Mr. President, members of the Presidential Party, on behalf of Governor Teah, United States Senator Mark Hatfield, Congresswoman Denny Smith, and our Forest Products Industry, let me welcome you back to Oregon, and more specifically, Climate Falls, Oregon. We are extremely grateful that you are taking time out of your very, very busy schedule to be with us here today, Mr. President. This is also an historic occasion for our industry.  The group assembled before you, Mr. President, is a diverse cross-section of our Westernern industry, ranging from large, fully integrated companies to smaller, family-owned companies such as my own. At times, it seems that the only thing we have in common is that we're all competitors. I would now like to take this opportunity to introduce you to my fellow panel members, Mr. President. On my immediate left is Mr. Bill Swindells of the President of the Lambert Industries, Portland, Oregon. Mike Burl, President of EF Burl Lumber Company, Medford, Oregon. Mr. Archie Emerson, President of Sierra Pacific Industries, Arcadia, California. Mrs. Barbara Jedlow, President of Oregon Cut-Stock and Moulding, Medford, Oregon. Mr. Paul Sagner, President of the Oregon Loggers Association, next to Mr. Hansken is Mr. O'Sulliance Group, Mr. President, and your immediate right, Mr. Charlie Bingham from Warhouser Company. Construction and the demand for lumber in plywood. Demand for these products has recently shown encouraging improvement over the devastating levels of the past several years. And this reflects an increase in housing starts. This new demand has enabled some of us to reopen mills that have been closed for weeks and even months. We can report a definite pull of inflation. The rampant inflation of the streets are trending towards more reasonable levels. Although sometimes the cure seems worse than the illness, we realize that in the long run, inflation could destroy us. Battles concerning which land should be set aside for wilderness. This caused continued uncertainty concerning timber supplies. This half, again, of the variable people at Warhouser were absolutely delighted to have you here at Klamath Falls. We've operated here in this community continuously since 1929. We have consistently reforced at our lands, modernized our plants, and broadened the product line. We feel like we're a part of the fabric of this community. As a company, like those wonderful people you met a few moments ago, we're tree farmers. And we are illustrative of one of the unique parts of this industry. We're the only industry whose raw material is renewable. Takes a long time to grow a crop, but we're here to stay. And for that reason, I've been asked to talk about two longer term issues. Please bear in mind that we bought this timber before the government began their retirement that no longer exists. No one wants to return to that environment. And yet this timber cannot be economically harvested, even in the good markets we hope are coming. Mr. President, the forced products industry is now working on several alternatives as possible solutions to it. Thanks just to hear from you. Well, let me without directly replying to the things that have been said, because I know we'll take care of that in the question and answer session that follows. But Governor, I tell you, Senator Hatfield and Congressman Smith and the people of Klamath Falls, I want to thank you all for welcoming me here and for these informative reports. These are critical times I know for your industry, your workers and your families. But my visit here and our improving economy convinced me that together we can and will put the people of Klamath Falls and the rest of America back to work. First, let me say what a pleasure it is for me to be in the great Northwest. When the rest of the country, here's the name Oregon, I think everyone thinks of a rich green land that lured so many West explorers, traders, and lumberjacks to a state of tall timber and wilderness. And when William Cullen Bryan wrote that forest grove was where God's first temples, he must have seen the majestic sweep of Oregon in his mind's eye. But as you said, Oregon and our mighty lumber industry have suffered greatly from this last recession.  These problems were triggered by profligate spending, excessive taxation, and burdensome regulations imposed from the other side of the nation in Washington, DC. Deficit spending and a tax system which allowed the federal government to profit from inflation drove up prices. Interest rates hit 21 and a half percent. And suddenly the American dream of owning a home seemed an impossibility for millions of people. But the housing industry on the rocks, the lumber industry ground to a halt, and Oregon's mills and forests fell silent. But in 1980, the people of Oregon recognizing what was happening voted an unmistakable mandate to clean up our economic mess. And in the last two years, that's just what I think we've been doing in Washington. We've begun returning America to the strict principles of economic responsibility that made us great in the first place. We've made great strides toward limiting government's role in our marketplace and in the lives of our people. We've cut the growth in new regulations by a third and government's rate of growth by 40%. Incentive hard work and savings are being rewarded again by a reformed tax policy. We offset the largest tax hike in history that had been passed during the previous administration We offset it with the largest tax cut in history. The third installment of the tax cut rate will take effect in a few short months, and America's working families will reap the most benefits. Our tax indexing provision also ensures that cost of living raises won't push workers into higher tax brackets. Meanwhile, we're tackling the monster of deficit spending, which still threatens the road to recovery. We've proposed a budget and a fiscal plan that will steadily reduce federal deficits until eventually we balance the federal budget. As a result, the economy is finally revving up. New home sales, as you know, in January were up 10%, and that was more than a 50% improvement over the same month last year. Housing starts increased by 36%, and that was the largest jump in history. Permits to build were up by 13% to the highest level since September of 1980. Overall, construction spending rose nearly 9%, and that was the most dramatic improvement since 1946. And the increase in the sale of existing homes broke all the records in the books. Something exciting is happening. You can feel it in Klamath Falls, and I think in towns all across America. Inflation has risen at an annual rate of only 1.4% for the last six months, and that's down from the agonizing 12.4%, which was the annual rate when we took office. That success, along with a moderate monetary policy, has enabled interest rates to come down key to our recovery. Many people just don't realize the parallel between the two, and this was why inflation was our prime target from the very first day in office. If you're going to lend money, and the value of that money is depreciating because of inflation, you have to get an interest rate high enough to not only bring an earning on your money, but to offset that depreciated value so that when the dollars are given back, you receive the same purchasing power that you loaned in the first place. Well, those dry rates dropped again last week and are now less than half of what they were in 1980. I believe they're going to go down even farther. Lower, more realistic interest rates are unlocking the chains that are binding our people, our businesses, and our economy. Still more improvement will free us to create the kind of prosperity that was our heritage and that we must restore for ourselves and for our children. Already, overall productivity is improving. Our automobile industry is rebounding, and real wages are rising for the first time in several years. Unemployment, though still painfully high, has begun to dip, and the leading economic indicators have been signaling recovery for eight out of the last 10 months. The latest report on those indicators released this week showed the largest monthly gain in more than 30 years. Now, all this is good news for Klamath Falls, for Oregon, and for America. After nearly a three-year slump, the forest products industry is coming back. I just left a lumber mill that has reopened, and I can tell you the horror of the machinery there was music to my ears. Since February of 1982, about 475 plywood mills and sawmills around the country have reopened or resumed full production. Here in the West, the number of employees directly affected by sawmill closures or production curtailments is half what it was a year ago. Loggers and sawmill workers are going back to work, and when people in Klamath Falls go back to work, it means that paper makers, carpenters, home builders, and an endless array of others across America are also being called back to the job. Now, I know times are still very difficult. We're not out of the woods yet. Maybe in this particular place, I should put that another way. You're not back in the woods yet as much as you would like to be. Your industry is still operating far below capacity, and many thousands of workers here still wait for that callback notice. But our recovery is building and gaining in strength, and I believe it will be powerful and sustained. We've had seven previous recessions since World War II in every one of which government rode to the rescue with a quick fix and an artificial stimulant and guaranteed that with anything from two to three years, we would have another recession and it was always worse than the last. Each one started with a higher level of unemployment to begin with and with a higher inflation rate. This time, we've tried to go back to the basic rules of economics that built this country and have a recovery that is based on common sense business practices and that will be lasting and that will be without inflation. I believe it will be powerful and sustained this recovery. It should be because as I say, it is the result of time tested common sense economic principles that have worked when they've been tried. When I began speaking today, I described how other Americans view your abundant national wealth out here. I would like to add that when we think of your people, we think of independent men and women of strength and foresight imbued with a frontier spirit. I wish that the rest of the country could see and hear what I have today because they would realize how richly that reputation is deserved. I think they'd appreciate as I do that the Oregon spirit is the American spirit and with that spirit, there is no challenge too great for us to overcome. They say that out here in the great Northwest, the trees grow so high that it takes a whole week to