Thirty-two years after Hurricane Iniki made landfall on Kaua’i in 1992, few physical reminders remain of the storm’s destruction, but there are many reminders of the island’s resilience.

They include 20 homes in the 189-unit Hokulei Estates subdivision in Puhi, over 160 homes built around the island by homeowners in partnership with Kaua‘i Habitat for Humanity, and the Kalepa Village low-income rental project in Hana – mā‘ulu. These residences were part of about 565 new affordable homes built in the decade after Iniki using disaster relief funds.

“In a way, a disaster can have very positive benefits for the community if it’s designed and worked out right,” says Chad Taniguchi about Kaua‘i’s recovery. He served as Kaua‘i’s housing administrator from 1990 to 1995.

He and others familiar with Kaua‘i’s recovery say some of the Garden Isle’s lessons may provide insights for Maui, though they acknowledge the disasters had starkly different impacts. In August 2023, wildfires on Maui destroyed over 2,200 structures, caused $5.5 billion in damage and claimed 101 lives, making it one of the deadliest U.S. wildfires in the last century. Hurricane Iniki, in contrast, severely damaged or destroyed over 4,000 Kaua‘i homes, caused over $6 billion in damage in today’s dollars, injured about 100 people and killed seven.

Maui is already implementing some of Kaua‘i’s lessons by building temporary housing projects that can later be used for permanent housing and by establishing an office to expedite rebuilding permits. That office issued its first permit to rebuild in Lahaina in mid-May.

“If you have the concept that you want this disaster to be of benefit for the long term for the people who are already there and who are being displaced, use that as overall value or principle, I think you can find ways to make that come true,” Taniguchi says.

Different Disasters and Impacts

Iniki, a category 4 hurricane, was the strongest recorded hurricane to hit Hawai‘i. JoAnn Yukimura, who served as Kaua‘i’s mayor from 1988 to 1994, recalls sleeping on her office floor the night before Iniki made landfall on Sept. 11, 1992. She and her team watched from her office as Iniki came ashore during the afternoon.

Winds up to 160 mph flattened wooden structures, tore off roofs and knocked out about half of the island’s power lines, leaving many communities without electricity for weeks. Thousands of residents were displaced and found shelter with family or friends, at hotels or on the beach.

Most hotels were so damaged they closed; those still operating housed relief workers and displaced residents. But the island’s tourism industry, which comprised between 65% and 70% of Kaua‘i’s economy, came to a standstill.

Yukimura recalls viewing the island from a helicopter the day after Iniki. While flying over Kekaha on the island’s west side, she saw residents checking on neighbors, fixing their roofs and waving to her. “There was already such a community spirit,” she says.

Within a month, the Kaua‘i County Council and Yukimura approved the creation of an Office of Emergency Permitting to process rebuilding permits and waive permit fees. The Federal Emergency Management Agency funded the OEP.

Several repairs and replacements were exempted from permit requirements. Among them were repairing or replacing non-retaining walls and fences, and non-bearing walls, ceilings, floors and windows.

Kaua‘i also required that structures be rebuilt with hurricane connectors and other requirements to better withstand future hurricanes. Yukimura says among the lessons learned from Hurricane Iwa, which struck the island in 1982, was adopting stronger hurricane requirements and requiring permits for major repairs and rebuilds of existing structures. If Kaua‘i had done both after Iwa, it may not have sustained as much damage from Iniki, she says.

“Hurricane Iniki created the urgency to get things done,” she says. “And as long as you could guide it to get it done right – because there’s often the temptation to just do it fast and not do it right – if you can do it right, then it is a long-term foundation.”

Kaua’i habitat for Humanity received Iniki relief funds in 1997 to build 95 for-sale homes in its ‘Ele’ele iluna subdivision. | Photo: courtesy of David Bieker

Separate Permitting Office

Kaua‘i’s Iniki recovery generated a construction boom. The OEP issued nearly 14,300 permits between October 1992 and the end of May 1995. The office was run by Keith Companies, a private engineering and surveying firm.

Reconstruction or repairs of hurricane-impacted structures had to comply with health and building requirements that were in place in 1992.

An owner would have to go through the normal permitting process if he or she wanted to rebuild a hurricane-damaged structure substantially larger, change the structure’s use or density, or rebuild in a high hazard area. The OEP also did not process Special Management Area permits or zoning changes, says Peter Vincent, an O‘ahu architect who helped establish and run the office.

In addition to processing permit applications, the office conducted outreach to help residents understand the new requirements. Staff held seminars, participated in radio programs, distributed flyers and went house to house to hang door hangers. Vincent says the OEP even wrote letters to insurance companies to explain what homeowners needed to do to rebuild.

He adds that the office was meant to be a one-stop. At its peak, it employed 64 plans examiners, inspectors, clerks and administrative staff, but the office also for a time housed representatives from the state Department of Health. That helped expedite decision-making.

The one-stop shop “short circuited a lot of the issues or finger pointing or ‘go see somebody else’ kind of thing. And that was really needed. I think something like that on Maui would be super helpful because permitting is such a hard process,” Vincent says.

He adds: “For people once they finally are able to rebuild, they don’t have to wait two years to get a building permit. It’s just ridiculous. I mean, they’ve been through enough hardship.”

While Kaua‘i’s rebuilding started quickly, Maui’s has taken longer due to the hazardous materials that must be cleared after the fires.

“Many of the Kaua‘i properties were damaged but not burned to the ground,” says Carl Bonham, executive director of UH’s Economic Research Organization. “And there’s a difference between replacing all your windows and roofs and repairing something versus starting from scratch.”

In an email, Maui County’s Communications office wrote that the county learned lessons from all its state and county partners, including Kaua‘i, which was among the first to send its people and other resources to Maui to help with emergency response after the August 2023 fires. The County also received assistance from California’s Sonoma County.

Maui County opened its Recovery Permitting Center at the end of April. The center is run by 4Leaf Inc., a California-based professional services firm that specializes in fire recovery and also helped Sonoma County with its permitting needs after wildfires.

“It’ll be very important for folks who are trying to rebuild once the debris is all removed,” Bonham says. “I think we’ll see that permitting activity in the latter half of this year start to ramp up for folks literally going in and rebuilding their destroyed properties, particularly in Lahaina.”

As of June 21, the Recovery Permit Center had processed about 80 permit applications and issued 15 permits. Applicants can request that their permit fees be deferred if they are rebuilding residential structures. And permit fees may be assessed at half of what they would normally be if residential and commercial structures were built not long before the August wildfires. In an email, Maui County’s Communications team wrote that the county has not deferred permit fees for any single-family houses that are being rebuilt in fire-affected areas.

The Grassroot Institute of Hawaii argues that permit fees should be waived instead. Malia Blom Hill, policy director of the nonprofit public policy research organization, says those fees can block residents from rebuilding.

Permit fees are set in Maui’s annual budget ordinance and vary based on the valuation of the construction work. For example, projects valued from $100,001 to $500,000 are charged $880 for the first $100,000, plus $5 for each additional $1,000. Electrical, plumbing, driveway, grading and other permits have additional charges.

Gov. Josh Green joins the April 30 groundbreaking of Ka La’i Ola, which will create 450 housing units for Maui wildfire survivors who aren’t eligible for FEMA assistance. | Photo: courtesy of Ka La‘i

Limited Time Frame

It’s hard to miss the Coco Palms hotel along Kaua‘i’s Kūhiō Highway. Until recently, the Wailua hotel, located on culturally and historically significant land, has sat largely derelict since it was battered by Iniki.

Now, construction activity abounds under the latest rebuilding effort. Developers are rebuilding under a so-called “Iniki ordinance” that allows non-conforming structures to be rebuilt to their pre-hurricane conditions. Coco Palms’ previous owners received permits to rebuild prior to the now-repealed ordinance’s 2015 expiration.

Gary Hooser, a former Kaua‘i councilmember and state senator, says the hotel should not be allowed to be rebuilt under decades-old standards. He voted in 2013 against the county bill that extended the ordinance’s expiration to 2015. He says that the ordinance had a valid purpose after the storm – to allow people to rebuild – but “it should be limited to that purpose and not held out forever.”

Maui County is now considering a proposal that would allow nonconforming structures impacted by natural disasters, such as the August wildfires, to be repaired or rebuilt in a similar fashion while complying with existing building and fire safety requirements. Building owners would need to have their final inspections done within four years of the governor’s original state of disaster.

Jonathan Helton, policy researcher for the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, says he questions whether four years is long enough, especially for Lahaina structures located in the special management area and historic districts. Structures in those areas require additional approvals.

One option, he says, is for Maui to provide flexibility to building owners by including language in the proposal to allow the mayor to extend its time frame.

Maui’s nonconforming structure proposal passed its Planning Commission in late February, with an amendment to allow the structures five years to rebuild, with an option for a two-year extension; at press time, the Maui County Council had yet to introduce the bill.

Build Lots of Homes

Taniguchi recalls a meeting he had with a representative from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development after Hurricane Iniki. The Kaua‘i Housing Agency had just built 35 simple cottages around the island on lots where homes were destroyed. The first cottages were mostly built by volunteers, but the project was considered a failure for costing twice its budget after volunteer labor couldn’t be sustained.

However, HUD was blown away by the county government’s efforts to meet its residents’ needs, Taniguchi says. In 1994, the department gave the Kaua‘i Housing Agency $41 million in disaster funds. Prior to Iniki, the agency received about $700,000 to $1.2 million in federal monies each year.

According to a September 1993 article in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, the island then needed about 6,000 new homes to meet housing demand. Monthly rents for a two-bedroom apartment averaged $1,100 compared with about $900 pre-Iniki; for a three-bedroom, rents averaged about $1,400 compared with $1,000 prior.

Insurance covered most of the rebuilding for existing homes and commercial buildings, so the $41 million was largely used to build 563 affordable homes under the agency’s Pāku‘i Housing Program over 10 years.

The agency held a series of community meetings to get feedback on the affordable housing projects that developers proposed. Ken Rainforth, who worked for the Kaua‘i Housing Agency in various roles between 1979 and 2009, says that helped projects get approved without opposition. Projects were given grants and no-interest loans; the paybacks went into a revolving fund to fund other affordable housing projects.

Disaster funds also helped the county to rebuild 10 homes damaged by Iniki, establish a homebuyer loan program that funded eight homes, construct two water wells in Kekahā and Hanamā‘ulu, and hardened existing infrastructure in other areas.

“If you look at it from afar, you don’t want anything to be left after you spend all this money for short term efforts,” Taniguchi says, adding that he doesn’t know the specifics of Maui’s recovery. “If you can minimize the amount of money going out for the short term and invest in things that will be a benefit to the people and the island for the long term, then that’s the best way. That’s how you use a disaster for positive things.”

Several interim housing projects are underway to house displaced Maui residents and will have longer-term benefits after those initial uses.

One is the 450-unit Ka La‘i Ola being built in Lahaina. The project will house survivors ineligible for federal aid for up to five years, after which the state will commit the land and permanent infrastructure to the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands. And the 175-unit Hale ‘O Lā‘ie, the former Maui Sun Hotel in Kīhei, will transition to teacher and workforce rentals with public kindergarten space after it is initially used to house survivors.

