Like many other families this August, Krizhna Bayudan, 23, a Lāhainā resident, recalls her family of six sleeping in their cars wondering whether their house, where she has lived her entire life, burned down in the fires that decimated West Maui. They would later learn that it was completely destroyed, along with every other house in their neighborhood. Her family relocated at least five times within the first few weeks before being placed at a hotel-condominium in Kāʻanapali. “It’s so nice to just see people we used to see … and knowing that they’re okay,” Bayudan said, describing walking the hotel’s hall, which has become a collective space for many other displaced families. 

Just one month after the deadliest wildfires in US history ravaged West Maui — killing at least 97 people, displacing thousands, and incinerating the historic town of Lāhainā — Hawaii’s governor announced that the island would fully reopen to tourism. Beginning October 8, travel restrictions will be lifted and visitors will be welcome to resume their vacations.

The reopening means that families like Bayudan’s face yet another displacement from hotels as they prepare to make room for tourists who will soon lodge in the same rooms that have been used as emergency housing. This moment underscores historic tensions between tourism and local residents and Hawaiians: Maui’s economy depends on tourism, yet the visitor industry is making it increasingly unlivable for those who call it home. Now, with a reopening for tourists being framed by their governor as a welcome return to normalcy, many locals feel the opposite as they navigate what they see as a housing crisis within the climate crisis. 

Bayudan and her family have been told by the American Red Cross, which operates the hotel for fire survivors, that they would have lodging there until October 31, which was later confirmed via email by the resort’s management company. But she joins many other displaced residents in their fear of the unknown. She’s heard that the date could be extended, but if not, she has no idea where her family will move next. While living in the hotel has given her and her family some much-needed relief, the uncertainty around when they would need to relocate has made it impossible for them to feel settled and safe. Bayudan told Vox that her family is still in danger of being relocated well before that date if the rental owners decide that they want to come back to Maui. 

“I just want a final answer already,” she said. Until then, she will continue living out of her suitcase. 

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green’s administration, along with the Hawaii Tourism Authority, is imploring visitors to return to spend money at the island’s hotels, restaurants, retail shops, and visitor experiences in order to support its economic recovery. “We have to just begin to heal,” Green said during a recent news conference at the state capitol in Honolulu, on Oahu.

After survivors spent weeks sleeping in gymnasiums, church halls, in their cars, and on the beach, nearly 8,000 people are currently sheltering across 40 Maui hotels. Many of them are employed in the visitor industry, some at the very hotels where they’re staying. A majority of them are in impacted West Maui, which hosts over 50 percent of the entire island’s lodging capacity. 

“As we continue care of those displaced, we may look to consolidate or shrink our footprint across hotels,” said the American Red Cross in a statement to Vox. “During this process, some people may need to be relocated to different hotel properties. However, we will communicate all changes with our residents and do our best to ensure the least amount of disruption as possible.”

Veronica Mendoza Jachowski, co-founder of Roots Reborn Lāhainā, a group of Maui-based immigration lawyers and community organizers, is currently providing direct emergency needs assessment to Latino immigrants, including undocumented survivors. She said the uncertainty is already doing the work of forcing some community members out. “They’re leaving the hotels and now paying rent,” she said. “They’re not even two months out, and they’re already hustling to make ends meet so that they can pay rent.”

For some, the October 8 reopening signifies a rushed return

Gov. Green and the American Red Cross have assured that those who qualify for housing assistance will not be kicked out of the hotels without alternative accommodation. The reopening has nonetheless stoked fears of further displacement and reignited outrage from state residents over whom their home ultimately caters to, and how much longer it can sustain that servitude. Some survivors have already reported receiving notices from their hotels asking them to vacate. Others remain on edge, fearing that it’s only a matter of time before they receive their own notices. 

At the end of September, the state’s Safe Harbor program ended, threatening more than 600 disaster survivors with displacement if they did not register to remain in temporary housing by that date or could not show proof of residence, Hawaii News Now reported. Some survivors, including those who were unsheltered before the fires, will now be transferred back into a temporary shelter setting. 

Those who don’t face relocation still fear that it’s too soon to return to normal. “There is this forced attempt to make the October 8 reopening feel happy and cheery and inevitable,” said Khara Jabola-Carolus, a former state official now volunteering primarily for Tagnawa, an immigrant group organized in the wake of the fire. Tagnawa provides a working-class Filipino response for the Filipino immigrants who make up roughly 40 percent of Lāhainā’s community.