see the top of them. Well, it's that way with good results too. Sometimes the reward comes along spell after you begin the effort. But anyone who's looked out over the top of an Oregon forest knows how worthwhile the weight can be. So I thank you for your vision, your hard work and your faith in America. And together we're putting our country to rights again and I think it'll be worth the effort and the weight. And I thank you for giving me this opportunity and God bless you all. But let me anticipate the line of questioning just a couple of the things that were said here earlier. I recognize some of the problems that have been pointed out here. I have a man right now working investigating everything administrative that can be done with regard to this particular problem here. And we are going to continue to work on that to find out, first of all, all that we can do administratively. There are other things that have been brought up here that I know will be repeated in the questioning. So I'll stop and let us get to that questioning. That's what I've been looking forward more to than making a speech. So thank you, Mr. President. We do have some good news for you too. And I think John Stevens wants to share a little bit of that with the questioner too. Mr. President, since last fall, our company employment has increased by over 750 full-time jobs. All of our plywood plants are now running and we've realized a 13% productivity improvement in that same period. Now, this improvement is partly because of market recoveries. But the most important reason were the short-term timber contracts made available to us from the Forest Service and the BLM. Will these kind of contracts continue to be available? Yes, I don't think there would be any change in that at all. As a matter of fact, all of you know better than most. Some great misunderstanding, for example, about our national forest and the BLM and land and all. I ride fairly regularly through a national forest in the east now when I can get to Camp David. And I'm amazed and I know you're all aware of what people think is nature being preserved, but how such a useless tangle and then the taking over by lesser-valued trees is taking place because there is a lack of harvesting in there that would keep those forests more alive than what they were supposed to be. But the tangle of downed trees that have been allowed to mature, grow old, and then before their harvest succumb to insect and age reveals that we have a long way to go in recognizing the assets we have and making full use of them, and at the same time retaining better forest land for those who want it for recreational purposes and all than we presently have. Thank you, sir. Mr. President, our company and many other small companies like ours have endured heavy financial losses the last couple of years. We can't survive another downturn. Can we count on interest rates continuing at their present levels or hopefully lower? Hopefully lower because we're going to continue the fight against inflation. That, you know, most people have forgotten that for more than 30 years, inflation was a deliberate planned government policy. They called it the new economics. I remember being out on the mashed potato circuit about 25 years ago complaining about it, that it wouldn't work. They said that a little inflation was necessary to maintain prosperity. Well, I said a little inflation is like radioactivity. It's cumulative and pretty soon it gets out of control as it has. And as I say, these last six months, for the year of 82, the official annual rate was 3.8 down from that 12.4, but for the last six months, it had been running at 1.4. And even industry had a part in contributing to institutionalizing that. When industry yielded wage contracts that raised wages above increase in productivity, then that became an increase in price that had to be passed on to the customer and thus you built in further inflation. So industry itself has got a hand in this battle. Labor has a handle in this battle to ensure the production, but we're going to do everything we can. And I am convinced that as this continues to go down, right now interest rates are still higher than they need to be, cannot be justified on the basis of present inflation. It can only be a lack of faith that the government in Washington is going to stay the course. You maybe heard that expression before. And continue this fight. They're still skeptical that we might go back to the old ways of the artificial stimulant and then the increased inflation. Well, I'd say over my dead body, but there are too many people willing to take me up on that. Mr. President, we understand your recent recommendations concerning the deregulation of natural gas allows for a renegotiation of the contracts. Is it possible for this type of approach to be used in reference to government timber sale contracts? This is what, as I say, I have someone in my office right now that is looking into this and all the administrative terms. And I know that this is what's on the Senator's mind also, and this is something very definitely to be looked at. We know there are two industries in this country that either one of them alone can start a depression or recession. The housing industry, the automobile industry. And because of the high interest rates, we got a double whammy. It came from both. And it started, it was evident, clear back in 1978 and 1979 and just kept on skyrocketing and going to the present situation that we have. So those are all things that we want to look at. Because we realize that half of the unemployment today may be structural and is the need for training for new industries and new jobs. The other half of it is brought on by the recession. And the only way to get that half back to work is to get this economy moving again. Thank you. Mr. President, you may be aware that proposed additional wilderness legislation in the West would take millions of acres of land from our existing timber base. Would you consider vetoing any unreasonable wilderness proposals? You used the right word there, Duolami. I usually am reluctant to talk in advance about what I will or won't veto if it's unreasonable. It'll be vetoed. But I know that problem also. And you know there has been a great effort spread over a number of years by the government to get possession of more land. Now the United States government owns one-third of all the real estate in the United States. And the bulk of that is here in the West. And they've used various devices to do it. In 66 when I was running for governor. And I remember I addressed a forestry products group in San Francisco. And my opponent went out and said that I in my address had said that if you've seen one tree, you've seen them all. I never said any such thing. But then it was outdoor recreational land. You remember that there was a big wave. They were even foreclosing on some mining claims. And they were buying up land and using eminent domain to do it, claiming that it was needed for the future. So there would be outdoor recreational space. Well finally when they'd exhausted about all they could do with that, then came the environmental surge and the urge that for the environment we must do. We have 80 million acres of wilderness land now. This is land that you cannot have a road in or anything of the kind. It's there because out of the 250-odd million Americans in this country, we realize that at least 240 million of them are backpackers who want to hike into that wilderness area. But at one time, one of the public officials in some of this land acquisition in Washington made a statement that was shocking. He said, in the beginning, we urged the private ownership in order to get development of the land. Now it is necessary for government to regain control over the land. And I realize, yes, there are some areas that I think still should be protected that are so unique. I mean, in addition to the 80 million, to add to those. But let's be reasonable and sensible about that. And we intend to be. And if there is definite reason from an aesthetic and the uniqueness of the land as a standpoint to do that, to add that to the wilderness, fine. But not to go out on the wholesale amounts that they are talking. Because that wasn't the intention. And the private sector has not been guilty of rape of all the natural resources. There is today in the United States as much forest as there was when Washington was at Valley Forge. And the industry itself now, with its sustained yield approach, replanning as it cuts. There was a period once upon a time when there were so few people and this country loomed so big and unexplored that, yes, people used and then moved on. But that isn't true anymore. No, I was just going to say we have time for one more short question, Mr. President. Sorry, I'm answering them too long. Mr. President, many of our mills have their backs against the wall. They actually can't hold out much longer. Could you help to speed up the effort to find a solution to our timber contract problem? Yes, we shall work as fast as we can. I know that some other things. I know that the threat of some subsidized import into America and so forth is being investigated by ITA. And that report is due in July. But I know also that our Commerce Department is looking at some of that and expects to have an answer in May after a thorough investigation. But yes, we want to do everything we can because, as I say, your industry and all that surrounds it, housing and so forth, this can start and this can end a recession, this industry. And it's encouraging that, and the word that was spoken about employees that are back at work, just last October, the unemployment in your industry was just about 22%. It is now down to 14.1%. That's still too high, much too high. But that shows quite a sizable drop from October to the present. And we know that the housing starts are up at a level of about annualized a million seven. So we're going to do everything we can. Our idea is that when I said in my State of the Union address, I know some people cheered the one line, but cheered for the wrong reason. When I said that government has a part to play, yes, it does.  Well, I won't try to top that. Well, Mr. President, we just can't thank you enough for sharing your insight into our forced products industry with us here today. It obviously is a historic day of a memorable occasion for all of us. We will make every effort to build on the spirit of cooperation you have extended to us. We believe we can play a very major role. Visit here in Klamath Falls with our industry here today. We'd like to have you take that home with you. Well, thank you very much. I'd be very proud and happy to have that. Thank you. Well, I guess the time has come to move on. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for your questions.