An artist’s rendering of the Ka La’i Ola temporary housing project for wildfire survivors in Lahaina. | Rendering: Courtesy Ka La’i

Challenging Recovery

It took Kaua‘i’s economy eight years to recover after Iniki, according to a 2009 working paper by the UH Economic Research Organization. Unemployment rose to 19.1% immediately after the hurricane, compared with 6.8% just before. The island lost about 3,000 private sector jobs – about 12% of the island’s employment – amounting to $225 million in 2008 dollars in annual lost income.

Kaua‘i’s unemployment rate did not return to pre-Iniki levels until 1999, and the number of private jobs available didn’t return until 2002. While visitor arrivals to the island stabilized in 1995, they didn’t reach pre-Iniki levels until 2008.

Bonham, the UHERO executive director, says Maui has a challenging recovery period ahead. Maui was already suffering from a severe housing shortage, and in the immediate days after the fires, nearly 8,000 Lahaina residents were sheltered in 40 hotels. His organization estimates that 3,500 people have left the island and that the labor force is down about 5,000 people.

The Maui wildfires led to the loss of 7,000 jobs in September 2023 compared with pre-wildfires, so there has been some recovery, he says. Many employers in industries heavily impacted by the pandemic struggled to find workers even before the fires. But he expects the jobs recovery will slow moving forward, especially for the food service and retail sectors.

About 60,000 visitors spent about $250 to $300 each day on Maui before the fires. Bonham says that number is down by 15,000 people as of the first quarter of this year. The daily visitor count isn’t expected to return to 60,000 people until the end of 2025.

“It’s going to get harder for that recovery going forward to the extent that we don’t add housing quickly,” he says. “As long as we add 2,000 to 3,000 housing units and free up some of the visitor plant over the next year, then I think our visitor forecast has a chance of coming true and will continue to see some growth, but we will still see average daily census on Maui that’s well below pre-wildfire.”

Nestled next to farmland and older residences, three affordable rental projects are emerging from the red dirt in Kaua’i’s western town of ‘Ele’ele.

The rentals, part of the county-led 550-unit Lima Ola affordable subdivision, is an example of how Kaua‘i County’s Housing Agency has become a major developer and facilitator of new homes on the island.

The Housing Agency and its private developer partners are expected to begin construction on 288 affordable homes this year. Combined with the 221 units that broke ground in 2023, the agency and its partners are set to add 509 affordable homes to the rural island’s housing stock.

That’s a major increase from past years, says Adam Roversi, the agency’s director. From 2012 through 2022, for example, the county built about 410 affordable homes.

Adam Roversi has served as the Kaua’i Housing Agency’s director since 2019. | Photo: Noelle Fujii-Oride

“It’s a record, let’s put it that way,” Roversi says of the new homes. Another 860 affordable homes are in the works across the island and are expected to break ground in 2025 or later.

More homes are direly needed on the Garden Isle, where so few new ones are built that the island’s housing stock has remained stagnant for the last five years, causing prices to skyrocket, according to UH’s Economic Research Organization. A 2019 state study said the island needed about 800 new homes a year from 2020 through 2025; that number includes affordable, market-rate and luxury homes.

“Both politically and economically, it’s a good time for the county to be doing what it’s doing,” says Roversi, who leads a staff of 23, eight of whom focus on development. He points to expanded federal and county funding for affordable housing projects. “There’s a lot of political momentum to try to do different, out-of-the-box things.”

More Homes Needed

At the turn of the millennia, a shift began in the types of private housing projects being built on Kaua‘i, with more high-end luxury developments and fewer projects affordable to locals.

Ka‘āina Hull, the county’s planning director, attributes the shift to regulatory barriers and infrastructure requirements. For example, large developments have often been required to build new wastewater treatment plants, waterlines and roads.

“The only people who could pay for them were the high-end luxury folks,” he says. “And so some of these regulatory barriers and infrastructure costs, and this is just my perspective, created the barrier for our local housing.”

He adds that his department in the last five years has “taken a blowtorch” to Kaua‘i’s zoning ordinance and eased lot coverage, setback, density and other requirements. The other step to getting more homes is addressing infrastructure, he says.

D.R. Horton Hawaii, part of the largest homebuilding company in the U.S., built 151 homes and duplexes in its Ho‘oluana at Kohea Loa subdivision in Hanamā‘ulu in 2019. Of those units, 32 were targeted at households earning up to 140% of the area median income, or $143,100 a year for a family of four.

The subdivision is part of the 440-unit Kohea Loa project on 53.7 acres of private land. But the last three phases are on hold until water access issues are resolved, the company wrote in an email. Affordable units in those phases are anticipated to be sold at 80% to 100% of the area median income, or $96,500 to $102,200 for a family of four.

A community organization sued the county water department in 2018 over a proposed 18-inch waterline that would serve Puhi, Līhu‘e, Hanamā‘ulu and Kapa‘a – including the new Ho‘oluana at Kohea Loa subdivision. The state Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that the department didn’t do a thorough environmental assessment. The Kaua‘i Department of Water wrote in an April email that it is finalizing negotiations on the scope of work and fees to prepare an environmental document for the potential impacts and areas affected.

The cost and availability of infrastructure are key reasons why housing projects don’t pencil out for developers, says Milo Spindt, who advises nonprofit developers Permanently Affordable Living Kaua‘i and Kaua‘i Habitat for Humanity. “So if someone with very big … deep pockets who thinks very long-term with their investments can’t do it, who can?” asks Spindt, who is also a Realtor and serves on the Hawaii Habitat for Humanity Association board.

“He wanted desperately for the county to acquire land that he could entitle and set up for future development,” says Gary Mackler, who worked as a housing development coordinator for 24 years. That led to the county’s 2010 purchase of 75 acres of agricultural land from McBryde Sugar Co. for $2.5 million.

That land is home to the four-phase Lima Ola project in housing.

“We’re not producing market housing to make profits; we’re producing housing to serve residents.”

— Gary Mackler, former Housing Development Coordinator, Kaua’i County Housing Agency

Small Housing Loss

According to UHERO’s Hawai‘i Housing Factbook, Kaua‘i saw a “very small” net housing loss of about 400 units over the past five years. Justin Tyndall, assistant professor of economics at UH Mānoa and a member of UHERO, says some of that loss may be due to more housing units being used as vacation rentals. About 17.5% of Kaua‘i’s housing units were listed as active vacation rentals in 2023, up from 16% in 2022.

Kaua‘i issued about 160 to 180 residential building permits each year from 2020 through 2023, according to UHERO data. From 2016 through 2019, the county issued 200 to 400 permits.

Little new housing means there aren’t enough homes to go around, so prices are high. In March, the median sales price on Kaua‘i was $1.6 million for a single-family home and $770,000 for a condo, according to the Kaua‘i Board of Realtors.

“I feel like younger people 10 years ago could reasonably afford a home with a normal job on Kaua‘i and now there’s no way,” says state Rep. Luke Evslin, who represents southeastern Kaua‘i and is chair of the state House Committee on Housing. He adds that it’s even hard to recruit doctors because they can’t afford housing either.

But Tyndall says county leaders appear to be aware of the housing problem and have made reforms, including reducing regulations and getting the county to facilitate and produce affordable housing developments.

Producer of Affordable Housing

Around 2005, then-Mayor Bryan Baptiste began meeting with major landowners to talk about acquiring private land. He saw that many of the good development sites were being taken by the private market for market-rate housing projects. But residents needed housing that was more affordable.

“He wanted desperately for the county to acquire land that he could entitle and set up for future development,” says Gary Mackler, who worked as a housing development coordinator for 24 years.

That led to the county’s 2010 purchase of 75 acres of agricultural land from McBryde Sugar Co. for $2.5 million. That land is home to the four-phase Lima Ola project in ‘Ele‘ele, the county’s largest affordable housing undertaking.

Mass grading and utility and infrastructure installation began in November 2020 for the first phase, which will comprise 38 single-family and 117 multifamily homes.

“The one thing that got us there is persistence, even to this day, and now we’re seeing the dividends of that effort,” Mackler says. He also serves on the boards of the Hawai‘i Housing Finance and Development Corp., the Kaua‘i Housing and Development Corp. and the Hawai‘i HomeOwnership Center’s Community Land Trust.

Rep. Nadine Nakamura, who represents the island’s north and east sides, says Lima Ola is a model for the state. “This is what it takes to do development in Hawai‘i,” she says.

“We’re really lucky, I think on Kaua‘i, that we have an aggressive housing (agency). We have prioritized where we want affordable housing to be and we’ve identified the infrastructure needed to carry it out. So, you know, the next step is to figure out how we’re going to pay for that infrastructure and partner with the (state) and the feds to try to get whatever money we can. And that’s what’s happening.”

“We’re really lucky, I think on Kaua’i, that we have an aggressive housing (agency).”

— Nadine Nakamura, State Representative, Kaua’i

Roversi says the county’s goal is that affordable housing on county-owned land, like Lima Ola, be affordable in perpetuity through ground leases for rental projects and limited appreciation leaseholds for ownership projects.

“If we’re successful in continuing with that model, it kind of establishes a separate bifurcated housing market, that we have a pool of homes insulated from market forces, because the county owns the land,” he says.

The Housing Agency plans to replicate Lima Ola in Waimea and Kīlauea, where the county recently acquired land. And Roversi hopes to acquire property in other areas, including the Līhu‘e town core since the county’s general plan calls for most future development to happen in that area.

Housing Agency’s Role

The Kaua‘i County Housing Agency was established in 1976. Its early projects included collaborations with the state and a nonprofit housing developer. Together, they developed 14 single-family homes in Po‘ipū’s Weliweli subdivision, and 50 single-family homes each in the Līhu‘e Town Estates and Kapa‘a Meadows subdivisions.

Ken Rainforth was hired at the Housing Agency as a project coordinator in 1979 and worked in a variety of positions, including housing director, before retiring in 2009. He says the agency initially focused on administering Section 8 and other federal grants to nonprofits that served low-income residents. He began looking for funding so the agency could do more of its own development projects. “

To me, it’s just common sense to go after money and build your own projects,” he says.

Ken Rainforth helped create 5,000 housing units while working for the Kaua’i County Housing Agency from 1979 to 2009. | Photo: Noelle Fujii-Oride

Over the decades, the agency has also had a hand in multifamily and self-help housing, new and improved lots, and senior housing projects.

Developments supported by the Housing Agency took off after Hurricane Iniki, which devastated Kaua‘i in 1992. Chad Taniguchi, who served as the Housing Agency director from 1990 to 1995, says about $41 million in post-storm federal and state relief funds led to the creation of 581 housing units over a decade.

Today, many of its projects target low-income earners who make 60% of the area median income or less, or no more than $72,400 for a family of four.

In many cases, such as with Lima Ola, the Housing Agency is the lead developer; in that role, it identifies county-owned land or purchases land for affordable housing projects.

Along with that, it obtains any needed zoning approvals, solicits community feedback and conducts environmental reviews before issuing requests for proposals to select a private developer who will lease the land, typically at $1 per year.

The county will also put in needed infrastructure, expedite permits, and waive many county building fees. Roversi says those fee waivers can equal nearly $20,000 in savings per unit if the project is located near existing sewer lines.

The county also provides partial funding for projects, which helps them get additional points on their state financing applications. The number of points a project receives largely determines where it’ll rank among other applications. The highest-ranking projects are further evaluated to determine the amount of low-income housing tax credits needed to make the project feasible.

On the other end of the spectrum, the county is a secondary participant in projects initiated by private developers on private land. The county provides some funding, plus fee waivers and expedited permitting.