Interacting directly with those impacted, she has heard “the spectrum” of responses to the reopening, but none of them have been eager. “It’s this looming date that everyone is dreading,” she said. 

“Some people [say], ‘Well, we know that it’s good for the rest of the island, so we’re willing to take it for the rest of Maui because we don’t want to hurt our friends,’” Jabola-Carolus added. “What I saw more of, personally, were people erupting into tears and talking about how sad it was making them.”

Healing, many survivors believe, is the last thing the reopening will bring.

A petition by community group Lāhainā Strong to delay the reopening garnered more than 3,000 signatures within the first 24 hours — rebuking the governor’s argument of widespread support.

“A couple of people said that we didn’t get input,” Green told Hawaii News Now’s Spotlight Now. “That is not true. We held a meeting with 200 individuals who had either lost their home or their boat or their business or, God forbid, one of their loved ones. They told us almost unanimously — I mean, like well into beyond 90 percent — that they had to reopen.”

In contrast, as of October 6, the petition stands at over 16,000 signatures.

Maui’s complex dependency on tourism

Less than a week after the fires, Pā’ele Kiakona, 28, who is a part of Lāhainā Strong, was standing with local news channel KITV’s Jeremy Lee at the Lāhainā bypass connecting to Kāʻanapali. He grew up in Lāhainā, and his grandmother’s house on Front Street, which was incinerated by the fires, had housed seven generations of his family. He was sharing how the community had lost everything — including loved ones — when they were repeatedly interrupted mid-interview by people taking photos and gawking at the devastation. 

Kiakona has no reason to believe that tourists returning to Maui when it fully reopens will be any more respectful. “The only type of people who are going to come to a disaster zone for vacation are going to be those very disrespectful types of people [who] are insensitive and don’t care,” he said. 

Tourists to Hawaii are notoriously misbehaved, so much so that in 2019, the Hawaii Tourism Authority launched a marketing campaign to gently but explicitly educate visitors on appropriate behavior. Then the pandemic hit, slingshotting the state economy back into complete codependency on its most lucrative economic driver. Tourism is the state’s largest employer and remains Hawaii’s largest single source of private capital. And while the pandemic sparked earnest conversations around diversifying the state’s economy, they fizzled as soon as tourists returned.

After being urged to steer clear following the fires, state officials are now asking tourists to return to help the island recover, recently approving a $2.6 million marketing budget to court travel back to Maui. Tourism accounts for 80 percent of the county’s income. “Every 1,000 units not rented to tourists translates to a potential $30M monthly loss for local businesses, suggesting a prolonged recovery for our workforce,” read a report from the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization (UHERO) on Maui’s long journey to recovery. 

“I can’t control people’s behavior,” said Green in a recent press conference. “The appeal I’m making to everyone is ‘Come and help us heal.’”

Those from Lāhainā’s immigrant communities especially, who have uneven access to financial aid, are not waiting for the state government and Red Cross to coordinate housing for the next 18 months as the governor had repeatedly promised. Community organizations like Roots Reborn say that some displaced families have already left the island for the US continent. 

Many now fear that further displacement will make way for a land grab.

Maui’s housing crisis, explained

Top officials — from Gov. Green to President Biden — have assured the people of Lāhainā that the town will be rebuilt the way the community wants, assuaging early fears that the fires just paved the way for the island’s total gentrification. 

Destroyed homes will need to be rebuilt in the most expensive housing market in the nation: Median housing costs in Hawaii are reportedly 214 percent higher than the national average. Less than a third of Hawaii residents can afford to buy a single-family home, according to another UHERO study. For many, the opportunity to be a homeowner is dependent on whether they inherit a house or can sustain multiple jobs. 

Consequently, 40 percent of Hawaii households are renters, who on average spend over 40 percent of their income on housing. 

The Hawaiian Home Lands program, created by the US Congress in 1921 to return Native Hawaiians to the land by awarding homestead lots, today has a generations-long waitlist of some 30,000 people on some islands. Many have died before getting off the waitlist. 

Reasons behind the housing crisis are manifold, not least among them because much of the current housing stock is vacation rentals, motivated in part by the state having the lowest property taxes in the nation.  