My next speaker is Jan Verschel, I don't know if you know how to pronounce it in the English way. It's okay. He's coming from the USA, University of Chicago, Illinois. Thank you very much. I would like to thank the organizers for having me here again. So this is a talk on a mathematical application of ADA, of in particular multi-tasking. So I'm the only one in this session with a subtitle and I'm glad that this didn't scare you off. So I'm glad you came. So here's my outline. So the main point of my talk is that ADA works extremely well to define shared memory parallel programs. And the whole point is that you really get to do what you want to do. So there is some mathematics on there. I will try to use the mathematics mainly to indicate how you can tune your application. So computers are getting faster and faster, but that's actually creating a problem for us. Not that we have no things that don't go fast enough, but making computers work efficiently is actually quite the challenge these days. So here is the motivation. So this is the picture. The picture is kind of misleading. What we actually are always looking at are polynomial equations. So we have two polynomials in three unknowns. They define a space curve. So the space curve is this figure eight. So it's kind of bend it. And you are positioned at the top, the point zero zero two. So the point zero zero two satisfies these two equations. You know one point on a curve and you want to continue. You want to see what lies ahead. So you're going to compute power series expansions. The red one is the trivial one. So you think if you only do one term in your exponentiation, you think it's kind of a parabola. But if you take more and more terms in that power series expansion already actually the next one is here already very interesting. You see the crossing point. So this is where interesting things start to happen. And that crossing points as you take more and more terms in your power series actually starts to approximate the real crossing point. Now this is misleading picture. We only see the equations and actually the crossing points is where typically your power series will no longer converge somehow. But here actually they allow you to say something about the behavior of that curve. Now the point of the talk is to compute this efficiently and we run Newton's method all the time. So Newton's method is probably the Newton's method that you have seen in high school. Also with power series curves symbolically as you have to do this by hand, you can actually compute term by term. What you need to do is you need to evaluate polynomials over and over again. And you also need to know all the partial derivatives. So there is then solving a linear system. So these are the three things that you have to do. You have to evaluate, differentiate and solving a linear system. And it converges quadratically. So actually Newton's method is a very promising method. But there are a lot of computational difficulties. So if you do this by hand, you're quickly going to give up once you get past even already for one variable. It might be hard. But our curves, they live in any dimension. So the degree of the curves. So I should have pointed this out previously. So this is a quartic, a curve of degree four. So you have two equations of degree two. If you have three equations and four variables, if there are quadratics, the degree is going to be eight. If you have four variables, five equations, the degree is going to be 16. So you can see that if it starts to get very quickly, every time you increase one of the dimension, your complexity of your problem actually doubles. So with 10 variables, 11 variables, 10 equations, you may have a curve of degree 1000. Now, even if you would fix a, I'm not going to go past 10, then actually you have your power series.  So there's no limit there. We have some power series that converge rapidly. We're lucky. But some power series converge very, very slowly. So we may not know how far we need to go. And that was actually the motivation for this study as well. We want to have something that's running fast and allows us to compute a large, large degrees. And so even if you would say I only compute eight terms, well, then there is the multi-precision arithmetic that you may need. So high degrees, things start to curve. The roundoff starts to creep in. Double precision is unlikely to be sufficient. So these are the three motivations that we have for using parallel computations. And the code was developed on three different platforms. So the laptop that I have here with me is the middle. One's kind of the middle between these other two configurations. So first of all, the obvious point is that you can't have single core processors anymore. All your processors are multi-core. And the other point I would like to make is that while it looks very interesting and appealing to have a workstation like that sitting on your desk, but having it fully, so this is also the workstation that is serving our web server. So perhaps I should have said that right in the beginning. We also actually launch a web server. So this machine is actually hosting the web interface to our software. So it has 44 cores, and I get the best results with 88 threads. But I will restrict to the middle configuration. And here is the ADA code. The ADA code that I have been using already now for a very long time. And that also actually have other people have used. So I saw a recent paper that was published in composite structures of lamination design. So if you want to know where polynomial systems occur in practical applications, if you have to design a robot arm, for example, a robot arm can take possible configurations. So you can already see this with the elbow that I have. You want to reach a certain position and then you want to compute all possible angles of your arm so that you can reach these positions. Now you don't want to twist your elbow. So all the polynomial equations, they express that the lengths of your mechanism, they have to stay fixed. So the methods that I'm using often very well known into mechanical design. And my users, they simply download typically the binary version. And if you have minus t, it uses the multi-threading. And it actually runs this very simple procedure. It launches threats and every task has a unique ID identification number. And that's that genetic procedure. So this is a genetic procedure, the body of genetic procedure. And the argument, the genetic parameter is the procedure job. So job is what I always provide. And I can tell each task specifically what to do based on its identification number. So tasks actually work on job cues. Okay, so if you want to write multi-task encoder, there are two main issues that you have to consider. The first one is memory. So every task has its own stack, but they all share the same heap. So if you start allocating and deallocating, you better do that outside the task routines. So everything that you do on these power series, you have to allocate the auxiliary vectors outside. And pass those pointers to the auxiliary data structures in the arguments of the jobs. So the second thing that you have to worry about is the granularity of your computations. So there should be actually enough parallelism. So typically you have a limited number of tasks, but the tasks actually need sufficiently many jobs to do. Sometimes you need to synchronize. The easiest way to synchronize is just so synchronization means that there is a piece and all the tasks have to wait to a certain point to continue. The easiest way is actually to stop the tasks and then to relaunch them. So that's the way we do the synchronization right now. So these are the two main issues. I actually have three implementations already of my power series library. So you have, first of all, the functional correctness, but then you have to think of it in a whole different way when you think of the shared memory parallel computation. And then of course, there are always other issues. I will point out some other issues. Okay, so now what do we do? We evaluate and differentiate. This is something that I also did only learn when I was doing the parallelism. So you may have seen rules to differentiate or compute all partial derivatives. The cool thing is that if you have a product of n variables, if you do this symbolically, it will be an n square operation. But you can actually do this in a linear time, linear in the number of variables. You can see if you take this simple product of variables here, if you have the stars, so you can compute. So the left here are actually the names of the variables, so the kind of funny names. But at the right you see all the star operations. The point is also the star is not the star of numbers. So we multiply power series with each other. And the coefficients again are typically multi-precision numbers, double, double, quad doubles. So there's a lot of arithmetic overhead here. So you may want to save on the number of multiplications. The bottom line here is that this is kind of the saving step in what makes everything run very well in our parallel computations. There is a straightforward parallelism. So a polynomial, so the name says it itself, there are many, many, many monomials. And you can compute all the monomials independently. So you have a very straightforward parallelism here. So that's the first mathematical idea. The second one is that you can work with a matrix of power series and invert that. That's all very fun. But actually what you should do is you should look at a power series where the coefficients are matrices. And I worked here the simplest example. We are going to solve a linear system. So the matrices are our partial differentials that we have computed. So they are power series again. Now if you linearize it, we arrive at a block triangular system. So even if you, for example, you can invert power series, polynomials, they have no inverse power series. They do. That's kind of the cool thing. And this slide also actually shows this. So you have to compare, if you solve the inverse, so you actually are after the updates in your Newton's method. So you have to invert the matrix A0. And once you invert the matrix A0, you adjust the right-hand side. And here's where the pipelining comes in. So you do the first update, the delta x0, and then you update the right-hand side, the B1 and the B2. And they can happen independently. And this is where your parallelism comes in. So here you can have two tasks working independently in the second step. So here you have a maximal speed up of two, no matter how large your matrices are, if you do this with this very coarse granularity. Now, of course, if the matrices start to get larger, you better use a multitask QR. So we have also played with that. So this is kind of the bottleneck at this point. So at this point, this is still a work in progress. So these are timings that I did yesterday in my hotel room on this laptop. Trying to see what happened, how far I can go with the degrees of the truncated power series. So this was done in double arithmetic. It was done on a ten-dimensional benchmark system. If you're really curious, you can figure out via my websites what the polynomials really look like. So with degree 16, I doubled the number of tasks in each step. So at best I can get close to four. So the polynomial system is actually very, very mild as far as nonlinearities go. You can read these columns from top to bottom, but I also like to read them diagonally. If you go from degree 32 to 64, you kind of double the size. Now, this is not a linear operation, these multiplications of power series. So you almost get a tenfold overhead if you want to do that. Now, if you then use your 16 tasks, this is where you have kind of the speed spot where with 16 tasks, you still get a little bit more of speed up. Now, the time actually then doubles. So from the 2.3, you go to the 5.2 seconds. Yeah, and at that point, so this is ongoing work. For this laptop, the fan starts to get blowing at 64 degrees, and I don't want to exhaust that pure laptop. But on a bigger server, it's actually much more challenging because then also the precision, the double precision starts to deteriorate a little already. So we're still working on getting the precision fixed. But as far as the parallelism goes, it's fairly simple to implement. And you can focus on the mathematical difficulties. And also, whenever you have an application, you can focus on really what matters. And we have five minutes left for questions. Thank you very much. The question is how do we actually get the best speed up at 88? So the processors indeed support hyper-threading. But then I don't get 88. I think the best I get is close to 60 somehow. And this is really for the polynomial evaluation, where every monomial can be devaluated independently. Second question. That's a very good question. How much is used of the vector instructions? That I don't know. Well, I know when I do my linear algebra column-wise, like the Fortran does, then I get better performance. But the performance actually then deteriorates when I use complex numbers. So if I do floating-wise column-column, then the compiler can actually do the vectorization correctly. But I still have to figure out how actually the compiler will figure it out for complex numbers. And then there are also complex double-doubles, complex quad-doubles. So that's then another challenge, yes. Thank you. Thank you. We have a few minutes before you leave. I remind you that all of this room has been organized by this client. So unfortunately he's not here. For those who were not here at the beginning, he broke his right to cover his duty. But he did a terrific job in organizing things and getting the speakers together and getting the room again. And I got the message that he's watching us on the live stream. So please, a big applause for that.


