Tulsi Gabbard

It's expensive to live in Hawaii.

And there have not been very good solutions.

The governor...

He was encouraging homeowners who have vacation homes in Hawaii, like, hey, turn your vacation rental home into a long-term rental so that these families can, kids in school and they're like, let them come and actually just rent your house for the next year or whatever.

Not very many people were willing to do that.

And so he took action to essentially limit or stop them from being able to be short-term rentals.

So that then, you know, okay, well, either you're not going to rent it at all or you're going to rent it to a family that's been displaced.

But it's been and continues to be a very, very tough road for these families and these kids.

I am probably aware of all of them.

You don't?

And I'm saying that not just because of belief, but because I went there...

I was in army training in Fort Leavenworth when this happened.

Thankfully, I was able to take leave and get back to Maui as quickly as possible.

I think it was the second or third day after the fires.

I went, obviously, directly out to West Maui to go and talk to people.

This was a community that was in my district when I was in Congress for eight years.

And I wanted to know what happened.

And speaking to the firefighters, the people who were there, community leaders, the convergence of events that resulted in winds changing direction, funneling through the valley,

this side of the island is very, very dry.

It didn't used to be that way.