Honolulu County, Hawaii
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Honolulu County has the highest housing burden score in this batch of ten. 95.1 out of 100. Renter burden ranks at the 98th percentile. Owner burden at the 94th. The wage-to-rent ratio sits at the 99th percentile for unaffordability, the worst reading in the entire group. Nearly every metric of housing cost relative to income is near the national ceiling. An island economy where the geography itself caps the housing supply. And everything else is fine. Unemployment is 2.1%, the lowest in the batch. The uninsured rate is 3.4%, also the lowest. Community vulnerability scores 10.9. Debt and delinquency, 23.5. The 84-point gap between the housing domain and the vulnerability domain is the widest single-county spread in this group. Honolulu functions as a case study in what happens when a single cost overwhelms an otherwise healthy economy. People have jobs. They have insurance. They have low debt. They just can't afford to live where they work. Honolulu has no adjacent counties. It is, literally, an island. Among its score-matched peers nationally — Cherokee County, Georgia; Kent County, Michigan; Hillsborough County, New Hampshire — the comparison is almost absurd. Those counties share Honolulu's 37.9 Normal score but through completely different mechanisms. The distress that looks moderate in the composite is, in practice, concentrated in the single cost that no resident can avoid.
The Numbers Behind the Score
The CDI measures five statistically derived factors of household financial distress, PCA-weighted. Honolulu County's primary driver is Housing Cost Burden at 95.3 — worse than roughly 95% of U.S. counties.
Scores are percentile-based: 50 = national median, higher = more distressed.
Neighbors and Peers
Population Peers
| County | Score | Zone | vs. Honolulu County |
|---|---|---|---|
| Capitol Planning Region, CT | 41.9 | Normal | -0.1 |
| Washtenaw County, MI | 41.9 | Normal | -0.1 |
| Hillsborough County, NH | 41.6 | Normal | -0.4 |
| Lancaster County, PA | 42.5 | Normal | +0.6 |
| Western Connecticut Planning Region, CT | 41.3 | Normal | -0.6 |
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