Introduce it! Get your light, because Ryan didn't turn the light on. Introduce it! This is funny. I want a clean matchup. All right? I want a clean matchup. All right? Let's go. The judges will tell you if you did something wrong. Listen to the judges. Dap it up and get in position. Dap it up! Let's go. In position. Kevin Dante do this. Second! Shit, right now. Let's go. So don't give up.  You keep going. You keep going, bro. You keep going. Let's go.  Push it.    Sierra, you push it. Everything you got. You did practice it. Let's go. Let's go.   Just take breaths. Just take breaths. You don't need water. 15! All right. Thank you. You're good today. You're good at contacting them? You're good at calling them? I want people out of the arena. I was going to see the guys next year. We also. Well, Chris is not here. We're waiting for Chris.


So in this webinar, it's called Using Open UK Data Service Since Support Datasets in Open Source GIS Software. As Jill said, my name is James Crone. I work for the UK Data Service Since Support up here in Edinburgh. I'm actually part of ADINA at the Information Services Group, where we provide and support various online services dealing with geospatial data. So what we're going to look at is the range of open data that is available for download for the UK Data Service Center support. I'm also going to look at other sources of open geospatial data that can be combined with UK Data Service Since Support data, and these are from various other organizations like the Ordnance Survey or the Office of National Statistics. And then I'm going to provide a brief introduction to open source GIS software before doing specific demonstrations of using Census Support data in the PostGIS Spatial Database as our data store and using the QGIS desktop GIS application to do some mapping and some better spatial analysis. Particularly, we're going to take, we're going to create chloroplast maps, cartograms and flow maps using QGIS. And I'm just going to give you a bit of background about the UK Data Service Since Support. We're part of the main UK Data Service. With InSense Support, we provide access to and use support for data from the last five UK population census. Our decennial census from 1971 to 2011 across the whole of the UK. The majority of the data brought by the UK Data Service Since Support is available as open data. Whereas in the past, some of the data was only used for strict academics, now most of it is open data. As well as the core census data, we also provide various other non-census data sets, which can help when you're doing analysis on the census data to get extra context to that data. If you've not been to our website, there's a link on the bottom here, which you can look at later on. So what is open data? Some brief descriptions. Basically, it's any data that anyone can use access and share. It should ideally be providing a sort of a common machine-readable format. And what's special open data is it must be licensed, so it's good to help people who can use that data and then remix it and then combine it with their own stuff. That's just a definition of the European Data Portal. Do a Google search for the European Data Portal. You can find information about them. Within the UK Data Service Since Support, all our open data is provided under the Open Government License, which is a UK thing for open license or open data. As part of the UK OGL, it's called the OGL. Whenever you re-use the data, you should also acknowledge the source of the data, and it's possible to provide a link to the OGL. In terms of the types of census data that are provided for the UK Data Service Since Support, it breaks down into four key data types. There's the aggregate census area statistics data, and this is the tables, so this is the core census data from 1971 through to 2011. And there's lots of lots of variables and lots of combinations of data you can get about individuals that was covered during the census days. There's the census interaction data, which is flows between places. So that's like, it could be commuter flows. So where do people live and where do they work? As well as migration stuff. There's census micro data, which is detailed on long-gauge information about people. And as well as that, we have supporting data sets. This includes boundary data sets and geographic lookup tables. So these allow people to map the census data and to create maps and spatial analysis, and also to use geography as a way of linking that census data to other data sets. If most people use the UK Data Service Since Support, they may have seen the Infuse and Casuab applications. These are the UK Data Service Since Support applications that allow people to download the aggregate data. Infuse will allow you to download the 2001-2011 data across the UK. And the people living in UK Data Service Since Support done a lot of work on Infuse. So it allows you to download data from across the UK and they've done a lot of work to harmonize it. Data from England, Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland. So in some respects, the Infuse thing is quite unique and powerful. To get the earlier data from 1991 to 71, you have to use the earlier incarnation of the application called Casuab. There's also to access the flow data. This is a separate application called Wicked. And that will allow you to download flow data. Again, that's the information pure migration that's been captured as part of the census. We also have Boundary Download Applications, which will allow you to download this supporting data. So here we have the Boundary Data Selector application. And we'll allow you to download Census Boundaries, which you can use to map some of our Census data sets. We also have an Easy Download Application, which just provides the pre-canned version of the boundaries. With less control, you can't specify which geographic area you want.  Again, in Infuse and the Boundary Data Selector, most of the data that is sensitive to this is all OGL. With Wicked, some of the data is OGL, but others are more restricted, depending on the level of geography in terms of the migrations. Some other sources of data that you can use from other organizations is the Office of National Statistics Open Geography Portal. They allow you to download Boundaries, as well as Postcode Directories. I think the emphasis on the ONS is to write access to contemporary data sets. So you can see here, for example, you can get data for 2017 of clinical commissioning groups. That's the Health Geography, which you might be able to use as context on information for our Census data. The thing to watch for the Open Geography Portal is it has less support for older Census Boundaries, such as the 71 and 81. So in that case, you're still better off getting that data from the UK Data Service since support. Another great source of open data is the Ordinance Survey itself. The Ordinance Survey is Britain's National Mapping Agency, and they have an Open Data Initiative, where you can access a whole variety of geospatial data sets, including backdrop mapping, postcode boundaries, gazetteers. They also have, like, three versions of some of their high quality data sets, which are really useful to provide background context to the Census data. It's going to give a background to GIS. So GIS stands for Geographic Information System, and it's basically a way of... it's an information system for modelling the real world. It tends to come to two distinct views of GIS. There's a vector GIS, and there's a raster GIS. Vector GIS consists of the real world in modelling in terms of points, lines and polygons, and raster. It's like a... it's a regular grid. You can imagine it could be an aerial photograph, or a digital terrain model, and there's different ways of storing the geographic data, and then you can run digital types of analysis on them, manipulation. Typically, a GIS may end up as a desktop application, which allows you to store that GIS data to manipulate it. So, for example, you could capture our lines and polygons to do some sort of create maps from that data, or do some sort of analysis. This is the cutest application that we'll be using today to use some of our Census data.  There's a lot of different technologies, so we're just going to show some of them. Specifically, if you want to look at how Census data is stored within a GIS, here's a typical aggregate data of the top left here. So we have these things called geographic identifiers. These uniquely identify each of the small area geographies, which could be an output area, which the Census statistics we produced for. Here we have a bunch of... we have three different Census variables. We have total population and male and female, and that just tells us the number of people that are males or females within that small area. And then we can also get the digital boundaries. These are the digital boundaries that represent the actual Census open areas on the ground. And by time relating the Census statistics to the boundaries, we can create maps and do spatial analysis, as well as using the power of geography to link in other geographic datasets. Let's say location brings context, so we're linking the stats to the boundaries in geography. These geographies are common key to bringing other datasets. In the GIS world, you tend to come up with a lot of common dataset formats, like the shapefile and CSV files to store the attributes. So what is open GIS software? Well, if we first look at what is open source software itself, it's computer software, made available with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. And it's often developed in a public collaborative manner. This is in contrast to sort of non-open source software, which may a commercial company may develop, in which they do all the bug fixing and testing internally and don't allow others to the community to feed into that development. So open source GIS software is just a special flavor of open source software targeted towards the migration of geographic information and data. Within the OS, within the open source GIS community, one of the major is an organization called the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, the OSQ, which is a non-proper organization whose mission is to support the collaborative development of open source geospatial software and promote its widespread use. So they have like a number of, they're like a banner organization, and there's a number of like different software applications that sit within them and they provide support and look after the development of these applications. They also run a very good conference every year, which tends to move around the world. And they have like local chapters and so for example there's a UK chapter which has its own conference stuff. And again, if you're just getting started with open source GIS software, their website is a great place to start. So there are different types of open source GIS software and these are aimed at different types of user or application. So from the top to the bottom, there are the core geospatial libraries. These are what developers would use to write other types of software and to add new features to those software. There are the desktop applications