Nearly a quarter of home purchases statewide are made by out-of-state buyers; on Maui, more than 70 percent of homes purchased in 2020 went to vacation homes or rental investments. 

With neighboring islands faring no better, local families have been migrating to other states in search of affordable housing. 

For the first time, Native Hawaiians living on the continent outnumber those who live in their homeland.

At least 2,200 buildings were damaged or destroyed by the fires, and nearly all of them were residential. Many of the houses in the burn zone reportedly also had been in the hands of local families for generations — including Kiakona’s grandmother’s home. 

“When the fire happened, the first thing that came to my mind was people are going to leave their homes and they’re going to start selling their property,” said Kiakona. “And corporate interests, with their greed, are going to … try and take advantage of people in their times of need.”

Amid immediate reports of unsolicited offers to buy land for cash by “vulture agents,” the governor voiced his commitment to protecting affected residents. “You would be pretty poorly informed if you try to steal land from our people and then build here,” he said. 

But the devastated and wary community isn’t exempting the government from making its own play for land.

Gov. Green extensively cited housing challenges for Native Hawaiians especially in his emergency proclamation on housing in July, which introduced a fast-tracked process for housing projects that would bypass regulatory barriers, including cultural and environmental reviews and public transparency in government meetings. It didn’t take long for the governor’s proclamation to attract strong criticism and, following the fires, litigation. In September, after considerable public pressure, the governor amended the proclamation to reinstate those regulations, but litigation remains ongoing.

While few can deny that a housing crisis exists, many debate whether the crisis actually stems from a housing shortage. More than 2,000 housing units were secured to shelter the displaced within the first two weeks after the fire, according to the governor. 

“Is Hawaii’s shortage of affordable housing really a supply issue, where the constitution has to be suspended so that more can be built,” said Maui attorney Lance Collins, who filed one of the two lawsuits targeting the proclamation. “Or, is it a distribution issue?” He believes it would be more impactful to defer mortgage payments, which is why he is petitioning the governor for mortgage deferral for Lāhainā residents for three years. 

“Almost every home in the burnout zone had a mortgage on it,” Collins said. “If there isn’t a general deferment process that everybody can use while they’re rebuilding, six [to] nine months from now, there’s going to be a tsunami of foreclosures, and then there is going to be a land grab.” 

“I don’t think it has anything to do with having enough homes,” said Kiakona. “[It] has everything to do with mismanaging what we have.”

Gov. Green again cited fear of “mass exodus” as a driver behind reopening, stating at the recent press conference that workers “passionately” supported the reopening to support their ability to continue to live there.

Much of that anxiety is extended to their current shelter. “It’s a thing across the hotels,” said Jabola-Carolus. “Even if you’re staying there as a disaster victim, you’re still working.”

Kiakona’s fear for those returning to work is that visitors will provoke more harm than healing. “It’s bound to happen,” he said. “People are going to ask, ‘Did you lose your home?’ That’s going to be a conversation that they’re going to have to repeat over and over again. And they never even got a chance to deal with how that made them feel.”

Rather than equate economic recovery to healing, Kiakona said, “the focus should be on how we’re going to get the money so the people here can focus on what’s really important. I don’t understand why [reopening] is the only option.”

“We’ve lost so much already”

Meanwhile, there are still loved ones who remain unaccounted for. A joint list as of September 29 from the FBI and Maui Police Department (MPD) puts the number of missing at 12, but that number only accounts for those with an official missing person’s report.

Some Maui nonprofit health care providers warned that interactions with incoming tourists could provoke altercations or trigger survivors.

So far, the governor remains committed to the October 8 reopening date.

When asked if community members have even begun to grieve their loss, Kiakona said that some are only recently able to admit that they’re not okay, eight weeks after the fire. Still, they don’t feel that they can afford to let up on pressuring the governor to reconsider. He and other community members remain in fight mode. 

“It’s just hard,” said Kiakona. “We’ve lost so much already, and I don’t want to lose any more people. We don’t need any more hurt and pain to come to us right now.”

“It almost seems like it never happened,” Pua Case tells Vox about her time in the encampment at the foot of Maunakea, a dormant volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii and the tallest mountain in the world. While she lives only a 30-minute drive away, she says, “I have to go back and look at videos or pictures to remind myself that we were really up there.”

