor made for hot- housing-market cities like Honolulu. Most of the nation’s in-demand expensive cities have recently adopted IZ housing policies including New York City, San Francisco, San Jose, Washington, D.C., Stamford, Conn., Boston and San Diego. Collectively, these policies are generating thousands of affordable homes for lower-and middle-income workers, seniors and long-time residents who are often forced to move elsewhere when new development and redevelopment occurs.

Comprehensive reviews of IZ policies, such as the national study prepared in 2006 by the Furman Center at New York University, provide strong evidence that standard IZ policies do not slow overall housing development. It takes an outlier policy to reduce housing starts, like Maui County’s Residential Workforce Housing Policy, which, because of its extreme requirements, brought housing development on the Valley Isle to a slow crawl. (Maui is now reviewing those extreme policies.)

Unlike Maui’s policy, the new Islandwide Housing Strategy being considered by Mayor Kirk Caldwell and the Honolulu City Council includes mainstream IZ provisions that, in my opinion, have the best promise for addressing our shortage of affordable housing.

EAH supports the mayor’s Islandwide Housing Strategy, as well as the creation of a menu of incentives to encourage developers to participate in helping to solve our housing crisis. Incentives such as reducing parking requirements, easing height limits, reducing setback requirements and making public investments in infrastructure, as well as providing state and county capital to assist in these new developments, make a lot of sense.

But ultimately we need these IZ policies with or without such carrots. If we have to choose between serving only a privileged class and the preservation of our island culture, I think we, in the development and major land owner world, can all agree to make a little less to keep Hawaii a little more local.