EMPOWER THE PEOPLE

 

SEEN YESTERDAY ON FREE HAWAI`I TV

 

 

 

 

KHON2.com - Gov. Josh Green announced that he backed down from a moratorium on short-term rentals in Maui County on Wednesday, March 27.

Community organizers are now focused on legislation that would give power to the counties to phase out high-priced vacation homes.

Members of the Lahaina Strong community group gathered at the Hawaii State Capitol on Thursday, March 28 and said they understand a moratorium is no longer needed since displaced families have started to trickle into more permanent housing.

“We still need to tackle this short-term rental issue,” Lahaina Strong organizer Paele Kiakona said. “Because the short term rental industry has exacerbated the housing market and made it way too expensive for anybody to even afford a family home here in Hawaii.”

Organizers are now highlighting legislation — HB1838 and SB2919 — that would give counties the power to gradually phase out short-term rentals.

“Giving counties the clear authority to phase out vacation rental uses is a key tool for helping Maui residents find adequate rental housing in the wake of the wildfires,” Lahaina Strong organizer Katie Austin said.

Rep. Elle Cochran added cutting through the red tape to find long-term housing is simply too much for some residents who are still displaced. Organizers said 60% of Native Hawaiians in West Maui who were affected by the fire have left the island.

“Every time they get a different case manager, they have to re-tell their story,” Rep. Cochran said, “they have to get this paper, get it signed, go back, I mean, it’s just been nonstop. We’re almost nine months in and we still haven’t built a home?”

Some new help is available. The Office of Hawaiian Affairs announced one-time grants for Native Hawaiians affected by the fires — $9,000 to eligible homeowners and $4,000 to eligible renters.

“People wonder if things are forgotten, if Lahaina is forgotten,” Hawaiian community advocate Archie Kalepa said. “This is a reminder for our community, the help is there.”

The State also announced it has acquired a former hotel in Kihei with 175 guest rooms to be used initially as temporary housing for the displaced and eventually repurposed as a teacher and workforce rental housing project.

Hale ʻO Lāʻie — formerly the Haggai Institute property — is expected to open to wildfire survivors in early May, 2024.

LAHAINA STRONG

 

KEEPING LAHAINA LANDS IN LAHAINA HANDS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NPR - March 14, 2024

Several months after Mikey Burke's house burned down in Lahaina, her husband got a text message out of the blue. It was an offer to buy their property with no inspections.

"He's gotten a couple of those," Burke says. "Fighting against speculators and large developers coming in is nothing new for us, but we've never had it where it's been this important to our very being as this community."

Burke and her family are among hundreds in Lahaina who are navigating the long and arduous process of rebuilding. More than seven months after the wildfire that took 101 lives, hundreds of properties are still covered in piles of debris.

Some fire survivors have moved into rental properties outside Lahaina. Others are finding new jobs or schools elsewhere on Maui or in the continental U.S. Many Lahaina residents worry that developers will buy up properties as they become available, changing the makeup of a community that was once the historic capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

"If we have enough of that happening, the village we grew up in is not going to be the village that we want to raise our kids in," Burke says. "This community is so important to who we are.”

Now, some community members are working on a way to buy properties so they can remain affordable and available to local residents. It's a nonprofit community land trust, modeled after ones used around the country for affordable housing. Land trusts purchase properties and then sell or rent the houses. When the homes are for purchase, the trust keeps ownership of the land they're built on, so the overall sale price is less than comparable homes.

Community land trusts have emerged in a handful of other places recovering from disasters, like Houston and the Florida Keys after both places were hit by hurricanes. The challenge is mobilizing financial resources in time to purchase properties in the crucial years post-disaster when properties go up for sale.

"The number of units destroyed that are housing people affordably always outnumbers the amount that you rebuild," says Steve Kirk, president of Rural Communities, an affordable housing nonprofit affiliated with the Florida Keys Community Land Trust. "There are individuals and corporations with strike capital that can step into that void and acquire that land.”

Life is still in upheaval for Burke and her family. For months after the fire, her family of four kids and four dogs lived in two hotel rooms. Recently, they moved into a longer-term rental north of Lahaina. Her kids go to a Hawaiian language immersion school right next to the burn zone, so all four are doing distance learning by computer from home.

They're still grappling with memories from the day of the fire. As the smoke approached their house, Burke loaded the kids into the car. But the traffic was at a standstill in the rush to evacuate Lahaina. They watched as the flames kept getting closer.