For nearly nine months, she and other kiaʻi, or protectors, were sleeping in a parking lot over a lava field that marks the beginning of the access road up to Maunakea’s summit. From the Pu‘uhonua o Pu‘uhuluhulu camp, protectors kept watch for construction crews for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) — planned to be the largest telescope in the Northern Hemisphere — through windstorms, hail, and overnight temperatures that dipped well below 30 degrees Fahrenheit. 

In Hawaiian traditions of creation, the mountain is an ancestor and shares genealogical ties with Native Hawaiians, or Kanaka Maoli. It is one of the most sacred sites — if not the most sacred — in Hawaiian culture. For kiaʻi, protecting the mountain from desecration is more than a cultural responsibility; it’s a lineal duty to those who came before them and the generations who will succeed them.

When the pandemic hit, kiaʻi were already assessing the threat of construction and considering the impact on resources. After determining that there was no imminent threat, they decided to pack up their site, which hosted anywhere between 30 and 3,000 people at any given time. Should an attempt be made to initiate the project, they knew they could be back up there in half an hour. Still, their departure from the mountain was marked by emotional exhaustion and trepidation for what was to come.

It also presented familiar challenges. Before the latest standoff on the mountain, many kiaʻi had spent years tirelessly writing letters, submitting testimony to city council meetings, combing over management plans, and trying to monitor the movements of multiple parties with vastly more power and resources than they’ll ever have. Today, they continue that labor from their homes.

At least on the mountain, they could offer their physical presence to inspire supporters, who could be shielded from the invisible — and, certainly, less romantic — work kiaʻi had been doing behind the scenes. The movement has a robust social media presence that acts as a direct line of communication between the front line and its supporters abroad. The Protect Mauna a Wākea Instagram account, one of two accounts that had been operating from the camp, has 136,000 followers who rely on photos and videos of kiaʻi to draw inspiration and feel plugged into the action. Under lockdown, the movement is challenged with keeping supporters, who are used to seeing dispatches from the mountain, engaged and connected to it. 

“It’s constant,” Case says. “You have to be a presence or you’re going to disappear. And you can’t afford to disappear when you’re talking about your lifeways, your culture, and the very continuance and protection of the places that are connected to you.”

A timeline of resistance

Kiaʻi have opposed the telescope’s construction in a string of legal challenges, petitions, and protests over the past decade. But the fight for Maunakea gained national attention a year ago, after Hawaii Gov. David Ige announced that construction would be cleared to begin on July 15. 

That morning, kiaʻi awaited the construction crews. Some had locked themselves to a cattle guard that was built into the Mauna Kea Access Road — the only road up to the summit. But then, a line of elders, or kupuna, formed farther down, at the start of the road. It was their blockade that inevitably became the front line.

“I saw them sitting in lawn chairs and folding chairs on the road, all bundled up with blankets and sleeping bags,” said Andre Perez, one of the kiaʻi and a nonviolent direct action trainer for the Hawaiʻi Unity and Liberation Institute. He was the acting police liaison that day. “I knew that something powerful was happening. The elders were stepping into the fray and taking charge.” 

They held that line for two days before Ige issued a state of emergency on July 17, clearing a path for law enforcement to begin making arrests. 

Multiple agencies arrived on the scene; there were officers brought in from other islands, three state agencies, and the National Guard. It wasn’t long before kiaʻi, hundreds of whom had gathered there around their kupuna, were sitting in front of a massive militarized police presence dressed in riot gear and armed with chemical dispersants and a long-range acoustic device (LRAD) — a sonic weapon developed for use by the US military that emits high-frequency sounds at extreme volumes to disperse crowds.

Whatever aggression law enforcement expected from the crowd that day never materialized. Kia‘i sat in purposeful silence as 38 of their kupuna, many in their 70s and 80s, were arrested and escorted — and, in several instances, carried — away to awaiting police vans, crying but resolute. The air above the crowd was periodically punctured by sobs, singing, and chanting. “We didn’t want to give the police any reason to escalate,” said Perez. “Our discipline was our safety.” 

Images and video footage of the arrests sparked public outcry across the island chain and overseas. It was the stark, visible disparity between the resistance and the state response that galvanized a native movement and brought supporters from around the world to their cause. 