such as QGIS, which allow end users to manipulate GIS data and create maps. There are web mapping software which allows people to do online mapping of the data and then these two at the bottom are more related to the actual management of the data itself. So there's metadata catalogs that metadata is data about data. So it's how you describe that data and how you make it discoverable by other people. And again, there are GIS open source applications which are helped with that sort of stuff. Today, we're going to look at two main open source GIS software applications. We're going to look at using PostGIS as a spatial database in which to store some of our census data and then we're going to use QGIS to connect to PostGIS and do some mapping and some great various types of visualizations of our census data. So just to start off with PostGIS, let's say to get started with what PostGIS is itself. So PostGIS adds GIS functionality and data types to the PostGIS QL database. So PostGIS itself is like a type of database. It's an open source database but it comes with sort of like supports for geometries but it doesn't have this two GIS functionality as part of it. So the idea is you have PostGIS on top of PostGIS and then you get like the full ability to store GIS data in PostGIS and you can also do all your GIS data processing analysis using spatial SQL so you can write SQL to query that spatial data in PostGIS, PostGIS and then you can have other applications that talk to your PostGIS database in order to access your GIS data. And that says PostGIS is part of USTO umbrella of software. So in terms of how you go around getting PostGIS, the prerequisite is a PostGIS installation. You can install PostGIS and PostGIS on a number of software platforms including Windows, Max, and Linux, etc. And Windows is actually pretty easy to install. PostGIS itself comes with these X-Tools. You can just run to install PostGIS database on your Windows desktop and then there's a thing called the stack builder which allows you to install additional parts to PostGIS such as PostGIS on top of that PostGIS database. So it's actually fairly simple to get straight forward to install a PostGIS on your Windows machine. I think for Linux you can make it as difficult as you want to depending on how you want to install it. And again, for Max, there are different options. So I've got a PostGIS installed on this Windows laptop which we'll be using for, of course, the webinar and the demonstrations. So in the first demonstration I'm going to do, I'm just going to load a shapefile of boundaries into PostGIS. From set to support I've downloaded some Scottish Council areas and what I'm going to do is load them into a PostGIS special database that we have access to. And I said there are lots of different methods of doing this. I'm just going to look at one method which is a nice easy way of doing this. And then once we've done that we'll see how the data is stored around PostGIS. So let me just drop out the presentation here. Let me first just open a PostGIS itself called the administrative tool that lets you admin on PostGIS databases. So basically there's a bunch of different types of databases I have on this machine. I've already set up a database called James because my name is James. And within this I create very schemas. Schema are just a way of partitioning the data in the database. And then when you can see it, we know the table is loaded. So let's just load some data. So I'm looking for my PostGIS tools. So when you install PostGIS on Windows, it gives you this. It gives you a PostGIS importer and export manager tool which will allow you to upload shapefiles into your PostGIS database. This is what this tool is. You can do this in Linux or I think on Macs. You don't get this nice GUI tool. You get command line tools which should do this similar sort of thing. The first thing I have to do is tell the tool where my database is. So let me just do that now. Okay. There's two tabs here. So there's an import tab and an export tab. I won't use the import tab because I want to import the shapefile. So I'll just navigate to my data. So I've got my desktop. And I've got two shapefiles here. The one I want is this Scottish one here. So I know how to set two options. I first need to tell the SRID as a spatial reference identifier. And that just tells the PostGIS what type of the spatial reference system is it British National Grid or is it Data for America or Australia? It just tells the spatial reference of that data. So I know this is British National Grid and this uses like a code of 270. I have to tell which scheme I want to put the data into. So that's like the partition in the database where the data is to be stored. So I'll add the UQDS one cell. So that's what I want to use. I've confirmed that and that's all I need to do. I could add multiple shapefiles here by doing this and having them queued up. I'm just going to add one. And I just run this import statement. And you can see it very quickly. It's done something. If I go back to the PG admin and do a refresh. You can see that it's now loaded the data as a new table. If you look at the table, you can see how the table is being created. You can see we've got various columns here. We've got an identifier column. We've got a GUID column. That's like the presentation. That's the unique ID for the geographic area, which tells us how we can relate and send the stats to it. The name is a place name of that geographic area. But importantly, we have this geometry column. And that's the GIS part. That's the geometry, the polygon extent of that area or in the state of the county area. And it's through that that we can map the data under spatial analysis. The import has also added an index to our data. And that just means that the features on that table can be accessed quickly. Just check. So that's great. We can actually, because it's a database, we can query the table just as you would any other sort of data set at any other database. So the PGM tool comes with a GUI that allows you to type in SQL queries and stuff to use that access system or something. But what we can do is we can post just provides all these special functions that allows to manipulate the spatial data itself. I can just do an order or something. So if I run that, you can see it pulls back results from the table. So again, you can see I've got the GUI identifier. So I need to identify each record. It tells you where it is. And because I've run this function called STS text, it's worked out this from the geometry, the centroid point of that polygon. So you can see we want to use just purely using PostGIS to do GIS type functionality on our data. We could have done this in a GIS application like QGIS or ArcGIS. But it's really nice to just get your data purely from SQL by running queries. So that's really nice feature. So I just go back to this presentation. So the next thing is like, how do we actually then view our data from PostGIS? And to do this, we can use the QGIS desktop GIS application. So again, like PostGIS, it's really easy to install QGIS. It comes with executables that just allow to... It's quite hefty downloads. I think it's like 300 megabytes on Windows.  And then you get this really cool, nifty desktop GIS application. I've already pre-installed it. So I just fire up QGIS now. So let's wait for QGIS to open. There you go. So I've got version 2.18. QGIS is quite actively developed. So you might find the version number increases quite rapidly. I think the next major release will be QGIS version 3, which will be really quite nice in terms of what it does. Okay, so it opens QGIS. So there's various menus on the top. I've got the main map window here and some various panels on the side. But we just want to add some data from our PostGIS database to QGIS. So we have different types of data we can add from the left here. And for PostGIS, PostGIS, we have the big elephant symbol. So I just need to tell QGIS where my PostGIS data is. So I've already set up a connection here. I'll just edit that. So this just tells QGIS where my data is. It's okay. I'll just connect. Give it my password. Okay. And I just simply pick my table, which I've added to QGIS using that tool. And there we go. There's our PostGIS data within QGIS. And I can just select. I can click on the various features of the boundaries. I can see the properties. Or I can see the entire table. I can open the actual table. So that's great. We can have our data stored in PostGIS. And we can access it from QGIS. So one of the common tasks within GIS, and especially using census data, is the amount of your boundaries. And then you might have aggregate data in a CSV table. And you want to be able to join them so you can do some sort of, so you can map the census data by geography. And this is a task of joining data. You basically have like that. You have a unique identifier and a CSV data. You have the same unique identifier. You simply want to join the two tables. So we can do that in QGIS quite easily, which I'll just show. Basically, you go to properties of the layer. Let's first add the CSV file. So I first have to add a CSV file of my census stats. Again, use a QGIS dialog here. I have to pick no jump rate, because the stats don't contain a junction column. If I open the attribute table, you can see all the census stats. You can see this geographic identifier, which uniquely identifies each row. Again, you've got name and you've got various stats from left to right. So here we've got population 11. I think this is like a data do of housing and stuff. So we have like a number of people who rented local authorities, who rented from a local authority, from a housing authority, from a private one-lord and stuff, or over-occupiers and stuff. And we simply want to join those stats to the boundaries. So we go to the properties of the boundaries. There's a join area here. And we simply want to add a new join. So we select the data you want to join to the polygons, which was our CSV of census stats. This one here. And we just have to tell QGIS in which columns contain those same geographic identifiers. Okay. And we just apply that. You okay that? And now, if you do that, we can see that the stats have now been joined to the polygons. Now, you could also, because this data is in PostGIS, you could load your CSV directly to PostGIS and just do it in Postgres itself. But some people find it easier just using the GUI and QGIS to do this. So there's just different ways of doing the same thing. So that's great. We've joined our stats to our boundaries. And now we maybe want to look at doing some actual visualization. So the first thing you do visualization non-geographically, you could create bar charts and stuff, or pie charts, or pictograms almost. But because we've got the data geographically, you want to do some sort of spatial mapping. So such as a quarter-plot map. Here's an example here for London. I think this shows the percentage of people working more than 14 hours per week in London as a part of the UK 2011 census. And this is being the city of London. You can see that the highest percentage is in the city of London. That's all the bankers and stuff. Working at long hours, or is it in central London as you get towards the suburbs, people are working fewer hours. But before we do this, we're going to do some sort of mapping fundamentals. The first thing to look at is actually how we classify data. So we have like a range of data variables. And the classification part is simply simplifying that range of data into categories in order to allow us to recognize patterns in that data.  