(3 of 7)
One reason that so many are willing is that for many mainlanders the gloss has gone off some once fashionable Caribbean and Mexican resorts. The dollar is worth a dollar, almost. The natives speak English, sort of. It is a fairly easy hop for U.S. Westerners, who account for 80% of Maui's visitors (though 600 people a day flew from New York City en route to Maui on United alone last year). Though here and there a McDonald's, a Pizza Hut, a Baskin-Robbins has sprouted, it is still possible on Maui to rediscover the idyllic Hawaii of swaying palms and hips that Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain and Jack London described so affectionately. More than 75% of the island is gloriously uninhabited and is likely to remain so. Only 2,650 acres are zoned for resort use, while 242,408 acres are reserved for cropland. Sugar cane is Maui's premier crop, yielding some 200,000 tons of sugar a year, the world's highest per-acre yield; the third biggest crop is pineapple. The second most valuable crop? Pakalalo, a.k.a. marijuana. Grown illicitly, of course, in rain forests and cane fields that are well-nigh impossible to police, Maui Wowie is reputedly the world's most potent pot, selling for $140 per oz.
Tourism, however, is the island's biggest money spinner ($176 million, vs. $65 million from agriculture in fiscal 1977). Maui's seven major resort hotels have an occupancy rate of well over 90%, a phenomenon that actually distresses the hoteliers because they hardly have time to change the sheets between check-out and checkin. Not at all unhappy are the property developers who are dotting condominiums around the hotels on what was useless brush and mesquite land a few years ago. If Maui in the past century was ravaged by diseases brought in by outsiders, the island today is in the throes of a more benign importation. It could be called condo fever. Symptoms:—More than 1,000 people gathered at Kapalua last July to engage in a form of real estate roulette. The names of "registered" prospective buyers of condominiums were spun in a revolving cage to decide which 134 lucky ones would get the chance to shell out an average $205,000 each for unbuilt one-or two-bedroom town-house units on leasehold land, with projected ground rent and maintenance charges of $300-$400 a month.
> Over in Wailea last April, more than 500 bidders were on hand to try their luck at 148 condos at Ekolu Village. Prices ranged from $150,000 to $230,000, and may have been a bargain at that. Neighboring Ekahi (first) Village opened three years ago with 294 units. A beachfront house there soared in value from $275,000 to $575,000 in one year. A one-third-acre building lot that went for $80,000 fetched $163,000 some 18 months later.
> At the Whaler, a twelve-story high-rise in Kaanapali, a two-bedroom apartment that sold for $175,000 in 1973 is worth $450,000 today.