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Who’s at fault for the exodus of those born and raised in Hawaii to the mainland? Are our leaders quavering at standing up to the forces that drive locals away?

Lack of bravery is not the problem.

The fundamental problem is that the problems are so fundamental.

The heart of the housing problem like other big problems here is this: Solutions need to overcome economic and political forces that are so strong, so historical, and so inherent (another term for this is “structural”) that at best we can chip away at them.

Let’s focus on affordable housing. People leave Hawaii for all sorts of reasons, but economics is at the center.

Build Back Better, Gov. Josh Green’s comprehensive affordable housing plan, was a profile of courage. He stuck his neck out trying a new way to move forward on affordable housing.

The plan was out of the box in a good way. It took a lot of guts. Yet BBB has already been disbanded.

No one chickened out. The governor has made clear his commitment to fight another day but take a look at what he — we — are struggling against.

The economic forces pushing those born and raised here are so intractable and so pervasive that if they can be dealt with at all, it is only in dribs and drabs. Incremental responses to a huge backlog of troubles when for many the housing problem is immediate and pressing.

For those who need affordable housing, life becomes a waiting list.

The pace of building affordable housing simply cannot meet the pressure and scope of the pent-up demand.

“We’ll catch up and meet the demand in five years.” Maybe so, but that’s a long, long time and an impossibly long time for people who decide to leave.

Think about two kinds of people involved with affordable housing: the individuals waiting and the policymakers whose actions affect the size of the list.

That’s how the Hawaiian homelands waitlist officially works. That’s also how the state’s affordable housing policy works unofficially.

Now, think of two kinds of time: policy time and individual time.

Politics is on policy time. No matter how important a new policy is, it takes time to make it work, rarely just months, typically years and even decades.

Policy is future oriented. It’s addressed to categories of people. “50,000 units of affordable housing in five years for people who qualify.” That’s become a common way of thinking about housing policy here.

Sure, it may make the public feel hopeful to have this plan, but optimism does not move a family into a home they need at a price they can afford. Affordable progress is incremental, a few people in dribs and drabs at a time.

Maybe, as the saying goes, good things happen to the ones who wait. It depends, though, on what someone has to go through while waiting.

That’s the nature of the policy-time beast. But individual time is a different beast entirely.

Individual time is about a particular person’s own life right now. If you are, as half the people in this state are, barely making ends meet and living with your extended family because you can’t even come close to making higher rent or a mortgage payment even with your side job, that’s a right-now problem.

Will you benefit from the new housing policy? Not right now. That’s for sure.

Those benefits would be down the road, way down for all but the lucky few who end up getting first dibs.

Good chance that by the time house largesse rolls around, your pre-school age children will be out of elementary school.

In the terms of moms and dads raising little kids, that’s a long, long time as grandmas and grandpas get older and move from caregivers to folks needing care while you and your partner need to work more hours to make ends meet.

So, I am suggesting that you look at Hawaii differently in a way that’s more realistic.

To do this, let’s talk about courage. Three kinds of courage.

Political courage: leaders who will be candid and not slip and slide over the difference between what people here really want — their aspirations — and why it is so challenging to get it. The courage to keep it real.

“We need to keep our keiki here,” or some such, has become a buzz phrase telling people what they want to hear. It’s a Hallelujah moment typically followed by some vague pronouncements and unreal general plans.

Any politician whose adult children live on the continent should be willing to explain why they do so. The courage to be honest.

The courage of the people who stay:

These people have the most skin in the game. It’s their lives and their cultures most directly at stake.

They can’t, or choose not to, avoid or escape the consequences of the policy-time waiting list.

The courage of the people who leave:

We need to be happy for the people who have left and admire their courage and their adaptability. Less handwringing about leaving home and more appreciation of what they are doing right now over there.

They keep Hawaii’s cultures alive in their new communities but at the same time, make adjustments and accommodations. Appreciate that everyday heroism.

People who have left are not just escapees. Sure, they may live in a suburban Vegas home with mucho powder rooms and 1,500 more square feet than you have in Hawaii, counting your car port. It’s more than that. They are models of how cultures thrive in new surroundings.

In that way they are a lot like the immigrant ancestors so many of us had. Wherever they came from — whether, like my family, from Eastern Europe to settle in the Midwest or, like many of yours, from Asia to work on the plantations — they were courageous everyday heroes.

Not that they ever saw themselves that way, but you know what I mean.

All in all, the courage to be realistic. The courage to fight harder because, realistically, the struggle is even harder than we think.

And the courage to recognize that whether you like it or not, leaving Hawaii is a fruitful choice that in its own way is a powerful tool in protecting a culture that is so fragile in Hawaii itself.