For nearly nine months after, kupuna never left the spot they first occupied. A tent was erected to shelter them as they sat on the road, and a volunteer village formed overnight, equipped with a kitchen, solar trailers, and even a “university” grounded in Native Hawaiian science and culture. They hosted locals and musicians from neighboring islands, curious tourists, relatives from other Indigenous movements — the camp flew flags gifted to them from Palestine, Tibet, Guam, Standing Rock, Cherokee, and Navajo, Aotearoa, and the Indigenous Australian people, among others. Even Hollywood celebrities like Jason Momoa and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who felt connected to the movement through their Polynesian heritage, came to pay their respects. 

A team of medics was also on hand to assist kupuna, some of whom experienced altitude sickness and even mild strokes while keeping watch over their sacred mountain. Many kupuna had preexisting health conditions that made their taking a stand challenging — and yet, they stayed. 

After five months and $15 million spent on officers and supplies to manage the conflict, Ige withdrew state and county law enforcement from the mountain. At the same time, he requested additional funding from the House Finance Committee as a “contingency amount for any upcoming projects that may attract community activism, including but not limited to Maunakea.” 

In late December, kiaʻi reached a temporary agreement with Hawaii County Mayor Harry Kim to clear the access road with his assurance that TMT would not attempt to begin construction until the end of February 2020. They caught a break when the deal expired; the observatory’s leadership had yet to determine when construction could begin.

In the midst of the pandemic, the future is uncertain. Kiaʻi don’t know when or if they’ll return to the mountain to resume their standoff. Since the lockdown, some have returned to the mountain to stand at the ahu, the altar erected alongside where their camp once stood, and for years where many have offered prayers. It is ground that they hope someday to only have to hold in prayer, rather than resistance. 

A battle for the heavens

The new giant telescope promises access to “the very edge of the observable Universe,” an opportunity to discover places that were previously unreachable to humankind. 

“It will enable a new frontier of discoveries about the contents, nature, and evolution of the universe, including the search for life on other planets,” the University of California, one of the project’s funders, said in a statement to Vox. “The potential for scientific discoveries is truly unlimited.”

But kiaʻi say it’s precisely this argument that gives cause for opposition: There are some places that humans aren’t meant to go, and the summit of Maunakea is one of them. 

The summit is firmly the province of the gods. Historically, only select individuals — such as the kahuna, or priests, or the ali‘i, high chiefs — were permitted on the mountain in order to perform ceremonies of affairs, and they wouldn’t stay long. It is sacred not only in its religious capacity but also because of the lack of oxygen. 

At 13,796 feet, there is 40 percent less air pressure at the summit than at sea level. Visitors are advised to heed signs of altitude sickness and pulmonary and cerebral edemas. Even employees at existing observatories have reported feeling fatigued working at that elevation. 

“It’s a place where humans don’t belong,” says Noe Noe Wong-Wilson, one of the kupuna arrested that day. “Where gods reside.”

The area between Maunakea, Mauna Loa, and Hualālai volcanic mountains are sensitive environments and culturally significant landscapes. Roughly 20 miles from Kona to the west and almost 30 miles from Hilo to the east, the area is extremely remote. 

The only other substantial activity in that area is at the Pōhakuloa Training Area, the largest military installation in the Pacific, where the US Army conducts live-fire training a few miles down the road. On those rare nights when the harsh weather conditions would relent, kiaʻi still had to fall asleep to the sound of machine gun fire carried over the camp by an eastward wind. And as they laid their heads down in their tents, they could feel tremors underneath them from the impact of explosions. “It feels like a little earthquake,” says Wong-Wilson. “Every time, it just hurt our soul.”

TMT proponents say they don’t understand why Kanaka and locals would go through the trouble to contest a telescope, an instrument of science that beckons humankind to reach for a higher purpose. Many have reasoned that the telescope must represent other longstanding issues for the Hawaiian people — such as the 1893 illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom by American and European businessmen, aided by the US military, which paved the way for US possession of the islands and, eventually, Hawaii’s induction into statehood. “I understand that talking about TMT is a way to express some frustration over these issues that have not been addressed in the past,” Gordon Squires, vice president of external affairs for the TMT International Observatory, told Hawaii News Now.