And we just want to simplify that data into five classes. So here my class, I have a class from 3 to 20, 21 to 38, 39 to 56, 57 to 74, and 75 plus. So we've simplified the range of data into five classes. And obviously by choosing a different number of data classes and how we allocate the intermediate to those classes, we'll produce different sort of maps. The other thing is styling data. So again, here are our five categories. And then we just choose the sort of colors to apply to those categories or to map them. And again, we have all kinds of choice here. We can have like a linear. We go from light to black. So small data values have a light value, margins have a darker value. And there are various choices here. This color viewer tool is really nice to try and pick the ultimate color style to apply to your data. I think QGIS as it has plugins will allow you to use color viewer. So that's something to look for. So where are you going to do it? Create a color path map using QGIS. So again, the color path map shade area is place to go variables. So again, from QGIS, you just use the properties of the layer. We go to style and let's go. We want to go to the graduated option. And when you pick the sort of variable we want to map, let's use diff, which I think is the difference in mortgages between 2001 and 2011. So I just classify that. And I just apply it. And there we have our color path map. And this being QGIS, I'm going to adjust mapping application. You can actually create a print hard copy of this. So it's got a print composer in QGIS. So it basically allows you to lay out how you want to sort of map your final maps in here, which you might want to include in a report or something. So let's just change the portrait, add a new map. So you can see it dumps the view from our main QGIS window into this layout. And you can play around with this a bit. You can do things like QGIS. So you re-center that. And we can add some map essentials like a key and a north arrow and a skill bar, et cetera. So we just drag this on. So there's a skill bar. We also need a key so that we can tell what the various colors mean. The color legend here. Give them up a title. So we just drag on a text box. So tweak the font and stuff. And because this is like our center database under the open government license, we have to write an attribution statement that indicates where the data came from. So when you download data from the UK Data Service, it will always come to our terms and conditions document. And that will tell you the attribution statement you have to use. So here it is. And from the boundary data selector, it's called terms and conditions.html. So I just open that with Firefox. You can see you've got this attribution statement here. And I'll just copy into QGIS. So let's add some more text. That's another text box. Please increase the size of that. So it's a bit legible. You can stick that in the bottom. So it's not massively exciting. But again, we've just done that. It was a PDF or something. So let's see. It's created something. So great. That's our map. But again, we can dump it into a report. We're writing something. So collaborative maps are one way of visualizing data. Another way of visualizing census data is a thing called a cartogram. And the cartogram, instead of the, we're just shading the areas by the variable, we actually manipulate the areas themselves according to that variable. So there are two types of cartogram. There's a distance cartogram and an area cartogram. A distance cartogram is a classic example. A distance cartogram is the tube map in which the distance between the stations is not a journey distance. It's actually the time between those stations so that bonds between the mobile apps are relatively short or far from each other but it's much further apart. But it doesn't represent true geographic distance. With an area cartogram, we simply distort the actual geometries according to the variable being shown.  But we still maintain the relationship between the areas. So we still see that Texas is near precisely Louisiana and Washington, Oregon and California still sit between each other. And cartograms are quite heavily used for socio-economic data. They feature quite heavily in the media publication of data related to the last EU referendum. So as a guardian, we created these cartograms showing the result. And they were widely used for census data as well. So there's a great book called People and Places by Danny Dolling and Beth and Thomas, which uses cartograms extensively to show census stats for the 2011 census. And it's really quite a different way of viewing the data. Unfortunately, QGIS comes with a plugin which will allow you to create these sort of cartograms for the census data. So we're just going to look at doing that now because that's a different way of viewing the data than a chlorophyll map. We're basically going to create this sort of thing on the right here using our QGIS plugin. And then you can sort of compare it with your chlorophyll map. You can see the problem with the chlorophyll map is like the areas of large population like Edinburgh and Glasgow swamps by the bigger areas. With the cartogram, they will grow and it's a lot easier to see where the major areas are so these white bits here. It does distort the geography quite a lot but it still maintains relationships between neighboring areas. So it's still quite a nice way of viewing the data. So we'll just look at how we do that in QGIS. I'm going to use the same dataset and what I'm going to do is I'm going to save it to PostGIS so I can use it in this plugin. So to do that is a feature in QGIS called the DV manager. And that will allow us to save our data that would join two posters. I can do this. I have to tell you what data to save. I'm going to call this Scotland Web Stats and what I can do is I just grid it these because I'm done with that. I'll just re-add that PostGIS data. It's this new one here. I've not lost any data on it. You can see we've got our stats downloaded before. This is quite a powerful feature of QGIS is that it comes as well as the standard functionality that you get when you download it. There's also a range of additional like they call them plugins which are additional community developed functionality that individual people have created and extend the functionality of QGIS. So it makes it really quite powerful. One of the ones we're going to use is a cartogram one. So to install the plugins you've got this plugin to manually install and it tells you all the plugins you've installed. You can see I've already installed this cartogram one. It has to connect to some external website so sometimes it can be quite slow. It's thinking about it and you click on the links it'll just tell you various things about the cartogram. So this is the sort of thing where I create using this plugin. That's great. I've already installed it so to access it and to go to the vector and when you install the plugin it adds different menus and stuff so I'm going to create a cartogram and I'm going to use the same variable as before which I think is a def m thing and then you can sit there and create our cartogram and it may finish at some point. Can you look? Yep, that's finished. So here's our cartogram. Again we can style it up and see what's going on. So yep, there's our styled cartogram and it's just an alternative way of viewing the data. Some people don't like cartograms I think they're a nice way of viewing the data. In the final bit of demonstration we're going to look at creating flow maps. So I said at the beginning of the presentation the Wicked UK Data Service Sensor support application will allow you to download flow data and that stuff will migration and stuff. And we're just going to use that. Get another QGIS plugin that allows to create flow maps from this data. So a flow map you can see here that this is showing the migration queue from leads to the in terms of where they work. So they'll be living leads and they work on these other local authorities and you can see that most people which work in and on leads will migrate to Bradford to work or Wakefield or as Les would say migrate to York. These are quite a nice way of just exploring the flow data. But I'm going to use some different sense of data for this. I go back to QGIS and I'm just going to get rid of these two data sets. And because we're running in quite short time I'm just going to add these as a shape file and a CSV file. So back to my desktop. So these are the boundaries. These are English and Welsh Census Merge Local Authorities. And I'm just going to add a CSV file of the actual flow data because this one again is if I open up the flow data you can see we've got an origin and a destination on the flow so that just tells us that 16,000 people in terms of where they work and where they live they live in this local authority and they work in this local authority and all you want to do is try and visualize this on this data set by creating a flow map. So again I'm going to use a plugin to do that. So I'm just going to open the plugins again and QGIS is thinking about it again. So I'm using this plugin called RSins which I think is French for snail or something. But again you look at the home page it gives you the developer documentation. It's all in French but you can basically tell what it's doing it's creating these flow maps and there's an origin and destination of flux. So that's the sort of thing you want to create. Again I've got it installed again so I can just go to flow maps and I just have to tear up the origin destination of the data I want to map. So if I do this now you can see it's created some flows for leads and because I've not mapped I don't have full data for the entire country. I just want to isolate the local authorities that we do have data for. So to do that I'm going to do some spatial analysis and just simply to select all the polygons which intersect with the flow lines. So analysis spatial query that's the one we want. So we just want to get queues to select all of the local authority districts which intersect with the flow lines and create a new selection. So you can see that it's done that. I'm just going to create a new layer and that did work. I just have didn't try that again. That's worked this time. So there we have our smaller selects in our local authorities and again I can just I can tweak the properties of this data to make things nicer so I can do things like I can show the labels of the features. So that's great, that's our flow map the majority in the leads who don't live and work and leads are migrating for work to Bradford and then to Wakefield and then far fewer are migrating for work to Doncaster, York or Harrogate. So that's just one way that you can create a visualization in QGIS of the full data.


