A global real estate giant will buy Alexander & Baldwin and take it private in a deal expected to close early next year. Buyers include the investment giant Blackstone Real Estate.
A&B is one of the largest private landowners in Hawaiʻi, and its portfolio includes 21 retail centers and 14 industrial properties.
Blackstone currently owns several luxury hotels in the state, as well as the Pearlridge Center on Oʻahu.
The Conversation takes a look back at the history of the Big Five as many consider what comes next for Alexander & Baldwin.
Carol MacLennan is a Professor Emerita at Michigan Tech University and the author of the book “Sovereign Sugar: Industry and Environment in Hawaiʻi.” She spoke with HPR about the history of the Big Five, from the missionary era to the present day.
“Beginning in the 1970s, I studied the plantation closings,” MacLennan said. “It was the beginning of the complete closure of sugar and eventually pineapple production in Hawaiʻi, and opening up all these lands. And they had so dramatically changed the lands and the demography, their footprint was just huge. And so after doing that research on the plantation closings, which lasted until the early 1990s, by then, the only plantation that was left was Alexander & Baldwin, and they were on Maui.”
MacLennan shared that A&B was unique among the Big Five because its interests were centered on Maui, where family descendants continued to live, invest in land, and own almost all of the island's sugar plantations.
“They maintained the sugar legacy and the local legacy much longer than the other companies did,” she said. “So the fact that they are part of a merger and then they're going private is a pretty significant ending to that historical lineage that all those companies participated in.”
She said she will be curious how Blackstone views its commitment to place and to people.
"I think it's really important to look at the consolidation of power through all kinds of political, economic and cultural means over time, and see how it changes the way people live, and also it changes the land and all of the really important assets — the water and forests and you know, the whole landscape of communities and places. It's really important to understand that, because it does repeat, in new forms, but it does repeat, and you learn a lot by focusing in on that history."
This story aired on The Conversation on Dec. 29, 2025. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Hannah Kaʻiulani Coburn adapted this story for the web.