Roversi says there have been more of these types of projects in the last three years. Before that, only Kaua‘i Habitat for Humanity was originating affordable housing projects on its own land, he says. Under Kaua‘i Habitat’s model, partner homebuyers, plus volunteers, construct the homes, which helps to keep costs down.

Part of a Team

Mackler joined the Housing Agency in 1993 to help with Hurricane Iniki relief. His position was funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and was only supposed to last five years. He ended up staying on as the housing development coordinator until he retired in 2017.

He says the county government during his early years treated affordable housing as any other project needing approvals. That changed around 2005 when the government created a housing task force.

Heads of the county housing, planning and water agencies, and other officials, met regularly with each other and with private developers to discuss affordable housing projects, get updates and address issues. Those meetings continue today. Later, the county created a policy to expedite certified affordable projects for permitting. That expedited process can save six to 12 months, says Mackler, who describes his role in the process as that of a navigator.

“I think what happened slowly was there became more buy-in among the county representatives and the reviewers to understand that we’re just here to build units for your kūpuna, for your auntie, your uncle, your nephew, your niece, your son, your daughter,” he says. “We’re not producing market housing to make profits; we’re producing housing to serve residents. And that really, I think, was the start of having a more supportive county apparatus.”

Makani Maeva, president of Honolulu-based Āhē Group, says those meetings with government officials make her feel like she’s part of a team. Āhē Group has built four affordable rentals on Kaua‘i and has two more under construction.

She says project risks are eased when the county does the pre-development work. Low-income rental projects like hers, she says, can only charge a certain amount of rent, yet the cost to build can increase due to unexpected delays, environmental issues or community opposition.

And, she adds, it’s helpful that the county lines up its timeline for selecting contractors for county-initiated projects with the February application deadline for most state financing programs.

“They give us the tools that we need to go and compete aggressively for those funds that are available statewide,” says Craig Watase, president of Mark Development. “But you know, they want us to come there and build housing.” His company has developed five housing projects on Kaua‘i since the 1970s.

Watase and Maeva both say they appreciate the county’s support of developer-initiated projects on private land. For example, Mark Development and another Honolulu developer, ‘Ikenākea Development, plan to build a 154- unit apartment complex in Līhu‘e, and Āhē Group is building a 75-unit apartment complex in ‘Ele‘ele.

Roversi says he’s been getting more calls from developers interested in building on the island. “I have hopes that we’ve built a reputation of being a cooperative and helpful environment for affordable housing developers and the word is getting out,” he says.

“They give us the tools that we need to go and compete aggressively for those funds that are available statewide.”

— Craig Watase, President, Mark Development

Past and Future

The Kaua‘i Housing Agency’s development of affordable housing is reminiscent of the larger role that the City and County of Honolulu and then-Hawai‘i Finance and Development Corp. played on O‘ahu in the 1980s and ’90s.

Under then-Mayor Frank Fasi, Honolulu spearheaded the development of the 600-acre ‘Ewa Villages, which included restoring plantation communities and building new homes and community facilities. And HFDC was the overall developer of the 890-acre Villages of Kapolei.

In March, its successor, the Hawai‘i Housing Finance and Development Corp., selected developers to plan and develop up to 900 affordable rentals and for-sale homes in one of the last undeveloped portions of that part of Kapolei.

Additionally, the Hawai‘i Public Housing Authority is planning to create 10,000 new affordable units by redeveloping state-owned properties, and the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands has been developing homesteads for Native Hawaiian beneficiaries for decades.

“We would like to spread our activity around the entire island so that every community is benefiting from what we’re doing.”

— Adam Roversi, Director, Kaua’i County Housing Agency

However, as local governments step deeper into this space, there could be concerns about government competing with private developers, says Spindt, the affordable housing advisor. There’s also a question of whether a local government, like the one on Kaua‘i, should be focusing on middle-income housing, a category of housing that’s not eligible for many state and federal subsidies.

He says he doesn’t have answers to those questions, but the big challenge is that Kaua‘i County’s government can’t make up the island’s housing shortfall on its own.

“The county can play a part in it, and I think they are playing an important part, and I do support the idea that all other counties in Hawai‘i and throughout the nation should have some role in preparing land for development,” he says.

Rainforth says he had a hand in about 5,000 housing units during his 30 years with the Kaua‘i Housing Agency. He still remembers how he felt when he first saw families do their final inspections of their new homes.

Photo: Noelle Fujii-Oride

“The joy of that family is just, I can’t describe it,” he says. “So later on when we were doing other projects, I made sure that my development staff had that same opportunity to do the walkthroughs with the new homebuyer. … It’s just really stimulating to be with somebody when they’re buying their first home. It’s just incredible.”

Maeva is wrapping up construction on part of her 75-unit Kai Olino project. And her two rental projects at Lima Ola are expected to accept tenants in the fall.

She says watching residents move in and become part of the surrounding community are her favorite parts of being a developer.

“It matters, right? It makes a difference,” she says. “And so it’s just a feeling when people are moving in. I’m so happy when kids have bedrooms, when people aren’t worried about their rent going up, or the house being sold. It’s a long-term solution. And it’s almost like a little bit of a peace. You know, you can feel it and you can see it, and people appreciate it.”

Unlike in other parts of the United States, wildfires have not been a longtime feature within Hawai‘i’s ecosystem. But changes in land use, population and climate have escalated fire risk in the Islands, “literally in two generations,” says Andrea “Nani” Barretto. She is a co-executive director at the Hawai‘i Wildfire Management Organization, a nonprofit based in Waimea. “In terms of our behaviors and understanding, we have a lot to catch up on.”

Additionally, fighting fires can be more difficult in Hawai‘i. “It’s not only trying to get resources from the continental U.S., but even sharing resources like an engine truck from island to island,” says Michael Walker, the state’s fire protection forester at the Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Division of Forestry and Wildlife.

However, wildfires “are not like other natural hazards,” says Barretto.

“We can control where wildfires go, unlike hurricanes.” We can also predict where wildfires may travel. The majority of homes are ignited by embers that fly through the air. Piles of leaves that accumulate in certain spots in your yard or on your roof, these are good clues to where wind would spread a fire. The good news is, says Barretto, “There are a lot of proactive steps residents can take ahead of time to protect their homes, yards and neighborhoods from wildfire.”

Firefighting should be seen as the last line of defense, according to Barretto. “There’s a myth that the fire fighters can just come out and take care of it. When a wildland fire turns into a structure-to-structure fire, that is a conflagration, and they won’t be able to keep every home safe. It’s really up to the resident to keep their home and yard fire-resistant. Because wildfires are a new reality; they aren’t going anywhere.”

Here are six ways to fortify your home against wildfires.

1. Harden the First Zone

Image: Getty Images

The first five feet around your home is a crucial zone, says Walker. Since homes are often ignited by ember showers, you want an area where there is nothing for embers to ignite. Envision smooth river rocks and minimal plantings, for example, rather than a bunch of bushes surrounded by tree-bark mulch. Pavers and gravel are other noncombustible options that can be used close to the structure.

2. Schedule Maintenance

Just as we have regular cleaning tasks around the interior of the home, Barretto suggests a weekly tidying of exterior areas. “You want the yard to be lean, clean and green,” she says. That means minimizing fuel sources and keeping what remains moist.

Image: Getty Images

Remove weeds and debris such as dead leaves and branches from your yard, roof, carport and lānai, and clear any vegetation out from under steps and other surfaces. Mow grass to a low height. Keep gutters clean.

Prune low-hanging branches so that nothing is lower than 6 to 10 feet off the ground. “There has been some concern with people having trees in their yard. It’s fine to have trees; it’s how you maintain them,” says Walker. Lower hanging limbs, he explains, are ladder fuels that can spread flames upward.

You don’t want crispy-dry plants, so keep your yard’s irrigation system maintained and active. You can also investigate using drought-resistant plants or xeriscaping to reduce the need for watering.

3. Pick Up Clutter

“A lot of times in Hawai‘i, we have the surfboards, the one-man canoes, the lumber for the projects, and you lean them against the side of the house,” says Nicholas Tanaka. He is a public education officer and fire inspector with the Maui Fire Department’s Fire Prevention Bureau.

“Removing the fuel from the area around your house is a best defense,” says Tanaka. That includes items like propane tanks or stacked firewood.

Limit combustibles like outdoor furniture and planters in those first 5 feet around the home, suggests Barretto. Minimize the use of wood lawn furniture and swing sets and leave plenty of space between them. Table umbrellas, and accessories like shades, screens and even natural fiber doormats, can catch fire too. Select materials that are more fire-resistant, like a rubber doormat.

4. Stay Mindful of Materials

Whether constructing a new home, or renovating, building materials matter. Go for glass skylights, for example, rather than plastic or fiberglass versions that might melt if embers land on them. Choose aluminum gutters over plastic versions, and for fences, use metal rather than wood.

Window size is a factor too, according to Tanaka. “Bigger windows will break faster in heat because of thermal expansion.” Invest in good double-paned windows, he suggests.

Also, any hollow spaces, such as eaves, soffits (the connecting material beneath eaves) and vents should be covered with a 1/8-inch mesh, to repel embers.

Image: Getty Images

Building a wildfire-resistant home can be done for roughly the same construction costs as a typical home, and many such homes have additional benefits such as reduced maintenance or longer lifespan, according to research conducted by Headwaters Economics, a Montana-based nonprofit research group focused on community development and land management.

Fire-resistant roofing options include composition shingle, metal, clay or cement tiles; for exterior walls, fire-resistant building materials include cement, plaster, stucco and masonry.

Retrofitting an existing home can be more costly than building new, with components such as the roof and windows adding significant expense, according to Headwaters’ research.

However, “if you are doing an upgrade to your home, that is a good opportunity to invest in wildfire safety, because you can kill two birds with one stone,” says Barretto.

Your top priority should be a fire-resistant roof, as the large surface area makes it particularly vulnerable to catching fire.

5. Be Ready To Go

Image: Getty Images

“The best defense against what people are concerned about – structural ignition – is nothing you need to buy,” says Tanaka. “We want to be prepared and it can be as simple as a go bag. Have some water, a couple changes of clothes, medications and important documents in something you can easily evacuate from your house,” he says.

He adds that mental preparation and acceptance is important, too. “Be prepared to say goodbye to what you know,” he says, “and only take what you really need to have.”

6. Create Community

Walker encourages people to join a Firewise program. “It’s a nationwide program where you can get your community assessed; it’s a great way for folks to get to know each other, discover risks, and find out who is elderly or disabled, who might need help with their lawn maintenance or evacuating in an emergency. You can protect your community as a whole.”

You can, as a community, also figure out evacuation routes. Ideally, plan for at least two routes out of the neighborhood.

On Hawai‘i Island, Erin Harner is a Firewise team leader for the Pu‘u Anahulu community, a Kailua-Kona neighborhood of 150 homes. She became certified for the volunteer position in 2020.

She and her fellow volunteers typically throw one event a month, such as “chipper day,” where neighbors were asked to collect dry leaves and dead branches, and a chipper company came through and turned the waste into mulch.

Another month, they hired a big dumpster for green waste, and neighbors piled it high. “Pulpy stuff, like bananas, or agave, or trimmings from bushes,” says Harner. “We filled that dumpster up three times. People love it. You find something they need and want, and then they will participate.”

Sometimes, the assistance is more personal, like the time volunteers got together to help an elderly resident clear an overgrown vacant lot next to her home. And the volunteer fire department has assisted with training.

