Why Miamians Should Steal Hawaii's Playbook: Scare Everyone Away Before It's Too Late

As visitors of our esteemed forums may know, I have a bit of a tendency to tell people why they won’t like living in Miami. Simply put, I spend most of my time discouraging them from moving here. While I could be described as overly negative, I say I am the voice of reality, but any way you look at it I love to make a point of explaining to people why living in Miami is so very different than coming on vacation. Well, this past week I got to play tourist in our nation’s other perpetual-warm-weather-and-endless-beaches state, Hawaii, and got to put the flip-flop on the other foot.

Like my words coming out of Hawaiian mouths

After a few days of basking in the warm Hawaiian sun, and enjoying the challenging training terrain of the green mountains, I thought to myself, “Man it would be really cool to live here.” I shared this sentiment with my cousin and some of her friends who live on Oahu, and the warnings started almost immediately.

“This place is sooo far from everywhere. If you get tired of the Island, you’re six hours from the West Coast!”

“To get home for Christmas it cost me $1200.”

“The traffic here is TERRIBLE! There are three cars for every person!”

“The weather is nice, but it rains a lot and you miss the seasons.”

“It’s really hard to be a white person here. The Hawaiians really don’t like you.”

Sound familiar?

Last man on the island

Aside from being stuck on an island 3000 miles from the rest of the country, it sounds eerily similar to the warnings I give to prospective Miamians. The best part, I asked them if they planned on leaving after their military days were up, and the answer was usually something along the lines of…

“No. No way can I go back to Wisconsin after this. We’re thinking of maybe moving to the Big Island once I get out.”

Yeah, Hawaii must suck really bad.

You got to accentuate the negative

What I’ve realized is that it all boils down to “last man on the island syndrome.” Literally here, I guess. Once you have your own little slice of paradise, you really don’t want anybody else infringing on it. So you make sure to stress all the negatives about where you live to dissuade sand-shoed tourists from making your home their home. The native Hawaiians have even gone so far as to write “Haole Go Home!” in white rocks on the lava fields, a tactic I’m thinking we should adopt in Miami. Imagine “Go Back to New York” written in palm fronds so you can see it on your descent into MIA.

Hawaiians do a better job of keeping their growth under control. You have to have lived on island for two years to get a government job. Development outside of Waikiki is not even noticeable, and Hawaiians do not worship the God of Air Conditioning like we do in South Florida. Seriously, I spent 2 hours in Walgreens yesterday just to cool off. Like Florida, Hawaii is paradise, but somehow the locals’ overwhelming negativity has managed to keep the population down.

Maybe if we all adopted a little more of the island mentality, the traffic wouldn’t be so freaking bad.

‍Editor’s Note: Originally published August 25, 2009. Updated in 2026 with new photography; Matt Meltzer’s original writing remains unchanged.