Homes for Whom? It’s Time to Act to Keep Hawai‘i’s Families Home

By Matt Jachowski and Marina Starleaf Riker

We all know the stories: The Lahaina ʻohana forced to shuffle between hotels and vacation rentals five different times after the fire, or the ones who crashed with cousins, making do by piling three or more into a room.

The naive often dismiss the latter as a matter of choice: our lāhui’s cultural preference for multigenerational housing. But as kānaka and kamaʻāina raised in Hawaiʻi, we have yet to meet a Hawaiian family – or any kamaʻāina for that matter – who would rather crowd six or more people into a two-bedroom home if they could afford more space.

Crowding into housing has become a matter of survival, not only for our Lahaina ʻohana, but families across our pae ʻāina.

Most kamaʻāina are struggling, but the reality is that Native Hawaiians are facing the most acute barriers to remaining in their ancestral home, as Hawaiians only earn $0.84 for every $1 earned by everyone else in Hawaiʻi.

For many, the only way to remain in Hawaiʻi is to double up with mom, dad, and tūtū; in fact, in the state already home to the most crowded housing in the country, an analysis of census data shows Native Hawaiian households are crowded at twice the rate as everyone else.

For the last century, political leaders have searched for solutions to fix Hawaiʻi’s housing shortage. But the data shows that the new homes being built are getting bigger and even more out of financial reach for our kānaka and kamaʻāina.

As a result, one in every four Native Hawaiians born in Hawaiʻi has moved away, and very few Hawaiians born on the continent move back. Today, there are more kānaka outside of Hawaiʻi than within the pae ʻāina.

On Maui, the 2023 fires only accelerated this diaspora, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent to prevent our families from leaving. There’s no way of knowing exactly how many families have gone, but it’s clear by the signs our kiaʻi carry at marches reading, “every day a local family moves away,” that we have underestimated the magnitude of the exodus.

But to understand why so many are leaving, we must first understand that so much of Maui’s housing – particularly the homes built recently – were never meant for us.

A century-old problem

One of the first front page headlines about Maui’s housing shortage dates back a century when the Maui News covered the Maui Chamber of Commerce’s 1921 probe into “a waiting list of more than a dozen families who are seeking homes.”

The article began: “Maui has its housing problem just as has Honolulu and as have the cities of the mainland, the shortage being felt most acutely in Wailuku and Lahaina.” More than a century later, Hawaiʻi is still in what the governor calls an “existential” crisis due to the lack of housing.

Throughout the decades, there have been emergency proclamations, task forces, millions of dollars spent on political lobbying, hundreds of campaign promises, and studies, studies, studies, and more studies examining Hawaiʻi’s housing problem and how to fix it.

Yet 104 years after Maui’s Chamber of Commerce first took up the issue, the shortage persists and is still being “felt most acutely” in Lahaina, where the fire incinerated roughly 30% of single-family homes across Maui Komohana (West Maui).

There is a sliver of truth in what pro-construction proponents say: The only way out of this crisis is to build. From 1970 through 2010, Maui built an average of about 600 new single-family homes each year, according to Maui County real property tax data.

But by the 2010s, new construction plunged by 60% to less than 240 homes per year and since 2020, has fallen again to just 71 homes per year. That’s fewer homes per year than 80 years ago, when Maui’s population was one-third of what it is today.

The last century of failed efforts, however, is evidence that building homes will never be enough when there is no assurance that the new homes will actually house the people working and raising families here.

Across West Maui, fewer than half of the new homes built since 2010 are housing full-time residents. And, overall, homes in West Maui sell for prices 21 times higher than the typical kamaʻāina household earns in a year.

But even if the influx of outside wealth suddenly vanished and luxury home development stopped, there’s still the elephant in the room: new construction cannot ramp up fast enough to stem the out-migration.

A stark example are the Lahaina Surf and Front Street Apartments, two affordable housing complexes identified as top rebuilding priorities. Even with rare political and community consensus, their completion isn’t expected until summer 2029 – six years after families’ homes burned to the ground.

Where will Maui’s ʻohana go?

In the year after the fire, the State of Hawaiʻi spent $357 million on hotels for fire survivors and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) spent another $295 million to temporarily rent homes and condominiums. Said differently, that’s enough money to buy (or rebuild) 650 $1 million homes – more than 80% of the approximately 800 owner-occupied homes lost in Lahaina.

But temporary fixes, even with hundred-million-dollar price tags, only fix thing temporarily. And by next March, all that temporary federal rental relief will be gone. Which is why we must embrace solutions that can stem this tide by housing families. Immediately.

The only sure solution? Move into homes that already exist.

Only two-thirds of Maui’s single-family homes house our residents; a third are mostly vacation homes that sit empty much of the year. The portion of condos with full-time residents is even smaller – fewer than 25%.

What is often missed in the articles spotlighting Hawaiʻi’s housing shortage is the stockpile of units being used exclusively by the short-term rental market: 8% of housing on Hawaiʻi Island, 14% on Maui, and a staggering 17% on Kauaʻi.

There is a reason, however, that so many of these condos do not house people who live here. Short-term rentals are so profitable, that almost none of their owners will voluntarily offer long term leases to residents.