Harner has also received training from the Hawai‘i Wildfire Management Organization’s Wildfire Home Risk Assessor Program, which helps homeowners spot risk potential. “Nani got about 50 people to show up in Kona from four islands; we had two days of training, and then Zoom meetings afterward to continue the education,” Harner says. The free risk assessments take about 30 to 60 minutes; request one at the HWMO’s website.

“I’m telling my neighbors, who I play pickleball with, ‘Let me come do an assessment,’ ” she says.

She notes that after a large fire, there’s a lot of attention and concern about the topic, but then community interest may dwindle.

“We had a big fire behind our community a few years ago,” she says, “and people were freaking out. About 100 people came to our next meeting. The last meeting we had, there were only 20 people there.”

As Barretto notes, “There is a role for everyone in fire prevention. Fire is complex, and 99% of wildfires are started by people. It’s a human issue – a human disaster. The only way to solve it is through the e orts of humans.”

It’s unlikely to get better any time soon.

And a growing number of condos are now carrying master insurance policies that provide less than 100% replacement coverage, which means if there’s a hurricane or other disaster, there may not be enough funds to rebuild. It’s driving some buildings to seek coverage on the pricey secondary market.

It’s creating a domino effect for everyone in “Condoland,” says Sue Savio, president of Insurance Associates in Honolulu, with condo owners, buyers, sellers and lenders all feeling the impact.

“It’s financially a serious concern,” says Savio, who estimates about 400 buildings are carrying less than 100% coverage. “I think it’s probably worse than ever.”

Rates for hurricane insurance and regular homeowner policies in Hawai‘i were already being driven up by disasters around the U.S. and the world when the deadly Maui wildfires happened last summer, putting Hawai‘i on the insurers’ radar as a wildfire state. Property and casualty insurance companies that operate in Hawai‘i pay to share their risk with the global reinsurance market, a system stressed by hurricanes and other catastrophes worldwide.

State Legislature Didn’t Intervene

The insurance woes are not limited to Hawai‘i. In California, travelers insurance recently said it would raise rates an average of 15.3% for more than 300,000 homeowners while dropping coverage for others deemed wildfire risks. State Farm had already announced it won’t renew 30,000 policyholders in California this summer. In Florida, high insurance rates and rising homeowner association fees are impacting condo sales and prices.

Hawai‘i’s Legislature tried to address the condo insurance problem during this year’s session with a bill that would have revived the Hawai‘i Hurricane Relief Fund and expanded it to allow condos to get coverage, but House Bill 2686 failed to make it out of conference committee in the last days of the session.

A condo building or complex carries a master hurricane policy to cover the cost to replace the property, which can total tens of millions of dollars in many cases, with annual premiums in the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Over the past year, Hawai‘i condo associations have seen one-year premium increases of 300% to 600%, which is four to seven times the previous cost, says Elaine Panlilio, AOAO Group Unit manager at Atlas Insurance Agency. A few buildings are looking at increases of 10 to 14 times the amount of the previous year’s bill.

Few Standard Insurance Options

There are four standard insurance companies that write property and hurricane policies for condos according to Hawai‘i’s rules. One of those four, State Farm, will only do renewals; it hasn’t issued a new policy in Hawai‘i since Hurricane Iniki in 1992.

First Insurance Co. of Hawaii and Dongbu Insurance continue to write policies, but earlier this year, the fourth, Allianz, cut the limit on its hurricane coverage to $10 million per customer, Panlilio says.

“If you’re looking at one of the newer Kaka‘ako condos here, the replacement cost for these buildings is $300 million,” Panlilio says. “If they’re not purchasing additional hurricane layers, they only have that $10 million layer of hurricane coverage.”

Failing to maintain 100% coverage can put a building on a blacklist with lenders, which makes it difficult if not impossible for a buyer to get a mortgage on a unit. Mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both of which purchase mortgages from banks and other lenders, require coverage of 100% of a building’s insurable value, which is why many banks won’t lend on units with less than 100% coverage.

Condos can add layers of other policies to close that gap, but it’s very expensive.

For example, Panlilio says that a $300 million building with only $10 million in coverage would have to buy an additional $290 million of hurricane coverage. Those additional policy layers would cost that building anywhere from $800,000 to $1 million a year, she says.

Deferred Maintenance Is a Problem

While the overall issue with the skyrocketing rates has more to do with global disasters, the condition of individual buildings also plays a factor. If a building has had many claims, or hasn’t updated its plumbing or other aging infrastructure, the association can expect a steep hike in premiums.

Alex McLaury, an agent with ACW Group in Honolulu, points to one 10-story condo that was “riddled with water claims.” Because of that, its carrier declined to renew its insurance policy.

The condo’s premiums went from $30,000 or $35,000 under the original insurer to $200,000 on the secondary market, then about $250,000, he says. This year, the premium was $375,000. Because insurers on the secondary market are not bound by state rules or rates, they can charge more than standard carriers.

“Any building that’s currently underinsured can get insurance,” McLaury recently told a gathering of the Hawai‘i Mortgage Bankers Association. “There is still insurance available. Those (policies) especially are going to be vastly more expensive. But for the excess hurricane insurance, that is available.”

To pay those higher insurance bills, associations might raise maintenance fees, assess owners a special payment or borrow money.

“They don’t have that extra $200,000, $300,000 for insurance premiums. They didn’t budget for it,” Savio says. “Some people are assessing, others are trying to finance it, like eight, nine, 10 months of the year, but then next year’s as bad. They’re still going to be short.”

Savio says some associations say they’ll take the money from their reserve funds to pay for insurance, but she reminds them that they will have to put that money back. Others say they just won’t take the full coverage because they can’t afford it, especially those in concrete condo buildings that are more likely to withstand hurricane winds.

“I mean, I understand their thinking. And I understand everybody’s thinking on this,” she says. “And they’re hoping the Legislature will do something.”

But House Bill 2686 failed to clear a conference committee a week before the session ended on May 3. It would have revived the Hawai‘i Hurricane Relief Fund, which currently has a balance of $160 million, and opened it up to condos, and also would have added to the Hawai‘i Property Insurance Association funds.

McLaury says part of the sticker shock is a result of Hawai‘i’s property insurance rates being “artificially low for a long time.” Unlike Florida with its near-annual hurricanes and California with its frequent wildfires, Hawai‘i had been mostly free of major disasters until catastrophic wildfires swept through Lahaina and Kula on Aug. 8.

Hawai‘i tends to run one or two years behind mainland trends, says McLaury. He says he recently heard a property insurance broker from the mainland say that last year was the worst she had seen in 45 years in the insurance industry.

“I think we’re now getting into probably our worst year,” he says. Rates on the mainland have started to stabilize this year, so maybe Hawai‘i can expect to see stabilization in about two years.

However, reinsurance companies have deductibles for insurance carriers that are two or three times higher than before, he says.

Because the insurance carriers have higher deductibles of their own, “they have a greater exposure, so that greater exposure is going to mean that they’re going to have to charge more to offset that exposure,” McLaury says. “That’s one reason I don’t think we’re going to see a rate reduction for the next couple of years. I don’t think we’ll ever get back to where we were … like in 2018.

Reduces the Pool of Potential Buyers

Home sales are being affected at those 400 or so buildings that no longer carry 100% replacement coverage because most banks won’t write mortgages for units in those buildings.

“Sellers may have a di¡ cult time,” says Victor Brock, a legislative chair at the Hawai‘i Mortgage Bankers Association. “They get the pool of potential buyers diminished because it’s cash buyers, or people that can come in with bigger down payments, not the whole big pool of potential buyers. And then if someone wants to refinance, they might have very little luck.”

Meanwhile, House Speaker Scott Saiki says that while there are no plans to call a special session to deal with the insurance issue, he doesn’t rule it out. He told Gov. Josh Green that he and Insurance Commissioner Gordon Ito would monitor the situation over the summer.

“If we begin to see major impact with transactions, with the ability for people to borrow funds to purchase units, then we may have to consider it,” Saiki says. “This issue is not just about the availability and cost of property insurance but all of the ramifications which impact buyers, sellers and existing homeowners who need to insure their properties.”

A four-story walk up with 36 affordable rental units is nearly complete at 216 Olive Ave., the former site of seven dilapidated cottages built in the early 1920s.

The site, just blocks from Wahiawā’s Walgreens, McDonald’s and other retailers, is the latest example of how Honolulu’s Bill 7, enacted in 2019, is transforming decaying or underused small lots into needed affordable apartments. The measure limits work to areas already zoned for multifamily dwellings.

The Honolulu Department of Planning and Permitting says that as of March 1, two projects with 51 total units have been completed under the law, which grants fee and tax waivers and exemptions from standard building regulations. Another eight projects composed of 236 total units are under construction. And 40 applications are either pending review by DPP or on hold while applicants make corrections to plans.

Bill 7 led to the establishment of a five-year pilot program with a goal of building 500 affordable rental units annually. But due to slow performance brought on by the pandemic, differences in how the law is interpreted, and higher interest rates and building costs, the program was extended and now expires in 2030.

Other efforts are in the works to help speed developments under the so-called Bill 7 program. Last year, Honolulu passed a law to allow some self-certification of projects, and a bill is moving through the Honolulu City Council to increase government subsidies for these walk-up apartments.

Developer Paul Lam of Lam Capital is part of DPP’s Affordable Housing/ Bill 7 Task Force, which includes other developers, contractors, architects and county officials. He has built one 26-unit Bill 7 project in Makiki and is working on eight others.

“We can’t depend on government to solve our problem,” he says. “We have to do it ourselves, along with the government backing and supporting us, and the lending institutions, our local banks offering creative solutions to finance. This is the key to solving affordable housing.”

Redevelopment Opportunity

In the 1980s, Wilbert Toda, a World War II veteran, was looking for real estate to buy. He came across 216 Olive Ave. and its two neighboring lots, which totaled 17,000 square feet.

Old cottages occupied the lots, but the land was also zoned for apartments. His plan was to one day replace the cottages with denser, multifamily housing. Linda Austin, his daughter and the owner of the land since 2003, says Toda often talked about his plan at dinner, but building costs were prohibitive.

That changed in 2019 when Bill 7 passed, making it cheaper to build higher density rentals on lots up to 20,000 square feet in apartment, apartment mixed-use and business mixed-use zones. The projects are not required to have off-street parking, elevators or bicycle racks, though a developer could include them, and buildings can be up to 60 feet tall.

At least 80% of the units must be rented to households that earn 100% of the area median income or less – about $131,000 for a family of four – for at least 15 years. Up to 20% of the units can be occupied by property owners or their families.

Such projects can receive 10-year property tax exemptions on units rented at 80% AMI or below, plus waivers on building permits and wastewater system facility fees. The county permitting department is required to approve or disapprove Bill 7 building permit applications within 90 days.

The affordable walk-up at 216 Olive Ave. includes 12 studios and 24 one-bedroom units. | Photo: Aaron Yoshino

Austin worked with developer Derek Lock of HNL Development to build the Olive Avenue project. The building has 12 studios and 24 one-bedroom units, each with a mix of vinyl and carpet flooring, plus a washer and dryer. There are two stairwells and 36 parking stalls. One unit will be occupied by Austin’s adult son, and rents for the others will target those earning under 80% of the area median income. The goal is to attract people who work in Wahiawā, Hale‘iwa, Mililani and at Schofield Barracks.