"I was telling the kids: if mommy opens the door, you run straight and you run to the ocean," she says. "I will never forget that feeling because I didn't know if it was ok."

Their house was destroyed. The burned debris is still awaiting removal, like hundreds of other properties in Lahaina. But Burke's family is already navigating the rebuilding process. Burke says they received a dollar estimate for what their insurance company will pay them, but they're not sure if it will be enough to cover the cost of rebuilding, with contractors in such high demand.

"Of course in August, everyone was like: yeah, we're going to rebuild," Burke says. "But now, we're looking at the actual money we have to rebuild and have to make a decision. Do we rebuild? What can we even rebuild? Or do we sell?”

She's heard from others from Lahaina going through the same struggle. Some who are older may not be up for the long rebuilding process. Some are underinsured and won't have enough to rebuild what they had. Burke says she's determined to stay, but concern is high that the community she grew up in will be forever altered.

Keeping the community together was on Burke's mind when she ran into two people working on a potential way to help: Carolyn Auweloa and Autumn Ness. Having worked on housing policy, Ness and Auweloa were aware of the community land trust model and decided to start one for Lahaina. The goal of land trusts is to keep housing affordable in the long term, since the buyer agrees to sell the home at a restricted price, whenever they choose to sell.

Dozens of community land trusts have been established around the country to boost the affordable housing supply. As climate-driven disasters have taken a bigger and bigger toll, land trusts are getting new attention.

Ness says the wildfires only increased the already-existing pressure on Maui's housing market. With its stunning ocean views and rich history, Lahaina was a tourism hotspot. Short-term rentals, driven by Airbnb and VRBO, made up 40% of the total housing supply in Lahaina's zip code. And in Maui County more broadly, half of all condominium sales are to out-of-state buyers.

"We've seen Lahaina be sold to investors parcel by parcel over the last couple of generations, so it was just like: oh my god, we're super vulnerable," Ness says.

The Lahaina Community Land Trust, as they've named it, is still in the early stages and is starting to raise money through donations. Ness says it could do more than just build housing. They could buy some properties that are of cultural value to Native Hawaiians and preserve them for the community. They could buy other properties at risk of being flooded by sea level rise and not build on them at all.

"People talk about the land trust as a way to sell in, instead of selling out," Ness says. "If you have to sell – not your fault, no judgment. How can we make sure you have what you need and the land stays in the highest and best interest of the community?"

Burke decided to join the effort to develop the land trust, which she says will hopefully lessen the pain for neighbors who choose to leave Lahaina.

"We know we can't save every parcel that's gonna come up to be sold," Burke says. "But if we're an option on somebody's table so if they have to walk away, they can do it in good conscience, that's all we're there for."
Land trusts are growing after disasters

When hurricanes, floods and wildfires destroy housing, the ensuing upheaval can permanently shift the makeup of a community. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans in 2005, a third of displaced residents still had not returned after three years, and lower-income residents were the most vulnerable to being displaced. Neighborhoods damaged by flooding were also more likely to experience gentrification.

After Hurricane Irma hit the Florida Keys in 2017, the Florida Keys Community Land Trust was established. Like in Lahaina, land values are high there, driven by tourism and restrictions on development.

"Vacation rentals command so much money that even in the absence of any storm, we are losing service worker housing on a month-to-month basis," says Kirk, who works on the land trust as well as affordable housing around Florida.

The trust built 31 affordable units on property that went up for sale after the hurricane. It began with a private donation, but the trust eventually secured a federal grant earmarked for disaster recovery. Kirk says securing funding quickly is key, since many properties are put up for sale within just a few years of a disaster.

"Public funding is really a necessity in order to preserve land in the aftermath of a disaster, particularly in an affluent location," Kirk says. "Because in the absence of that, market conditions will cause speculators and others to step into that land and end up serving a completely different income level.”

In Lahaina, Burke says organizers aren't sure how many properties the land trust might be able to buy, but they hope to start within the next six months.

"I don't think we're at a place where we can't come back and still make this a beautiful, vibrant community," Burke says. "We're gonna need help and we're going to continue to need help for years."

