It is easy to count the low-paying jobs created by illegal vacation rentals, and only slightly more difficult to calculate the rise in housing prices caused by them, but it is far more difficult to count the high-paying jobs that disappear when technology companies either leave Hawaii, or never start up, because their employees cannot afford to rent or buy.

Is tourism all we know how to do? Are we so desperate for more of it that we must sacrifice the residential neighborhoods on which every other industry depends? Have we lost our minds?

Neil Frazer

Kailua

Click here to read more Letters to the Editor.