“It’ll welcome tenants that will add to the neighborhood rather than subtract from the neighborhood,” Lock says. “So I think that’s something that Bill 7 has brought to these older apartment-zoned neighborhoods.”

Further Incentives

Bill 7 was meant to spur privately financed affordable housing development, but it was written when construction costs were around $250 per square foot.

Lock says the Wahiawā project came in under $300 per square foot, but if it were built today, it would cost much more due to higher interest rates, inflation and supply chain shortages. He and others say those higher costs are main impediments to Bill 7’s progress.

“While it’s a legacy project for them (the Toda/Austin family), you know, it’s still, basically, privately financed affordable housing,” says Lock, who is building two other Bill 7 projects in the McCully area. “There’s no immediate windfall like a lot of other developments. And it’s hard to make it pencil. You’ve got to keep the construction costs down, you’ve got to have a low land cost basis to begin with.”

In 2021, Honolulu created a program to provide Bill 7 project owners with completion grants of up to $9,000 per dwelling unit for units rented to households earning between 61% and 100% of the area median income. Units rented to households earning less than that could net project owners up to $15,000 each.

The program was capped at $10 million. Only one project had received funds from the completion grants as of early March, says Curtis Lum, DPP information officer. That project received $147,170.

Honolulu’s City Council is now considering a new grant program that would pull from the $10 million cap to provide projects with per-unit grants before construction begins. The program is part of Bill 3 and if it passes, developers would receive up to $25,000 for units rented to households earning between 61% and 100% of the area median income. Units rented to households earning less than that could net developers up to $35,000.

Projects can only receive a preconstruction grant or a post-construction grant, not both. Preconstruction grant recipients would be required to pay their workers prevailing wages in exchange for the subsidies. But they could also be certified by the Hawai‘i Housing Finance and Development Corp. and receive exemptions from school impact fees under the governor’s fifth emergency proclamation on affordable housing.

Lam says Bill 3 could be a game-changer: “We’re not getting enough government subsidy (under the current system). … It doesn’t pencil.” He adds the Bill 3 subsidy, if approved, will enable developers like him to move faster, put less of their own money down to get a loan and pay prevailing wages.

Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi also secured from the state $5 million in matching grant funds for Bill 7 projects, according to the 2023 housing plan prepared by the city’s Office of Housing. Lum says there are talks to allow the use of these funds for preconstruction costs, but nothing has been decided yet.

Key Housing Solution

Lam is the founder, chairman and senior advisor for Perform International, a concert event planning company. He began building affordable rentals in metro Honolulu after Bill 7 passed.

He lived in affordable housing while growing up in California and saw how unstable housing can hurt a family’s social, emotional and financial well-being. He sees Bill 7 as a key solution to Honolulu’s affordable housing shortage and says he appreciates the way city and state governments are addressing challenges.

Last year, Honolulu enacted Bill 6, which allows certain licensed architects and engineers to self-certify that their affordable housing projects stemming from Bill 7 comply with relevant building codes. The temporary self-certification program is meant to help alleviate DPP’s backlog of permit applications.

Gordon Pang, housing information officer for the Hawai‘i Housing Finance and Development Corp., wrote in an email that Bill 7 projects could receive a general excise tax exemption if a developer agrees to keep rents affordable for at least 30 years, pays prevailing wages and records a declaration of restrictive covenants at the Bureau of Conveyances.

Lam says that so-called Bill 7 projects offer the best return on government investment in housing. About 1,700 affordable housing units unrelated to the Bill 7 projects received $284 million in federal and state low-income housing tax credits and subsidies in 2023. That’s about $167,000 per unit – and those units could take multiple years to build, he says.

But so-called Bill 7 projects can be built at a fraction of that time and cost, he says: “To me, it’s a no-brainer. This is the only way we can transform within metro Honolulu. How else? I mean, there are no large parcels. But we can take a 5,000-squarefoot lot and convert it to 25 units.”

On the hottest day ever recorded in Honolulu – Aug. 31, 2019 – a group of volunteers organized by the Honolulu Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency attached heat sensors to their cars and collected readings around O‘ahu. The project’s timing just happened to coincide with the oppressive weather, brought on by a record-breaking marine heat wave that was cooking up the waters around the Islands.

The volunteers recorded startling discrepancies. While the air temperature hit a high of 95 degrees Fahrenheit, the “heat index,” which also factors in humidity, reached 107.3 degrees, logged at the Waimalu Plaza shopping center between 3 and 4 p.m. That was more than 22 degrees higher than the coolest temperature on O‘ahu recorded that hour.

This commercial stretch of ‘Aiea is one of the city’s many “urban heat islands,” where buildings, rooftops and pavement absorb the sunlight and re-radiate it as heat. Few trees are around to cool the area by blocking and reflecting the sun, or, in a process called evapotranspiration, releasing water into the atmosphere through their leaves.

And there’s another layer of heat to consider. The heat index is measured in shade. But the tropical sun can dramatically heat surfaces, making a sunbaked sidewalk or parking lot significantly hotter.

John DeLay, an associate professor of geography and environment at Honolulu Community College, measured temperatures in direct sunlight and under the thick canopy of a monkeypod tree at Makalapa Neighborhood Park near Pearl Harbor. While the air temperatures in the shade and sun were nearly identical, surfaces in the shade were 12 degrees cooler. “That’s why you’re feeling a significant difference in your body temperature,” he says.

About 1 million people live on O‘ahu, most in developed areas that are prone to the urban heat-island effect. Pockets of high heat and low vegetation can be found all along the coastal plains of O‘ahu, including in Pearl City, Waipahu, Kapolei, and Wai‘anae.

In the core of Honolulu, low-lying neighborhoods get dangerously hot, as shown by the dark red areas of the O‘ahu Community Heat Map. At these hot spots – stretching from the Daniel K. Inouye International Airport to residential areas hugging Wai‘alae Avenue in Kaimukī – afternoon temperatures on that extreme heat day in 2019 reached 99.7 degrees and higher.

Jammed with apartment buildings and tightly packed houses, many of the trees and gardens in these dense urban areas have been cut down and paved over for parking. Municipal “street trees,” wedged into small plots of dirt along sidewalks, can have short lives and stunted growth, with little chance of developing the thick, sprawling canopies of mature shower trees blossoming in a park.

Tree canopy maps created in 2022 by the state’s urban forestry program, Kaulunani, along with the U.S. Forest Service, show that in neighborhoods such as Kalihi, McCully-Mō‘ili‘ili, Kapahulu and the makai side of Waikīkī, and parts of Kaimukī and Pālolo, tree-canopy coverage is less than 8% and as low as 2% – far less than the city’s goal of 35% coverage. Honolulu’s overall canopy coverage is estimated at 20%.

These neighborhoods are also some of the most disadvantaged parts of the city, as shown on the multilayered canopy map depicting income levels. Median household incomes in many of these areas fall in the lowest ranges – from $25,000 to $57,000 or from $57,000 to $76,000 – according to data from the 2015-2020 American Community Survey.

But travel south to north, into the cooler, often rainier and greener neighborhoods at higher elevations, and income levels tend to rise precipitously, a historical pattern that began in the 19th century as those with means moved out of the hot, congested town that had coalesced around the harbor.

Heat Is a Public Health Crisis

Those over-paved areas that don’t have sufficient tree canopy are going to be the hottest,” Brad Romine of the Honolulu Climate Change Commission says. Romine, a coastal resilience specialist with the UH Sea Grant College Program and deputy director of the Pacific Islands Climate Adaptation Science Center, has worked with the five-member commission to develop guidelines that track the impact of urban heat and recommend ways for city and state officials to deal with it.

Average temperatures in Hawai‘i have risen 2.6 degrees Fahrenheit since 1950, and about 3.5 degrees at the Honolulu airport, according to Matthew Gonser, chief resilience officer and executive director of the Honolulu Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency. Much of that rise has been in the past decade, and near-future projections show it will get hotter.

“We have seen a marked increase in hot days and warm nights. … It’s one of the most conspicuous, in-our-face results of using dirty fossil energy and the resulting climate changes.” – Matthew Gonser

In a heat wave like the one in 2019, when trade winds collapse and humidity rises, the heat can be punishing on the body.

Dr. Diana Felton, head of the state Department of Health’s Communicable Diseases and Public Health Nursing Division, says that vulnerable people will bear the brunt of the impact of intense heat: the elderly and children, outdoor workers, people with chronic health conditions, and those who can’t afford air conditioning or access health care.

Felton is a lead member of a new DOH working group that’s studying the local health impacts of extreme heat, floods, drought, wildfires, mosquito-borne illnesses and five other climate threats illustrated on a circular chart that Felton calls, with dark humor, “the pinwheel of death.”

The Climate Change and Health Working Group was formed to expand climate-change planning beyond sea-level rise and protecting infrastructure, she says. “No one was talking about the disease and injury that is going to come from climate change, and has actually already come.”

Felton is working with the group to gather evidence of how heat is impacting health in Hawai‘i, and is still sifting through data. But one fact is well documented across the globe: Fatalities rise when the heat index reaches 95 degrees – which can be air temperature of 90 degrees and humidity of 50%, for example – for an extended period.

“The longer the heat wave goes on, you have increased mortality,” explained Dr. Elizabeth Keifer, an assistant clinical professor at UH Mānoa’s John A. Burns School of Medicine, at a seminar in January.

Romine says that urban Honolulu could experience intolerable heat in just a few decades. “I think we could surpass 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by mid-century, and that’s only going to exacerbate heat waves,” he says. “What that means is more frequent and severe heat emergencies.”

At Honolulu’s Division of Urban Forestry, part of the Department of Parks and Recreation, new administrator Roxanne Adams says her groundskeepers have switched to long-sleeved, high-visibility Dri-Fit uniforms that don’t require the extra layer of a safety vest. She plans to buy cooling neck wraps to supplement the ice water that work crews carry in their trucks.

Roxanne Adams, administrator of Honolulu Department of Parks and Recreation’s Division of Urban Forestry, is responsible for trees in public parks and rights of-way. It’s a big job that requires residents to help: “If neighbors are watching the trees in front of their house, the chances of survival increases greatly. | Photo: Aaron Yoshino

“They notice the heat. We all notice that it’s hotter and drier than when we were kids,” Adams says.

“We’re not going crazy when we say, oh my gosh, it’s not as comfortable to sleep anymore,” Gonser echoes. “We have seen a marked increase in hot days and warm nights. … It’s one of the most conspicuous, in-our-face results of using dirty fossil energy and the resulting climate changes.”

Federal Funds to Expand the Canopy

In November, $42.6 million in competitive federal grants, funded by the Inflation Reduction Act and administered by the U.S. Forest Service, was awarded to Hawai‘i groups to provide “equitable access to trees.” In raw dollars, only California, New York and Oregon received more money than Hawai‘i, and in terms of funding per resident, Hawai‘i topped the list.

“It just shows how ready people are to take on this kind of work. … I feel like in five years we’re going to look back and say, wow, this was an amazing time,” says Heather McMillen, an urban and community forester.

McMillen heads the state’s Kaulunani program, an urban and community forestry initiative at the state Department of Land and Natural Resources’ Division of Forestry and Wildlife. Her small office distributes grant money, does outreach and education, and partners with the city, state and nonprofit sector to improve the health and viability of Hawai‘i’s trees.

Kaulunani received a $2 million competitive grant from the U.S. Forest Service, and is launching a project to plant shade trees at select Title 1 schools, where at least 47% of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals.