TOMORROW ALL DAY IN LAHAINA

SEEN YESTERDAY ON FREE HAWAI`I TV

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tiny Homes Meant For Displaced Maui Fire Survivors Are Sitting Empty

Washington Post - February 22, 20245

KAHULUI, Hawaii — Nesi and LJ Va’a pass the place where their new home should be at least once a day. They say a quick prayer as they drive by. At this point, that’s pretty much all they can do.

The couple and three of their kids fled Lahaina on foot as their apartment burned in the August wildfires. They lost everything but the clothes they were wearing — and each other.

Since then, like thousands of other West Maui families, they’ve been living in American Red Cross shelters at local hotels, and they’ve been shuffled between facilities seven times as the resorts make space for the slow return of tourists to the island.

The plot they now pray over promised stability. The site, vacant land owned by a nearby Christian church, was supposed to host 88 tiny homes, newly constructed to provide two years of rent-free housing for 350 fire survivors. And for months, dozens of the structures have stood on the dusty tract near Maui’s main airport, ready for displaced families to move in.

But the project has been tangled in red tape.

The saga of this 10-acre development, overseen by a local social services organization called Family Life Center, offers a window into the often-maddening world of building affordable housing on Maui, where a notoriously long permitting process and a thicket of regulations have stalled projects for decades. Even now, after apocalyptic fires made the already dire housing crisis worse, residents and advocates say the same old delays are preventing small houses from solving a big problem.

“Man, if we had this, it would be perfect,” Nesi, who was born and raised in Lahaina, said of the Family Life Center project. “The frustrating part is not knowing who to go to. Where’s the answer?”

More than six months after the fires, some 4,700 people are still living in hotels and desperate for more permanent housing. And after 3,000 structures burned, housing options are more limited than ever and prices are at an all-time high. Experts disagree on just how large a role tiny homes can play in alleviating the crunch, but they say that in an unprecedented emergency like this, the island must pursue every means possible to get residents housed.

“If you have a large family, there’s simply no housing that’s anywhere near affordable,” said Justin Tyndall, a professor at the University of Hawaii’s Economic Research Organization. “These problems existed before the fire but are now being highlighted even more. It’s an existential crisis for Maui. Many people have already left and will continue to leave.”

In the weeks following the fires, as the totality of Lahaina’s devastation set in, the prospect of inexpensive housing that could be quickly constructed gave many people hope.

Nationwide, the market for these structures has boomed in recent years. Offerings range from a traditional tiny house, which is typically under 400 square feet and could be mounted on a trailer, to more substantial accessory dwelling units (ADUs), sometimes called “ohanas” in Hawaii, and larger modular homes that top 1,000 square feet.

Right away, nonprofits and neighbors began planning for hundreds of units, in clustered developments and backyards.

“The need for housing was huge,” said James Bruggeman, who owns the Maui firm AAA Tiny Homes. “And those of us who live on the island knew that tiny homes were the only solution that could be provided in a timely manner.”

But reality soon set in.

In Maui County, tiny homes fall into a legal gray area, housing advocates said. Like other dwellings, they are subject to restrictive local zoning laws and legendarily long permitting waits. On top of that, most are prefabricated, a type of structure the state has long opposed in deference to the powerful local construction industry.

Kamie Davis, a Maui-based consultant who advises tiny-home developments, said she’s working on four properties that would together bring more than 500 units online, but they’ve each faced delays at the county, which she blames for failing to establish a specific tiny-home policy.

“If we would have done what we could have done from the very get-go, we would have at least 3,000 homes on the ground today, and we don’t,” Davis said. “We have maybe a couple hundred. It’s nothing compared to where we should be right now because they choked, they didn’t move forward.”

While officials have offered few details about tiny houses, the county has taken steps to encourage ADU construction and streamline the building process for wildfire survivors by hiring staff to focus on expedited permitting. And local leaders have earmarked $8 million to buy 50 interim dwellings for displaced families.

The state also signaled that prefab homes would have to be a part of the island’s recovery, and Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen said he’s talking with the federal government about building up to 1,000 prefab modular houses.

“Through our different partners, we’re trying to expand the inventory,” he said in a recent local TV interview. “That’s really the key.”

Yuki Lei Sugimura, Maui County Council’s vice chair and a supporter of tiny-home projects, said these new steps are encouraging.

“I believe that government probably did not have all the resources, or understand all the things we needed to do” immediately after the fire, Sugimura said. “But we have a better understanding now.”

