The Wall Street Journal reported from the line in Kailua

On 19 August The Wall Street Journal published Owen Tucker-Smith’s report on Hawaiʻi’s attempt to build a technology and manufacturing sector, and opened it on our floor in Kailua.

The piece states the problem in the state’s own figures. Hawaiʻi has lost population faster than any state but Vermont. Young adults are more than forty percent of those leaving, and more than half of Hawaiʻi-born graduates now live on the mainland. The state’s response is to back industries that pay mainland salaries and sell something off-island.

Read it at wsj.com: “Hawaii’s Young People Are Fleeing Paradise. Can Tech Startups Keep Them?”

Every Airform on order is designed and assembled in Kailua. The team is about twenty people: engineers and designers from Tesla, Google, Apple, NASA and Gradient, and a growing number who grew up on this island.

The article mentions the second facility at Kapaa Industrial Park. That is where the Hawaiʻi production runs are staged.

Two consequences for a developer. Units for Hawaiʻi buildings do not cross an ocean or clear a port, which removes two of the things that usually move a delivery date. And a service question goes to the people who built the unit rather than through a distributor.

The Journal reports 32,540 technology jobs in Hawaiʻi in 2024, in a sector growing faster than the state economy, and a state strategy that now names advanced manufacturing and energy alongside aerospace and ocean technology.

This bears on a project schedule in one narrow way. HTDC is a customer and DBEDT knows the line, so a permitting, incentive or interconnection question has a route that does not start cold.