McMillen says that if you look at all public school campuses, and extend the footprint to include a half-mile buffer around the school, only 21% would meet the minimum goal of 30% tree canopy. But among the 67% of schools that are designated Title 1, or 197 schools, just 14% have these fuller canopies – an example of disparities in who has access to the cooling benefits of trees.

The project also involves creating a school forester position to work with teachers and staff on maintaining the trees. “Planting the trees is the easy part. Helping them grow to their full potential … is a much longer-term commitment,” McMillen says.

Heather McMillen, coordinator of the state Kaulunani community and urban forestry program, says: “Trees are not beautification. Trees aren’t nice to do. This is critical infrastructure, and it needs to be part of the planning process. | Photo: Aaron Yoshino

Other groups receiving funding include the Akaka Foundation for Tropical Forests and the Friends of Amy B. H. Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden, both on Hawai‘i Island, and various county, state and UH Mānoa projects.

The largest U.S. Forest Service award in Hawai‘i, at $20 million, went to Kupu, a 17-year-old nonprofit that has trained thousands of young people, many from disadvantaged backgrounds, for jobs in conservation and natural resource management. In the process, its teams have cleared about 150,000 acres of invasive species and planted 1.5 million native specimens.

CEO and co-founder John Leong explains that most of the $20 million grant will be re-granted to other groups in Hawai‘i and the Pacific region over the next five years, with Kupu providing technical expertise. The application process is expected to open in the second quarter of 2024.

In the world of urban forestry, the Kupu grant is a huge amount of money. For comparison, Hawai‘i’s 2023 state allocation for urban and community forestry from the U.S. Forest Service is $1.5 million. Many people interviewed for this article say they’re eager to find out who will win sub-grants from Kupu and what projects will be funded.

The broad theme of the federal grant is to expand the tree canopy and cool down places where people live, but the finer details require projects to benefit underserved areas. Projects linked to creating green jobs and engaging communities in planning and decision-making are also prioritized.

The O‘ahu community heat map identifying urban “hot spots” was developed by the Honolulu Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency. It’s based on peak afternoon temperatures recorded on Aug. 31, 2019. The full islandwide map can be found at tinyurl.com/oahuheatmap

Kupu’s mission lands at the intersection of all those goals. Leong says it will seek out organizations that will bring trees to “under-resourced” areas, both urban and rural, and build up a workforce of arborists and conservation workers.

He’s especially focused on training and educating, both for those doing the work and the broader community that benefits from more trees, more jobs, and an understanding of how climate change will impact them and what they can do about it.

“When you educate a young person, you’re really impacting about seven people: their parents, their grandparents and their siblings,” he says.

In the fight against climate change, “We have all the right stuff in our Islands to be a model for the rest of the world,” Leong says. “But we also have to engage communities at the grassroots level, empower them and give them the resources they need on the ground to be successful. That’s really what this grant is about.”

Why Trees Are Important

In 2016, the nonprofit Smart Trees Pacific released the dispiriting results of its urban tree-canopy analysis. Nearly 5% of the tree canopy, or about 76,600 trees, had disappeared in a four year span. The consensus among experts is that things haven’t improved since then.

Trees are cut to make way for larger houses or more parking space for multifamily homes. They’re cut because they’re old, and then not replaced, or because it’s easier to remove a tree that’s interfering with a sidewalk or utility project than to work around it. They’re cut because a homeowner is worried about liability. And many times, they’re cut because someone wants a better view or just can’t deal with the rubbish.

“It’s death by a thousand cuts,” says McMillen from the state’s Kaulunani program. No one tree-removal project accounted for a significant portion of the loss, she says, and it’s happening on both public and private land.

Gonser, from the city’s climate change office, says street trees are sometimes destroyed maliciously. That’s an added insult when you consider all the nurturing required in a tree’s first few years, before it’s planted in the ground, and “it’s vandalism of a city asset and infrastructure.”

Trees can take years, even decades, to get large enough for their benefits to dramatically overshadow their costs. “They cost money to maintain, as do sidewalks, as do stoplights, as do fire hydrants. But unlike that kind of infrastructure, trees are the only kind of infrastructure that increase in value over time,” McMillen says.

An analysis conducted for the city’s Division of Urban Forestry found that for every dollar spent on Honolulu’s trees, the city gets back $3 in benefits. Estimates in many other cities show even more positive cost-benefit ratios.

On the global level, trees are called the “lungs of the world” for their ability to pull enormous quantities of carbon dioxide from the air, which they store in their trunks and branches. With the help of the sun, trees then release oxygen through their leaves. A dramatic NASA time-lapse video shows the forests of the Northern Hemisphere sucking carbon dioxide from the air through photosynthesis as trillions of leaves open in the spring and summer.

The lungs metaphor goes deeper as well. For people who feel connected to trees, or just aware of their contributions, trees don’t just make life on Earth possible, they make it worth living.

Trees provide shade and cooling. They clean the air by removing pollutants, and provide food for people and habitats for birds. They protect against flooding by absorbing stormwater and help prevent beach erosion.

Trees reduce noise in the city, and traffic calms along tree-lined streets. In hot climates, their shade makes a city more walkable and bikeable.

And there are intangible benefits too, McMillen says: Trees are the “keepers of memories” for anyone who spent time playing in them as a child, and they can strengthen social connections among neighbors sharing fruit from backyard trees. They help define a place and remind us where we are on this planet.

Trees can even change cortisol levels, heart rates, breathing and mood. At the Tropical Landscape and Human Interaction Lab at UH Mānoa, students’ physiological, “preconscious” responses were captured as they viewed images of trees. Lush, green canopies triggered states of relaxation while images of canopies with their tops lopped off had the opposite effect, says Andy Kaufman, an associate professor of tropical plant and soil sciences and a landscape specialist.

For all their benefits, trees and other vegetation are often taken for granted and treated as disposable. “Nature is so important to us, but landscaping is the first thing to be cut and the last to be addressed,” says Kaufman, who founded and runs the interaction lab. “We should embrace living in nature,” not work against it, he says.

Kaufman has seen many examples of trees chain-sawed at the top, which lets disease and pests enter the tree and weakens the branches that grow back from the stumps. He’s seen trees clear-cut from an ‘Ewa school’s campus, a “complete streets” project in ‘Aiea that failed to include trees, new buildings constructed with only a tiny strip for plantings, and – in an especially egregious case – miles of oleanders along the Moanalua Freeway ripped out and replaced with concrete.

The biggest challenge, Kaulunani’s McMillen explains, is to get policymakers, developers, homeowners and anyone who cares about their neighborhood to change the way they think about trees.

“Trees are not beautification. Trees aren’t nice to do,” McMillen says. “This is critical infrastructure, and it needs to be part of the planning process, not an additional thing to do if you have funds or if you have the inclination.”

Where Trees Are Needed Most

The City and County of Honolulu’s Division of Urban Forestry can trace its roots to the Shade Tree Commission, which started in 1922 to deal with the ongoing issue of how to cool a tropical city, now getting hotter with climate change. “I would love for our city to be a city in the forest. I’m a firm believer that trees make everything look better, cleaner and more friendly,” says Adams, the division’s administrator.

Before joining the division last year, she spent two decades overseeing the more than 4,000 trees at UH Mānoa. The campus is an accredited arboretum and includes what’s probably the nation’s largest baobab tree, which is at least 110 years old.

Her new role overseeing the estimated 250,000 trees in city and county parks and public rights-of-way offers a vastly larger canvas for planting – the entire island of O‘ahu – but also far more challenges.

At the moment, Adams’ division is finishing a complete inventory of all city trees, which will let her team know exactly what trees they’re responsible for, which ones need attention first and where to plant next. The project, funded in 2022 with $300,000 in federal assistance, will be done before the end of June.

She’s also been focusing on filling vacancies that have accumulated over the past decade. Adams says her team is nearly fully staffed to do the hard physical labor of digging holes and planting trees, many of which start from seeds in the division’s nursery at Kapi‘olani Regional Park.

Once the tree inventory is complete, Adams says her goal will be to plant where shade is needed most, such as in Kalihi, Mō‘ili‘ili, Kapahulu and Kaimukī, and outward to ‘Ewa, Nānākuli and Wai‘anae.

“We’re definitely looking at equity and will be planting in those neighborhoods,” Adams says.

Kaulunani and U.S. Forest Service maps track tree canopy coverage and heat vulnerability, and also data such as median family incomes in a particular area, the presence of impervious surfaces, the prevalence of asthma and cardiovascular disease, the number of residents by census tracts and Native Hawaiian populations. That fuller picture of which neighborhoods are being left behind – economically, environmentally, medically – seems to be shifting the conversation about where to focus efforts.

Gonser, from the city’s climate change office, says that, over time, patterns in how a community is designed and developed “can exacerbate increasing temperatures and make it hotter in places. There really are disparities or inequities as a result of these practices. … We’re trying to make sure that we bring focused, strategic attention to those neighborhoods.”

People living in treeless, low-income areas on O’ahu, such as this stretch of Mō’ili’ili, suffer most in heatwaves.

 

In contrast, monkeypod trees line Kapi’olani Boulevard from Atkinson Drive to South Street, offering shade and cooling to pedestrians and residents.

While planting in an older neighborhood full of hardened surfaces and densely packed housing requires more effort than in more remote areas, among urban foresters, anything is possible. Their often-repeated motto is “the right tree in the right place with the right care.”

In unshaded neighborhoods, for example, sections of concrete can be removed from sidewalks to make space for plantings. Clusters of small street trees can be planted together to create a bigger canopy. For something more ambitious, car lanes could be used for planting large canopy trees, such as the monkeypods that line Kapi‘olani Boulevard from Atkinson Drive to South Street – a grove that’s been designated as one of Hawai‘i’s “exceptional trees.”

While trees can pose difficulties, those difficulties are surmountable, Kaufman from UH Mānoa says. “There are always ways to restructure roads. You can always work around trees. … Green infrastructure should be business as usual in every municipality.”

He and a team of researchers recently found that using Silva Cells – a modular, suspended pavement system developed a decade ago – is the most promising way to grow healthy street trees in Hawai‘i. Unlike other methods they tested, the roots stayed contained rather than sprawling out and up, damaging infrastructure. He says the long-term tests were the first ever conducted in a tropical urban environment, where trees and their roots grow year-round.

It’s not a magic bullet, Kaufman explains. But better planting techniques could help expand the canopy in some of the city’s oldest, most crowded neighborhoods, where working-class and middle-class people began moving more than a century ago, as new tram lines opened up new possibilities.

The Old Suburbs

Honolulu, like everywhere, has been defined by shifting migration and development. Through much of its history, one trend seemed clear: wealthier people tended to congregate in the hills or near the water, while the less affluent settled in the low-lying, hotter middle.

The first hint of a city started in the early 1800s, as whalers began stopping here for parts, provisions and rest, and a makeshift harbor settlement emerged to meet demand. By 1845, the capital of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i had officially moved from Lahaina to a now bustling Honolulu.

Wealthy ali‘i and white settlers were the first to leave the core, says William Chapman, the interim dean of UH Mānoa’s School of Architecture and a professor of American studies, with expertise in historical preservation. They fanned out for more space, less disease and often cooler climates.

Queen Ka‘ahumanu, for example, regularly retreated to her Mānoa house, near the present-day Waioli Kitchen and Bake Shop, where she died in 1832. In 1853, the German physician William Hillebrand built a house and planted trees at the site of Foster Botanical Garden.