Still, time is running out to avoid two major “housing cliffs,” said Matt Jachowski, the director of data, technology and innovation at the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement. Maui currently houses fire survivors in two primary ways: the hotel shelters and a program that pays premium rates to secure long-term leases at short-term vacation rentals.

If not extended, the hotel program will end in April. Funding for the vacation rentals, which comes largely from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, will be phased out over the next two years.

“The only way we’ll have any place for these people to go is if we have these ADUs built,” Jachowski said. “We’re going to need to build a lot of new ones — like thousands of new ones.”

One additional obstacle to construction is the question of what happens to the homes after the current crisis ends. Some funders have been unwilling to invest in projects that may only be allowed for a few years, while development-wary community members worry that emergency subdivisions could eventually be replaced by luxury homes, which would only exacerbate the affordability crisis.

Officials have stressed that many of the units would be temporary, and advocates say the county could address those concerns through careful legislation.

“You have to do something now to house people and figure out the knock-on effects once you’ve solved the core problem,” Jachowski said.

Tyndall, the economist, is skeptical that tiny homes and ADUs alone can solve the problem, but he said they should be part of the county’s long-term strategy, alongside larger multifamily housing developments.

“There’s no reason not to work to expand ADUs,” he said. “But in terms of the overall quantity of housing that gets built, that’s going to be only one part of the solution. It should be an ‘all of the above’ approach.”

The Family Life Center development, located on the grounds of a former sugar cane field in the central Maui town of Kahului, was the first high-profile project underway after the fire.

It received international attention, but soon after the spotlight faded, the project became a poster child for postponement. The first units arrived on the island within weeks of the August fire, and the center hoped families would be able to move in by October.


“We felt like, since this is an emergency, the process would be fairly easy,” said Maude Cumming, Family Life Center’s CEO. “But when we asked for direction, it was difficult to get.”

Cumming, who has worked in affordable housing for more than two decades, said the project has run into delays at nearly every step, from historic preservation rules to septic system regulations and water pressure requirements for the units’ fire suppression sprinkler system. She wants to comply with all codes, she said, but she’s been frustrated at the pace of approval.

“I just thought there would be a different kind of urgency,” Cumming said.

The latest hurdle involves an arcane dispute over the project’s water source. An influential real estate company and its business park development controls the closest water line, and Family Life Center said it had rebuffed requests for access.

This again delayed the move-in date, Cumming said, because it forced Family Life Center to bore underground to reach another water source. But after The Washington Post began reporting on the back-and-forth, the real estate company, Alexander & Baldwin, contacted Cumming and agreed to help Family Life Center temporarily access the water line, she said.

“We fully support the FLC project, and have offered to work with FLC to explore ways to get water to the homes so that they can be made available to the displaced families sooner rather than later,” Alexander & Baldwin spokeswoman Andrea Galvin said in a statement. She added that it is “a complex matter and will require the approval of a number of other parties.”

Cumming now hopes fire survivors will be able to move into the tiny homes by the end of the month.

Whenever it happens, it will be a moment that Nesi and LJ Va’a have been awaiting since they fled Lahaina the day of the fire. The couple, along with children who range in age from 10 to 16, miss the familiarity of their home, the way it smelled.

And in a time of constant change, they miss the routines that brought the family together, like sitting around on Saturday, planning out the week’s meals on a dry erase board.

At the Family Life Center development, known as Ohana Hope Village, they’ll have a place of their own, a kitchen, some normalcy. The units are spartan — no more than 500 square feet, metal walls and a spare interior — but the Va’as know firsthand how badly their community needs them.

Nesi and LJ have been working as disaster case managers at Family Life Center since late last year, and every day they talk to people like themselves who are anxious about where they’ll live while their town is rebuilt.

“People would move in here today if they could,” LJ said. “The 80-plus homes we have could be filled in a half an hour. The need is dire.”

When they talk to the long list of fellow fire survivors who have applied for a spot in the tiny-home village, the question they hear is always the same: When can we move in? They’re not sure how to reply, but they’re praying it will be soon.

BE THERE TOMORROW IN LAHAINA

HELP OUT LAHAINA THIS SATURDAY

PONO OVER PROFITS

HOW YOU CAN HELP KEEP LAHAINA LANDS IN LAHAINA HANDS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Explore opportunities for volunteering in general camp maintenance, tourist education, screen printing, overnight security etc. 

This is wonderful opportunity to give back, connect with like-minded individuals, and gain valuable skills in community organizing.