Just six months after the wildfires, as the state and FEMA attempted to lure vacation rental owners with monthly rents up to $14,000 to shelter the more than 2,000 displaced families living in hotels, the number of active Maui vacation rental listings actually rose 2% higher than the year before.

Those property owners can remain blissfully unaware of local families’ reality since over 90% of them don’t live in Maui County, according to property tax data. And most of the money they earn from the short-term rental market doesn’t stay here, either.

They defend their refusal to rent to local people by claiming that Maui families don’t want to live in condos. True. Most local families would prefer to live in single-family homes. But, given the reality of limited inventory and high prices, most local families’ true choices are overcrowding, moving away, or living in a condo (if one becomes available).

Compared to single-family homes, with median prices over 20 times more than median household incomes, condos sell for much less and are mostly located in communities where local housing inventory is most scarce: West Maui and South Maui.

Which is why some government leaders have proposed bold changes to upend this status quo, such as Mayor Richard Bissen’s proposal to phase out the ability for over 7,000 properties to operate as short-term rentals in apartment-zoned districts.

A preliminary analysis of this proposal by the Economic Research Organization at the University of Hawaiʻi concluded, “it would increase Maui’s long-term residential housing stock by 13%,” and “a flood of converted vacation rental properties on the market would help push down housing costs across Maui.”

Others have proposed alternate measures, ranging from Maui County buying those vacation rentals to house families – still less costly than FEMA’s rental assistance – to a more targeted phase out of complexes considered most attainable for Maui families.

Regardless of the policy specifics, one thing is clear: We need immediate and decisive action, if we don’t want headlines spotlighting Maui’s housing shortage another century from now.

How far are we willing to go for our people?

In Spain, the prime minister announced an “unprecedented” plan to impose a “100% tax on the value of properties bought by non-residents.” In other words, a non-resident buying a $1 million home would also pay a $1 million tax.

Other less dramatic solutions include the tax policy Honolulu County is considering that mirrors a solution implemented in Vancouver, Canada, where an empty homes tax of 3% per year correlated with a 54% reduction in empty homes.

Ironically, Maui County real property data shows Canadians already own 6% of Maui’s condos and over 200 single-family homes. Maybe it’s time to embrace the laws that Canadians use to protect their own neighborhoods?

History shows that Hawaiʻi’s lack of progress can’t be blamed on budget shortfalls. There is evidence of this, like the state’s creative financing mechanism to cobble up $377 million for a brand-new rental car parking garage at Maui’s airport, or the $68 million earmarked to give the reflecting pools at the Hawaiʻi State Capitol a makeover.

By comparison, research estimates that it would take around $360 million to buy up 20% of Lahaina’s residential housing stock in the fire’s aftermath.

Just imagine if, in the wildfires’ immediate aftermath, the state had assisted survivors who qualify for a mortgage with a $365,000 down payment, instead of paying for a year in a hotel at $1,000 per night?

What we lack isn’t financing, it’s political will – and the courage to put our communities first, even against the wishes of the outside wealth that has for too long shaped our politics and neighborhoods.

We need to learn from other communities

Think Maui’s $1.3 million home price is bad? The median single-family home price in Aspen, Colorado, in September 2024 was 10 times that: $13.5 million. After facing an existential crisis – make big changes or lose workers, shops, restaurants, schools, doctors’ offices, etc. – the community invested in programs that now mean 70% of full-time occupied housing units in Aspen are deed restricted.

Aspen’s affordable housing programs serve households earning up to $301,680 for a family of four — because even doctors and business executives can’t afford the free market.

Hawaiʻi is just now starting to talk about these solutions, like the Kamaʻāina Homes Program being weighed by legislators, which is modeled off a program in Vail, Colorado, that provides funding to purchase deed restrictions requiring owners and renters to work locally.

There are also similar home buyer assistance programs adopted by cities like Boulder, Colorado, that offers local residents a lump sum in exchange for placing deed restrictions on their property that forever protect against investor ownership.

There are community organizers already doing this work, like the Lahaina Community Land Trust, which is one of the few solutions that has emerged in the fire’s aftermath to provide both disaster relief and permanent affordability.

From a fiduciary standpoint, this perpetual stewardship model also ensures that our public and private dollars must only be used once to subsidize housing — instead of having to repeat the cycle – which is the norm with Maui County programs that protect affordability for just five to 25 years.

What our leaders across the pae ʻāina must realize is these solutions aren’t new. Politicians have been equipped for years with the tools to build us a brighter future, but they repeatedly fail to do so. And although Maui has rightfully garnered much of the recent media attention, the reality is that kānaka and kamaʻāina on Oʻahu, Kauaʻi and Hawaiʻi Island are also struggling to remain in Hawaiʻi.

The clock is ticking. How many more of our siblings, cousins, children, parents, and friends are we willing to lose?

Download Charts (PDF Format)

• Maui Single-Family Homes: Price Per Square Foote
• Single-Family Home Unaffordability: Median Home Price to Income Ratio
• Household Crowding in the US and Hawaiʻi
• Maui Single Family Home Construction
• Maui Single Family Home Ownership Statistics