In 1882, Anna Rice Cooke and Charles Montague Cooke, both members of missionary families, built a home on Beretania Street, on the site where the Honolulu Museum of Art is now. When electric streetcars were introduced in 1901, and the first automobiles traversed the city’s roads, large estates were constructed in the hills of Nu‘uanu Valley. Some are now occupied by foreign consulates.

After the kingdom was illegally overthrown by white businessmen in 1893, the global sugar and pineapple trade accelerated, along with immigration. Contract laborers first arrived from China in the mid-1800s, followed by people from Japan, Korea, Europe, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

Kaka‘ako in the late 1800s was filled with small houses for artisans, stevedores and service workers, many of whom were Native Hawaiian, says Chapman. Working-class and artisan-class residents began branching out into Kalihi and Liliha.

Honolulu Tree Canopy Map, 2021. Prepared by EarthDefine, U.S. Forest Service, NOAA and Hawai‘i Division of Forestry and Wildlife.

Streetcars opened up neighborhoods far beyond the harbor area. Many Japanese and Chinese workers, freed from contract labor that was deemed illegal in 1900, migrated east along King Street, renting or buying modest wooden houses stretching all the way to the rice fields of Mō‘ili‘ili.

By the 1920s, satellite communities as far away as Kapahulu and Kaimukī were developed as the rail lines expanded, while along the coast, affluent people had moved to the Diamond Head area and were expanding into Kāhala.

John Rosa, an associate professor of history at UH Mānoa, says his great-grandfather on the Chinese side of his family built a house on 16th Avenue during Kaimukī’s first wave of development. In the 1950s, his grandparents moved to a house in the breezy mountains above the neighborhood, in Maunalani Heights, where he grew up.

Many prosperous families had moved mauka into Mānoa Valley and Nu‘uanu, where whites-only “tacit agreements,” sometimes written into covenants governing new subdivisions, kept others out, explains Chapman.

These rules also determined the physical environment. “There were a lot of restrictions,” Chapman says. “It had to be a substantial lot. Residents weren’t allowed to build walls over a certain height. They couldn’t open a gambling den or a bar or a restaurant.”

The racial elements of the exclusionary practices were dropped after World War II, and the cooler, leafier neighborhoods opened to a mixture of people. Among the new Mānoa residents were many upwardly mobile Japanese residents who had gone to UH Mānoa on the federal GI Bill, Rosa says.

After the war, and before zoning laws were enacted in 1961, high-rise apartments were constructed amid the single-family houses of Waikīkī and Makiki. Eventually, cars brought people to the new postwar suburbs of ‘Āina Haina and Hawai‘i Kai, and then even farther from the city.

Today, some of Honolulu’s old working-class, mixed-use neighborhoods can feel improvised, a mismatched collection of small wooden bungalows, motel-style walk-ups with open corridors, taller “bare-bones” buildings with interior hallways, and their posher cousins, the newer high-rise condos.

“Planners aren’t the ones that actually build cities. It’s the developers,” Chapman says. “It’s like a rowboat and a tanker. The tanker is the developers, and they pretty well decide what’s going to happen.”

For example, setback regulations, which started in 1969, are still just 5 feet. “You’re supposed to put planting in the setback, but they’re often not very robust,” he says. “Developers probably see vegetation and trees as a luxury add-on. And if they don’t need to do it, they won’t do it.”

Chapman sees the old neighborhoods as “transitional,” with new housing set to rise in places like Isenberg Street in Mō‘ili‘ili. There, a 23-story tower is under development by the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, and on Kapi‘olani Boulevard, the Kobayashi Group is constructing a 43-story condo.

But with no requirements for trees, shade, green walls or green roofs – on new high-rise projects or throughout the older neighborhoods – these urban heat islands will only get hotter.

Greening the City

Community groups have been focused on trees and shade since at least 1912, when the newly formed Outdoor Circle, a volunteer women’s group, planted 28 monkeypod trees in Honolulu’s ‘A‘ala Park. Those trees still stand today.

The organization has spent the subsequent 112 years planting and protecting trees in public spaces. In 2017, the Outdoor Circle helped found Trees for Honolulu’s Future, a nonprofit group dedicated to increasing the urban tree canopy, advocating for laws and policies, and educating the public.

The group’s president, Daniel Dinell, spearheaded the educational component of the Makalapa Neighborhood Park project, which quantified the impact of shade on how we experience heat. Young “heat island investigators” from the underserved area nearby learned to measure trees, read temperature sensors and test hypotheses.

Among the organization’s many projects, Dinell is also leading a group of “citizen foresters” to map the trees in Kaimukī and locate places to plant, and he’s working with the city to get trees in the ground. One of the big obstacles to new street trees, he says, is getting homeowners and renters to water the trees in their early years, when they’re still weak.

“Just activating the community is key to the goal of increasing the tree canopy,” Dinell says. Government agencies can’t do it alone, Adams, the head of Honolulu’s Urban Forestry Division, says. “It’s critical that our neighborhoods, our friends, our family chip in and help us get this done. It’s a kōkua thing. If neighbors are watching the trees in front of their house, the chances of survival increase greatly.”

Residents can contact Adams’ division to request a street tree, at 808-971-7151 or DUF@honolulu.gov. The city selects hardy trees that won’t become invasive pests; most native trees aren’t able to survive in harsh urban settings with vehicle pollutants and poor soils.

On Hawai‘i’s Arbor Day, about 4,000 trees, including fruit trees, are given away across the Islands. The next annual event, organized by Kaulunani and government, nonprofit and community partners, is scheduled for Nov. 2.

At the Honolulu Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency, an ongoing effort to plant 100,000 trees on O‘ahu has passed the halfway mark. The agency’s online map tracks city plantings as well as trees planted on private property and larger restoration efforts.

The project, says Gonser, the office’s executive director, “was intended to be a campaign of awareness, and to celebrate those that are the true champions out in the community.” He says many plantings have not been recorded yet.

All of these efforts are steps in the right direction, and indications that more people and organizations recognize the value of trees in a time of rising heat and sweltering cities.

Globally, 2023 was by far the warmest year on record, according to NOAA. And while the heat affects everyone, it’s much worse in urban heat islands bereft of trees. And it’s particularly punishing for people without air conditioning.

“We’re already facing a lot of heat in these urban areas. It’s a problem we need to fix now,” says Romine, of the Climate Change Commission. “And if we start addressing it now, it’ll make these communities safer, more comfortable and more equitable, now and for the future.”

• For decades, Hawai‘i didn’t build enough housing to keep pace with population growth. Meanwhile, demand for second homes and short-term rentals nibbled away at inventory. Now, we face a statewide housing shortage. Maui faces an even more dire shortage, with thousands of homes destroyed by fire.
• Hawai‘i’s four counties have the most burdensome housing regulations in the country, limiting new supply. “Exclusionary zoning” policies that favor detached single-family homes have led to suburban sprawl. That sprawl has attracted the opposition of environmental and Native Hawaiian groups, who now form a significant anti-development lobby.These groups are joined by established homeowners who want to preserve their communities in amber and prevent any redevelopment or change. The combined political influence of these groups stymies housing reform.
• Unprecedented demographic changes await. The state has weathered seven consecutive years of population decline, a trend that shows no sign of slowing, despite optimistic projections by our state economists. Our population is aging and our labor force is shrinking. Young people are marrying later than their parents and grandparents and having fewer children. It seems that after decades of rapid population growth, our state has reached a plateau. Opponents of growth cheer, while their children weep for lack of economic opportunity and affordable housing.
• As an American state, Hawai‘i is at the mercy of the Federal Reserve, which sets the country’s monetary policy. Rising interest rates normally reduce housing prices. But the Federal Reserve’s recent rate hikes have not lowered housing prices in Hawai‘i. Instead, the high rates have further increased the unaffordability of homeownership for many local families. And out-of-state demand for Hawai‘i real estate remains strong.
• Covid devastated the local economy, with more families slipping into the just-above-poverty status of ALICE (asset-limited, income-constrained, employed) despite federal assistance. And the fires on Maui interrupted the recovery. The state and county must support displaced families, replace infrastructure and rebuild. And they may be on the hook for billions in damages, pending the outcome of civil litigation.
• Slowing economic growth means less tax revenue to support the basic functions of government, including building and maintaining infrastructure or issuing housing permits. Our political system works well when the economic pie is expanding; more can be given to competing factions each year. But growth has slowed in recent years, making future decisions more difficult.With population shrinking, interest rates high and economic growth slowing, we need a paradigm shift in the way we solve housing and other problems. Here are five ways to solve our housing crisis once and for all.

1. End the Sprawl

Sprawl is unsustainable. But it’s not inevitable.

Zoning is the basic policy of land use, and it’s set by the counties. Two aspects of zoning contribute to suburban sprawl: single-use zoning and limits on density. We should change both.

• Single-use zoning is designed to separate residential, commercial and industrial uses. It makes sense to separate homes and factories; it’s counterproductive to separate residential and commercial uses. The most vibrant cities in the world (think: London, Paris, Tokyo) favor mixed-use development. And charming small towns do too. This is as true in Hawai‘i as it is everywhere else. For example, it’s no coincidence that the most popular towns to visit on Maui were all developed before the county’s current zoning code was adopted in 1960: think of Hāna, Makawao, Pā‘ia, Wailuku and pre-fire Lahaina. Compare those quaint towns with Kīhei, the land of strip malls.
• Density is the key to sustainability. On islands with limited land, we cannot afford to sprawl endlessly. Sprawl is bad for the environment (think: vehicle emissions and that Joni Mitchell song about paving paradise to put up a parking lot). Sprawl is an inefficient use of land that could be used for open space, agriculture or renewable energy.And sprawl is terrible for quality of life: Time spent driving is time spent dying. A person spending two hours a day sitting behind the wheel is sedentary and more likely to suffer from obesity. And commutes reduce time spent with family, volunteering in the community or getting civically engaged.

Recommendation: Allow dense, mixed use development near job centers.

2. Increase Certainty and Speed 

Time is money. And with high interest rates, time is more expensive than ever. To keep housing affordable, developers need certainty and speed in the entitlement process.

• Certainty means that so long as projects conform with existing zoning and building codes, they are automatically approved, without discretionary approvals required by government employees or elected politicians.
• Speed means that projects are approved quickly. Policymakers often ignore the impact of time on the cost of development, but the costs contribute to higher home prices and discourage housing construction.

Developers take on substantial risk, fronting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars before construction begins. On large projects, pre-development costs can run in the millions. And it’s not uncommon for small developers to mortgage their homes to finance projects.

A project that starts out affordable can easily become unaffordable over time. For example, a developer may plan to offer for-sale units affordable to families earning the area’s median income. But if interest rates are raised before the project receives approvals, borrowing costs may force the developer to convert for-sale units into affordable rentals. Meanwhile, every day developers wait for entitlements, their labor and material costs are increasing. If an affordable rental project is delayed too long, it could be scrapped or converted into a market rate project.

Recommendation: Allow what is called “by right development.” That means none or fewer discretionary approvals, which involve elected or unelected officials picking and choosing the projects they allow. When discretionary approvals are necessary, use a “shot clock” to speed decision making.

3. Focus on Adaptive Reuse and Redevelopment

Demand for commercial real estate declined during Covid, and widespread adoption of remote work means demand has not returned to its pre-pandemic peak. This means a hollowing out of urban and town cores. But it also creates an opportunity to return people to the town cores and to make those places multidimensional, where people live, work and play.