Welcome to Inside Hawaii Real Estate. I'm Goh Tanaka. Happy New Year. It's 2023. I'm Leonie Lam, and we are so honored to be your co-host for Inside Hawaii Real Estate. My co-host, Will, is a full-time Hawaii Real Estate professional and a licensed attorney. And Leonie and I actually worked together as a husband and wife real estate sales team. Leonie is actually a Hawaii Real Estate broker and a 20-year industry veteran. Will and I have actually spent our careers as executives in most areas of Hawaii's real estate industry, and now we help clients at the front lines with buying and selling their homes. The goal of our show Inside Hawaii Real Estate is for us to provide education by going inside Hawaii Real Estate, literally. We're sharing knowledge from our guest experts to provide different resources and perspectives about everything in Hawaii Real Estate. And well, today we have a very special guest who's going to share about the organization she runs and the community she's involved in. Lailan Bento is a co-founder and principal broker of Hawaii Development Group. She's actually one of the leaders in the real estate industry on the big island, the Hawaii Island. And if you actually Google her name, she has amazing reviews as a realtor. At the same time, she's a very generous and giving person. I mean, she's very giving to a community. And she's actually the founder of the foundation and her mission is to help Native Hawaiian children of all financial classes with educational assistance. And she wants kids from Hawaii to dream big, just big time and not be limited by their family financial circumstances. So all right, let's get into it. Welcome, Lailan. Welcome, Lailan. Thank you, Will and Leone for having me on this amazing show. I'm excited to join you folks today just to touch on some topics here on the big island. What real estate is like selling on this island? Thank you so much. And, you know, as we're going to jump into this, right, there's a super hot topic on the big island, literally hot. It's a volcano, Kilauea volcano that's erupting or began erupting again just January 5th, I think. Is that right? Exactly. Yes. Yeah, go ahead. We started with Mauna Loa erupting, right? And then there was a thunderstorm and Mauna Kea was snowing and Mauna Loa was erupting and now Kilauea is back to erupting. So they're all taking turns, I would say. So literally hot topic, which actually leads me to this thing I learned about just recently, which is lava zones. And there's nine of them. What are lava zones and where are they? So on the big island, every district is a different lava zone, as you can see here on the map. And what you really want to look at when looking at real estate on the big island is if you're in lava zone one or two, it can really affect what bank is going to be able to finance your mortgage. And also, if there are any home insurance companies, for many, many years, the Lloyds of London used to be the main home insurance in those areas. And a couple of years ago when Kilauea erupted and took out hundreds of homes, they kind of pulled out of the area of now giving home insurance in those lava zones. That's just one thing to look at when you are buying real estate here on the big island is what lava zone is it and if it's in one or two, what banks land, what insurance companies also insuring those areas. Oh, interesting. So, you know, some of my friends that I might get calls once in a while, hey, I want to buy this one acre lot for only $20,000. On the big island on the east side, most likely lava zone one or two. Is that usually the case? Absolutely. I get those same calls, you know, and I quickly look into MLS and it's definitely in lava zone one and pretty much right on the volcano selling, you know, those lots of that price. So, again, if it's really, really cheap, there's usually a reason and it's probably starting off with being in a lava zone on the big island. So for the most part, for those types of properties, you can't even get insurance. So, so the prospective buyers, they're just taking a big risk that they're buying it for cheap, but they could just lose it entirely. Right. And then also the resale value, right? Because over the years, it's, you know, there used to be a handful of insurance companies and now there's maybe one or two. Also, the state had to step in the state's offering insurance as well in certain areas, but anyone that had, you know, property in those areas or has properties sometimes, you know, with the volcanoes all erupting now, right? They, to resell, it's definitely going to change, right? It's not too much of a valuable property if it's, you know, depends on what area it's in, if it's really right by the volcano, right? So would you just say for most buyers who kind of are interested in, you know, just spending $20,000, $30,000, would it just be too risky, you know, from your opinion or? I would think so. For many years, the volcano was just, you know, especially killer with steadily just erupting. And so before, I think it was more valuable if you did buy property in those areas because you could quickly resell them, right? But now that, you know, all the volcanoes between Manila and Kilauea are erupting, it's kind of making these, you know, insurance carriers and banks, right? Kind of pull back from lending and insuring in those areas. So that's why lava zones are so important to kind of be mindful of and be aware that they are there. And where are these lava zones? Right. On the Big Island, they are either in more of the South Kona area. So maybe Ocean View, as you can see, any place that is red and red on that map, those are the areas that you do really want to pay attention to. So on the east side of the island and then also on the southern end of the island as well. Those are the main lava zone one and two that you do want to look at. Yeah. Super, super good to know. Thank you for sharing that with us and educating us. You're welcome.  You were born and raised on the Big Island, is that right? Yes, yeah. Yeah, I grew up in Kona, so North Kona area. But yes, born and raised here on the Big Island, seen this island change and, you know, in a good way, right? It's growing just like the rest of the state is right now. So yeah. Right. And so you know the neighborhoods in the Big Island pretty well. It's from what I understand. And so would you be able to kind of share with us? Like if someone was thinking about, you know, investing or moving to the Big Island, can you walk us through maybe some of the neighborhoods that they might consider? Sure. So on our island, we have almost all of the world climates in every district is vastly different, right? So one area could be, you know, rains a little bit more. You know, the east side of the island rains a little bit more, almost similar to Kaneohe, right? And then on the west side of the island, it's sunnier, right? Weather. So west Hawaii has, you know, more sunny days. You know, it's a little bit drier compared to the east side of the island. It rains a little bit more on that side. I can tell just driving around the island, just the different towns, you know, some towns are rural and some, you know, you'll see more farms and ranches. And then, you know, North Kona, you'll have all the big box stores, right? For the island and our main hospital too is on this side of the island. So did you want to maybe touch upon the west side? We can go ahead and jump into that.  But I think I heard that coffee farms in South Kona, one of my favorite parts of the island. Is that right? Yes. So Kona is known, of course, worldwide, right, for our coffee. And also what's taking off is, I don't know if you ever tried it, is Kauu Coffee. Now, in the district, southern district of the island in the Kauu area, they're growing more coffee farms now. Also trying to put that on the map, you know, compete with Kona coffee. Yeah. Okay, let's talk about South Kona. Let's start with that. So South Kona is more of a rural area, more farms, you know, black sand beaches, green sand beach down there. If you're looking for more acreage, then you would definitely want to look in the South Kona area or if you're into farming or just, you know, not being close by your neighbors, you would definitely consider South Kona area. How about North Kona, where you grew up? North Kona has grown quite a bit, you know, when I was a kid, we had one stoplight. And interesting, we had three homeless and we knew them by names, you know, and you would walk through the whole town. Just as little groups of little kids, all your friends right through the town, it was that small. It was a coffee farm, coffee farming town and a fishing, a small little fishing village, right? And now Kona has just changed.  So it's grown quite a bit over the years of, you know, a few more stoplights, not like Kona Lulu or anything, but it's growing. And so North Kona. Costco is clutch, like we have to buy without Costco. We have, I don't even already know how many on our events. And it's like, that is where we are at, like almost every single week. Absolutely. And you know, when Costco was built, they definitely had a vision because when they built the Costco in Kona, it was actually the largest in the state at that time, which is interesting because the town was still small, right? And they must have, you know, foreseen some kind of a growth that was going to happen on this side of the island, which it definitely has. So would you say that the North Kona district is more of the main, not to take away from the other districts, but is that considered the main district on the west side? Yes, absolutely. And you know, housing is more expensive on that side of the island in Kona. You have more of the higher end homes, you know, the traditional upscale neighborhoods that are gated. So Kona definitely, you know, a lot of the workforce is on this side of the island, right, as far as higher paying jobs. And so of course, the cost of living is a little bit more higher in the North Kona area compared to, you know, maybe the Puna district, right, which would be on the east side of the island. And you know, when a lot of our friends visit the big island, including us, we stay in the Waikaloa area. Yeah. So that's more of a resort town, short term rentals. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Yes. So the resort area, you have a couple of resort areas, you have, you know, Mauna Kaia, and then you have Waikaloa Beach Resort, Mauna Lani Resort Area. And so a lot of the main hotels are in this area. We have really good restaurants. You know, we have a lot more amenities, right? We have nice beaches, white sand beaches out here. And it is definitely a resort area where you're able to, you know, you'll have a combination of short term vacation rentals and then there's also full time residents here too. And that has significantly changed in COVID. The neighbors are vacation renting their places and they actually moved here full time, which is nice because then you get to know, you know, everybody else that lives in your neighborhood too, right? Instead of just all the vacation renters. And you have mentioned affordable housing. So that's a huge issue across all islands. Absolutely. I believe I think our island is 15,000 homes short right now with a population of a little less than 200,000 on the island. We definitely need to build more homes. Otherwise, you're just going to continue to see, right?  