Wealth & Money Quote by Neil Abercrombie

“Land in Hawaii is money” lands like a blunt admission and a quiet indictment at the same time. Neil Abercrombie is doing politician-speak with the gloves off: stripping away the tourism-postcard mythos and naming the real engine of power in the islands. In Hawaii, land is not just property; it is the scarce commodity that determines who gets to stay, who gets priced out, and whose history gets treated as a footnote.

His pivot to “ceded land” is where the quote sharpens. He’s invoking a legal category with a loaded backstory: crown and government lands of the Hawaiian Kingdom, transferred after the overthrow, then folded into the Territory and later the State. By mapping that chain of custody in one sentence, he’s gesturing at contested legitimacy without using the word “stolen.” That restraint is strategic. It signals awareness of a moral argument - that these lands are bound up with sovereignty and unresolved grievance - while keeping the frame inside the bureaucratic and legal language that state government can actually operate within.

The intent, then, is double: normalize a hard-nosed fiscal reality (ceded lands produce revenue; revenue runs government) while acknowledging that the revenue source is politically radioactive. The subtext is a warning to anyone treating “state land” as neutral: in Hawaii, the balance sheet is also a history book, and every development fight, lease, or entitlement quietly re-litigates how the state came to possess what it now monetizes.