It’s a position those in the movement have heard repeatedly from their opposition, and to Kamanamaikalani Beamer, a longtime advocate for the preservation of Maunakea and an associate professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa’s School of Law and School of Hawaiian Knowledge, the argument is entirely dismissive. “Trying to say, ‘Look, we’re sorry [about] the overthrow, but don’t make us hurt for it’ is so dislocated from the reality of the situation. The scale, the amount of degradation, and the density of the existing telescope facilities on Maunakea — it’s all too much.” 

Squires, meanwhile, has called the project — whose budget has now climbed from its initial projection of $1.4 billion to $2.4 billion — “a bargain for the people of Hawaii and the people of the world as we understand our place in the universe.” 

But what many onlookers find perplexing, and what opponents of the telescope certainly find frustrating, is that TMT already has the licenses and land required to develop on a backup site: La Palma in Spain’s Canary Islands. It is a far less contentious option, and yet Maunakea remains TMT’s first choice for the project; the summit’s higher altitude and cooler temperatures make it a “slightly better” site to capture infrared light, Harvard’s astronomy department chair, Avi Loeb, told the Associated Press, thereby enhancing the telescope’s imaging capabilities.

“I think we can all agree that Maunakea is a great place to view the stars,” says Beamer. “But that’s not all Maunakea is.”

TMT leadership and proponents have also vehemently denied that the project’s presence would disturb any cultural resources or sites at the summit. But historical mismanagement of the summit’s natural and cultural resources has been well documented since the first observatory was constructed; kia‘i have no doubt that the addition of an 18-story building — slated to be the largest building on the Big Island — will be any different.

“In the Western perspective, people want to draw a line in the dirt and say, ‘It’s only sacred in this spot here, where you stand; therefore, we can build 500 feet to the left of that because that’s not sacred anymore.’ And we say that the landscape of the summit, which has no line drawn around it, is a spiritual landscape,” says Wong-Wilson. “Once they dig two stories into the ground and put in all the roads and outbuildings, and then the five-acre structure, they’ll have done damage that’s irreparable. The way that it looks now will never be recovered, and that, to me, is unacceptable. All the money in the world will not make up for that.” 

The fight ahead

There’s no telling what the fight ahead looks like for the movement, other than that it will be difficult. 

While the TMT International Observatory has announced that construction will not likely begin until 2021, the project is pursuing significant funding from the National Science Foundation, which would present a new set of federal regulatory obstacles that could further postpone construction by at least another three years. Still, Squires says it isn’t a question of “if” construction would happen, but “when.” 

“We’re absolutely committed to finding a way forward in Hawaii,” he said to Hawaii News Now on July 15, exactly one year since the most recent standoff began. The University of California also doubled down on its commitment to the project, saying, “TMT remains committed to integrating science and culture, providing the best possible stewardship of Maunakea, enriching Hawaiian culture and heritage, and supporting educational opportunities as it enables this global scientific collaboration centered in Hawaii in the interest of humanity.”

The governor’s office did not respond to Vox about the state’s involvement in the private project’s progress in the future. But in February, Ige traveled to Japan — one of two countries investing public funds into the project — and met with key TMT stakeholders there, signaling his commitment, as he stated in his emergency proclamation a year ago, “to seeing this project through.” 

As far as kiaʻi are concerned, though, they still have a job to do: protect the mountain; stop the project for good. In July, to commemorate a year since this latest standoff and the kupuna arrests, a slew of online events and actions was organized for their supporters to participate in “#TMTshutdown week,” including topic-focused talks via Zoom, film screenings, and a letter-signing campaign to TMT’s board of governors, project partners, and other affiliated stakeholders urging them to halt any further attempts at construction. Kiaʻi also recently submitted testimony at a UC Board of Regents meeting on July 30, where its chair John Pérez concluded that the board would continue discussions of the telescope at a later date. Meanwhile, charges against the 38 kupuna still stand.

While kiaʻi can’t afford rest, they might spare a moment to marvel at what has transpired over the past year. “I think most people thought we would get squashed. We were up against a billion-dollar project,” says Beamer. “And yet we were able to turn the tide. Despite all that it takes to stand against something like this, to risk what we’ve spent our lives building, people did it anyway. And we did it out of courage.” 

On July 15, 2019, construction for TMT was scheduled to begin. One year later, it still hasn’t broken ground.