It's multi-generational living in the same household just because there's not enough housing. But with our new administration, you are starting to see a lot of these affordable housing developments come through. They're finally, you know, getting dusted off and going in front of the county council to really push them forward with the housing crisis that, of course, our island has and statewide, right? We just have a lack of housing, so we just need to have more housing but affordable housing for people to be able to afford, right? That middle class definitely needs more housing. So hopefully, yeah. So on the big island, so on Oahu, a lot of times when they say affordable housing, they have, you know, market price units and then they combine it with, you know, a percentage of affordable homes. Is it the same case on the big island or do you have four units of affordable housing on the big island? So right now, we're seeing a combination of, they're actually affordable rentals and then there's also affordable housing to sell is what we're seeing more of. So what that does is if a family can't afford to buy yet, they're able to at least rent. And those rates, but people don't realize they're set actually from the state. And so they think the developer, you know, affordable housing at 600,000, but it's actually set by the state. The state sets those rates on a developer and then, you know, we'll give a developer tax credit to try to help them, right? And, you know, at least trying to build it where they're able to still offer, you know, with the, you know, for them to be able to build it, but then for family to afford it, right? So it has to make sense for a developer, right? So that's why they try to give tax credits and, you know, have the developer turn around and still be able to sell it at their affordable rate. Yeah. And then there's one area, I think, on the Big Island called Waimea. Yeah. And, you know, that actually someday in the future, I wish that I could have like an investment property in Waimea. I just love that town and that area. Could you maybe get into that a little bit about what is Waimea like? So Waimea for many years, we have, you know, Parker Ranch is there. So it used to be one of the largest ranches right in the country and they kind of, you know, split it off and sold to developers and shopping centers. And so Waimea is still a small town. You have some of our best private schools are in that district. So if you're looking for great private schools, it would be in the Waimea district. And then also those properties up there, you have, you know, again, more acreage or if you're in wanting to, you know, have a ranch, that would be definitely the district. And they also have some really great restaurants. In fact, Maryman's started there. That was their first restaurant in Waimea. And when you say they have the top schools there, they have the top school in the state there for private schools. Is that right? They have Hawaii Preparatory Academy in that area, yes. And then they have Parker School also in that district. So great schools, they have a great school district in that, that small town. And then kind of going back to Waikoloa area, you know, resort communities and everything like that. What is it like in terms of short term rentals on the Big Island? First, in the resort areas, they do fantastic as far as occupancy, the rates that they do get. You know, some of the hotels, it's actually cheaper to afford, for a family, I would say, to be able to afford a vacation rental.  Sometimes they're a thousand, eleven hundred dollars a night. And so if you have a family, it's still cheaper, right? And you have a kitchen to do, to actually rent a vacation rental. So they do very well in this area with occupancy. I heard it's probably about at least 80% of the time. And so that's really great for an owner, right? Because that covers all their expenses or mortgage or HOA fees. No, being able to do that. Right, right. On the Big Island, there's a hosted short term vacation rental and an unhosted vacation rental. Can you, you know, dig deeper into what the difference is? Because on the Oahu, we don't have that. Hosted versus unhosted. Right. And I believe our county, when they first passed, it was actually Bill 108 a couple of years ago. And what that was was if you, you know, were a rental, a vacation rental, they grandfathered those people in at the time. They did have to get, you know, a special permit. And so our county, we were a little bit more lenient where if you were in the short term vacation rental area, you just apply for a permit. And then if you were a hosted vacation rental, so that would be either a caretaker lives in the property full time or the homeowner lives on the property full time. They were able to still vacation rent as long as, you know, the subdivision rules allowed it. Right. So right now, currently you're able to still do hosted rentals and you don't have to apply for a permit with the county or anything. And so what's changing is going through our county council right now is they're wanting to have all the hosted vacation rentals apply for a permit so that our county will be able to know all of the rentals. Right on the property on the island instead of just knowing, you know, the short term vacation rentals that had to apply for a permit. So it's a little bit changing up so I'm curious to see how that's going to affect real estate here. You know, will it drive all of those investors to only the resort areas right because sometimes that might just force them into having to buy where you're, you know, legally allowed right to vacation rent. So it's, we're all watching it closely as realtors here on the big island just to see what's going to happen. Absolutely. At Oahu, short term is considered anything 30 days or less, but earlier last year, the mayor tried to pass a new law saying short term rentals is anywhere 90 days or under 90 days. But there was a class action lawsuit. There was a pretty preliminary injunction that blocked it. So right now it is set a standstill between, you know, 30 to 90 days, but on Oahu it's not 30 days or less is considered short term rentals on the big is that the same case. It is the same case, but we are loud. I know your island doesn't allow hosted vacation rentals right but our island actually currently does. And so I have this discussion with any new buyers going forward. You know, if they're looking at maybe a potential hosted rental just to let them know, okay, if you're going to, if you're buying it to do this, then you know, maybe down the line you might not be able to. I'm not sure just how, you know, this is all going to pan out, which is interesting. So any investors who's, you know, looking at our show right now, if it's unhosted, you have to get a permit, meaning that there's no caretaker, the owner does not live here or live on on that property. It has to be. Yes, yeah. And how long is a permit process. Right now, I believe the county right now is saying 90 days. So it's a couple of months for them to give the permit and knowing their application, which is going to be interesting for the hosted rentals. They, you know, they need their things like their blueprints, they're going to need everything to be permitted. And so if you have a hosted rental and something's not permitted, I don't know, you know, if the county will actually grant you that hosted vacation rental permit, if this does go forward. So I'm kind of, it's interesting to see what they're going to actually be asking the applicants right on a hosted rental permit. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And those for those applications for at least the unhosted is a pretty easy process. Is it just a rubber stamp or is it, you know, some stringent requirements from the city and county. There are some stringent rules in there of what the applicant has to do.    And there are at the time when that bill did pass there are a couple of companies here that actually assist people with that packet of applying it correctly to the county so that it doesn't keep getting kicked back to them, which is great. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think this is great. I mean, in terms of, you know, there's always a balance right because you have people who want to come to Hawaii move to the big island. And at the same time, we have to take care of our local families, affordable house. So there's always going to be that balancing factor. Right, right.  And they just want to rent out maybe their Ohana, right? That helps them pay their bills. And so it's really, you know, not people making, you know, there's not a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, right? It's just people, middle class really covering their expenses is what I've come across in selling, you know, those hosted rentals. And just kind of shifting gears. So like we talked about Waikulua and then there's this place called monolani, right? Within Waikulua, is that right? Yes. Yeah. And it's I've been there myself and it's just a wonderful, wonderful place and I was just wondering if you could share just a little bit like this is a particular area within Waikulua that I just kind of wanted to know more about. I love monolani. I mean, I feel like it's the best weather on the island. It's sunny every day with a breeze. You know, it's not just sunny and hot, right? It's not, it's rarely humid here. And I just love how, you know, clean and you have all of these amenities, amazing restaurants, you know, we have a fitness center. And if you're a homeowner here or a vacation renter even there is a private beach club. And there's a restaurant right on the beach. So I just love it. It's called Anapua. And so you have everything you really don't even have to leave the monolani area if you don't want to.  And you have goats too, right? And we have goats. Yeah. Yes. And they just love to eat all the grass and plants. It's a gold mine for them. So what are the price points, for example, because it's a resort area, right? Is that right? Yes. You're looking at maybe about a million, two and up. One, you know, at least one, I would say over a million in the resort area out here in monolani. And for all of the amenities, like the beach club and all that, like are the HOA fees reasonable or how is that? The HOA fees are a little bit higher here. They're at least, you know, probably about 800 and up. But that does cover what explains people is two associations, right? So your actual subdivision or complex association.  And with the master association, you have that, you know, private clubhouse, you have 24-hour security. You have all of these other amenities, right, that you are paying for. So if you were to split it up, then it would, you know, make sense to any buyer. But combined, it looks like this really large number, right, like 1600. But if you were to separate it and then people get to see what, you know, all the amenities you do have around here. And it's just exceptional. I love it.  And if you only have, you know, less than a couple of minutes remaining, but there's a new law 20 by 2050, you have to convert all cesspools into septic tanks. And do you want to talk about how it affects your island? Absolutely. That's another thing we're all looking at here in real estate. Our island has 50,000 cesspools. So there's 88,000 in the state and our island has the most, right, at 50,000. And I know the states trying to, you know, offer tax credits and, you know, first they were trying to, they have a priority list of, you know, the ones that are by the ocean or gang cesspools. Because we do have that also where you have, you know, a couple of apartment buildings and they're all in the same cesspool, right, from many, many years ago. And so those are always on the, their hot list, right, for the state to try and being able to convert them to either sewer or a septic system. I am curious to see how we're going to move this forward because there's not a fixed rate, right, to convert this. Meaning, if you have to dig up the driveway rock wall, I've had, you know, quotes from $12,000 to $74,000, right, from contractors. And so it's really going to be a burden if they do force this on all of these families, especially the ones that are on fixed incomes, to be able to pull that out from somewhere, right. I don't think they just have that kind of money laying around. It depends on, of course, their financial situation. I think, you know, definitely are going to need help from the state on this. Right. Yeah. So basically, in summary, you know, what a great time with you like land, but I mean, for investors looking to live that Hawaii lifestyle, obviously the big island of Hawaii is literally the most affordable in some cases, right. Yeah, there's the most land available, as long as it's not in a lava zone. You know, personally, it's one of my favorite islands, even though Will and I reside here on Oahu in Honolulu. I just, I'm looking forward to one day getting that investment property for us in Waimea and being able to spend time over there, you know, and everything, but or in Manalani, where you That sounds fabulous. And I would want to be your neighbor anyway. So yeah, what a great city. Yeah, I mean, this was so awesome. You're amazing, super informative, very helpful for us and our viewers. We learn a lot about so much about the big island and real estate. And how do people reach out to you if they want to learn more about buying and selling or but just property in general on the big island. So you can go ahead and you know, reach me on my cell phone or right here. That's also my email address or through social media. I'm available every day. You know how that is with real estate. So anyone has any questions about, you know, real estate here on the big island. I am open to help anyone. So just go ahead and contact me at any time. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. You are the best. Thank you. Hello. Hi.