To build a house on Oahu requires armloads of permits and long months of waiting for approval.

But only if you’re the sort of person who follows the rules.

Apparently, you also could just go ahead and build whatever you want, as big as you want, building code be damned, and nobody will come and make you tear it down.

The public meetings go on and on, and the City Council frets and promises, but in your neighborhood and mine and all the valleys and hillsides that we pass driving to work, huge multibedroom apartment buildings are rising up in lots where single-family homes used to be, and nothing has changed it. Nothing. Old houses come up for sale and are snatched up for more than the asking price by monster developers before working Hawaii families can even put in a bid on them. Then comes the wrecking crew, and before you know it a looming fortress with 23 bedrooms rises up on the lot where the Takahashis or the Lums or the Silvas lived with their prized starfruit tree for 50 years. The City Council’s moratorium earlier this year had the teeth of a baby guppy and only served to get the incumbents through their primary races.

Hawaii wears the now-weary label of being easygoing, relaxed, slow to anger and placidly accepting. That image of the anything-goes Hawaii is again being used against the law-abiding, working-class residents of this state to take over our neighborhoods and beaches and kill the way we’ve lived for generations.

Monster houses are just part of the scourge. The fiercely entrenched homeless encampments survive on the same lame, lax local leadership. Nobody knows how to make them move off public property, so they stay.

The city Department of Planning and Permitting is not the problem. The current laws are the problem, which means the current lawmakers are the problem since they seem not to have the drive or the ability to take decisive action. There have been tepid half-measures but no leadership stepping out and saying, “This stops now,” and then actually doing it.

Fines are not enough to stop these “monster” home builders. They are flush with cash. That’s how they buy the lots in the first place. If they ever get around to paying a fine, they will make it all back with the multiple apartment units they will rent in their “single-family homes.”

Or maybe they’ll say it’s a duplex for extended family. They can fill the rooms with unrelated renters or wild vacationers and cover up the sinks and stoves when the city inspector calls to give a heads-up that they’re coming to take a look. And what’s more, the city might eventually get around to making the whole mess retroactively legal. Mayor Kirk Caldwell is pushing a bill to retroactively make every owner-occupied bed-and- breakfast on Oahu legal. What’s your street going to be like if everyone rents out their spare bedroom every night? Build a wall around your property to keep out the noise. Sure, you’ll get cited for building that unpermitted wall, because you’re you and you follow rules. But that’s just how it goes in 2018 Hawaii. Everybody knows that.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.