Efforts are already underway to convert some commercial space into residences. In Downtown Honolulu, The Residences at Bishop Place is an example of an office building converted to residential apartments. And many offices in the Davies Pacific Center are slated for conversion into apartments.

However, more can be done across the state. Building code and zoning changes are necessary to allow conversions from commercial to residential use. So too are investments in infrastructure and tax incentives to support adaptive reuse and redevelopment.

Consider Maui, where the Queen Ka‘ahumanu Shopping Center lies in the middle of Kahului. Many storefronts have been vacant for years, and the massive parking lot is largely empty even on Black Friday. It’s space enough to fit hundreds of housing units, perhaps a thousand. Why not build housing there, sparing greenfield development and revitalizing the area? Similar opportunities abound throughout the state.

A few challenges await:

• First, some exemptions from building codes should be permitted to speed adaptive reuse. Instead of slavishly adopting international building codes, each county should adopt a general framework for adaptive reuse that addresses the typical challenges local developers face.
• Second, adaptive reuse often includes changing zoning or adding residential use to underlying commercial zoning. This rezoning process should be streamlined. Ideally, counties should rezone whole areas they’d like to see revitalized rather than relying on developers to pursue spot zoning for individual parcels.
• Third, infrastructure capacity must increase to support additional residents. As urban and town core infrastructure nears the end of its service life and must be replaced, counties should upgrade with core growth in mind. This is, in the long term, a more sustainable approach than sprawling out.

Recommendation: Enact building code and zoning reforms to enable adaptive reuse and redevelopment. Support adaptive reuse projects with infrastructure investments.

4. Seek Innovative Financing Models

Innovative financing models can unlock new opportunities for affordable housing development. One model is the community land trust, where the community collectively owns the land via a nonprofit, helping to stabilize housing costs and prevent speculation-driven price increases. Nā Hale O Maui, PAL Kaua‘i, and Hale O Hawai‘i are three examples of local community land trusts, and for now, all operate at small scale. We should provide resources and support to help them grow.

Another model is the housing conservancy. In this model, a nonprofit serves as an investment fund manager for a for-profit investment fund. The fund invests in developing or acquiring workforce housing, keeping it at a price that the local workforce can afford. Social impact investors accept a lower rate of return than they would earn with private equity.

The Washington Housing Conservancy in D.C. and the Austin Housing Conservancy in Texas are two examples of successful housing conservancies. All that’s necessary is to organize a conservancy and attract capital, which shouldn’t be too difficult: Local banks and insurance companies, union stabilization funds, Kamehameha Schools and the state Employee Retirement System all have deep pockets and an interest in creating and preserving workforce housing in Hawai‘i. They should invest in workforce housing. And our billionaire malihini should throw in their fair share.

Recommendation: Support community land trusts and establish a workforce housing conservancy in Hawai‘i.

5. Invest in Infrastructure

Roads, bridges, and highways, electrical power, water, wastewater, broadband. Ports, airports, rail. They’re some of the basic infrastructure of modern life. To this list, we could add schools (the infrastructure of workforce development). But not all infrastructure is good infrastructure.

Our state has a bad habit of building infrastructure without a plan to maintain and replace it. It’s easy to see why: Short-term political pressure on elected officials makes them focus on the present with little consideration for the future.

Deferred maintenance is the norm, with Hawai‘i receiving a D+ grade for infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

It’s more exciting to build something new than to take care of what we already have. There’s no ribbon-cutting ceremony for a water main replacement. And an upgraded wastewater treatment plant doesn’t make for a good photo op.

But infrastructure remains long after officeholders are gone. So we should get it right. Before we make investments in infrastructure, we should answer three fundamental questions:

• Will this infrastructure support the pattern of development we want for our grandchildren?
• Will this infrastructure support economic activity to fund its maintenance and eventual replacement?
• Will this infrastructure provide benefits for the general public or only for a narrow elite?

Then we should consider the potential for sea-level rise and ensure that infrastructure is resilient to natural disasters. Much of our infrastructure will need to be relocated or hardened to prevent future damage.

Finally, we need to fund infrastructure. A few things will help.

• First, we must elect leaders who will prioritize long-term infrastructure needs over short-term political pressure.
• Second, we need more programs like House Maui to align federal, state and county resources. House Maui has prepared three regional infrastructure plans that link proposed infrastructure improvements to the affordable housing and community facilities supported by that infrastructure. These plans are a jumping off point for discussion among stakeholders about the value of infrastructure investments.
• Third, we should explore different methods of funding infrastructure. For instance, tax-increment financing provides a way to capture the future tax benefits of real estate improvements to pay now for the cost of those improvements.

Another example is community development districts, which is the way that Kaka‘ako was redeveloped. Community development districts plan, finance, construct, operate and maintain community-wide infrastructure, charging property owners an assessment similar to their property tax. Every option should be on the table.

Recommendation: Invest in infrastructure that supports economic activity and benefits the public. Explore different methods of infrastructure funding, like community development districts and tax-increment financing.

Other solutions exist, but these five steps taken together are enough to solve Hawai‘i’s housing crisis and provide better lives for our residents. The time for action is long overdue. Where do you stand?

The biggest new housing project already underway along the Skyline route is Ho‘opili, on 1,550 acres in West O‘ahu makai of H-1 and Farrington Highway and just east of UH West O‘ahu. A total of 11,750 homes are planned – both single- and multi-family units – about a third more homes than in all of Waipahu, which sits east of the new housing project.

Developer D.R. Horton says 2,700 families have already moved into finished homes in Ho‘opili, and the rail line is one of the big draws.

Now that the first 10 miles of Skyline is running, we update you on new housing along the entire route and what’s being planned. The concept and selling point is called transit-oriented development, or TOD. | Photo: Aaron Yoshino

“We have noticed an increase in interested homebuyers exploring new lifestyle opportunities that transit-oriented development provides,” says Tracy Tonaki, division president for D.R. Horton Hawai‘i.

The development has its own Skyline station called Honouliuli and nearby Keone‘ae station at UH West O‘ahu has a transit hub where riders can catch buses to Mākaha, Wai‘anae, Kapolei, Makakilo, ‘Ewa Beach, Waipahu, Wahiawā, Pearl City, ‘Aiea, Kalihi and Downtown Honolulu. Ho‘opili’s newest condominium project, Nahele, is one block from the Honouliuli station, which has a park-and-ride facility.

Transit-oriented developments give “people a different option – a different lifestyle – by having everything conveniently located nearby,” says Tim Streitz, acting TOD administrator for the City and County of Honolulu’s Department of Planning and Permitting. And it allows people to have “the freedom to choose how to get around,” whether that be walking, biking, driving or public transit.

“We don’t expect that it (TOD) will completely eliminate cars, but it is intended to provide more transportation options so that you don’t have to be completely reliant upon cars,” Streitz says.

Along with single-family homes, Tonaki says, the long-term plan for Ho‘opili includes high-density mixed-use spaces with ground-floor commercial outlets like restaurants, retail shops and offices paired with residential units above. There are plans to build five schools in the area.

Revitalizing the Community

Multifamily housing being built next to the Honouliuli Skyline station is part of the Ho‘opili development, which is projected to include 11,750 homes at full buildout. | Photo: Aaron Yoshino

Six miles east of Ho‘opili is Pouhala, a combined rail and bus station also known as the Waipahu Transit Center, which is next to 3.8 acres of land owned by Kamehameha Schools. KS is partnering with Highridge Costa, a mainland-based developer that specializes in affordable housing, to create a project there called Keawalau at Waipahu.

The overall plan is for 537 units of affordable housing, to be built in three phases along Kahuailani Street, Waipahu Depot Street and Hikimoe Street. An 18-story tower and a 19-story tower for families will be on the makai end of the property, and a seven-story building slightly mauka will serve kūpuna. The units will be rented to working residents with rents set to be affordable to households making 60% or less of the area median income, according to Highridge Costa.

“This is an intergenerational affordable housing development that serves kūpuna, serves the young people and serves families as well,” says Moe Mohanna, president of Highridge Costa Development Co.

The project features shopping, dining and working opportunities for new residents, and is just steps away from the bus and Skyline hub. While most of the development will be housing, Mohanna says, Keawalau will also have 50,000 square feet of space for shops, services and restaurants.

In the meantime, there will be disruption. Times Supermarkets announced last year that its Waipahu store will close and be demolished when construction of Keawalau starts. Don Quijote, which has the same owner as Times, also announced plans to eventually close its Waipahu store, which is next to the West Loch Skyline station.

Kamehameha Schools says it reached out to all commercial tenants in the area, including Times Supermarkets, and encouraged them to come back and rent in the new space. KS also hopes to preserve most of the local businesses and mom and pop shops, Mohanna says.

The project is expected to create 300 to 400 local jobs, including temporary construction jobs and permanent ones. Mohanna says the project will add about $290 million to the economy, including construction costs and impact fees that will go toward improving local schools and infrastructure.

Highridge Costa and KS spent two years doing “extensive community outreach” for the project, and faced pushback early on, Mohanna says. But when in-person public meetings resumed after the height of the pandemic, the turnout was large, he says, with an “overwhelming amount of support from the community that said, ‘We need this housing.’

“That was very rewarding for us because that’s our goal – we want to do what’s good for the community in the long run,” says Mohanna.

“Activating a space is a catalyst to change an area, and that’s what this combination of mixed-use residential, as well as commercial, is doing.”

There is no timeline yet for construction. The Honolulu City Council approved Keawalau at Waipahu in January 2023 and the project received all its entitlements, but Mohanna says Highridge Costa must reapply for funding this year to help cover the costs of the project.

Other Westside and Central O’ahu Projects

UH West O‘ahu has multiple TOD-related projects planned and in feasibility stages. One project involves the development of about 180 acres of university district land. According to the state Office of Planning and Sustainable Development, the vision for this project is to create a “vibrant, sustainable mixed-use community that will be integrated and complement the UHWO campus.”

The university was also awarded $250,000 in state funding to study TOD near its campus. The grant lets the UHWO study the revenue generating potential for its non-campus lands in East Kapolei. There is approximately 200 acres of land located to the east and south of campus.

A view from Skyline’s Keone‘ae rail station shows The Element, an apartment complex with affordable rentals that opened in 2020. Nearby is UH West O‘ahu. | Photo: Aaron Yoshino

The state departments of Hawaiian Home Lands and Land and Natural Resources also plan to create more housing and mixed-use developments near the first two Skyline stations, Kualaka‘i and Keone‘ae.

And then there’s the Aloha Stadium Entertainment District project near the Hālawa Skyline station, which will transform the now-closed stadium and its surrounding area into a multipurpose community that includes homes, commercial and recreational space, an entertainment hub and enhanced transit facilities. The project has stalled multiple times in recent years, but the current timeline has a new stadium opening in time for the 2028 UH football season, according to stadium officials.

The Honolulu Planning Commission has recommended the rezoning of 227 acres in the area and the state Legislature has currently allocated about $420 million for the project.

Last year, construction began on a new low-income rental housing tower near the Hālawa Skyline station. The high-rise is expected to be done by summer 2025 with 302 rental units priced so as to be affordable for households earning 60% or less of the area median income, according to the developer, Halawa View Housing Partners LP.

Projects Planned for Honolulu’s Core

Streitz, the city’s acting TOD administrator, says multiple projects are planned for Chinatown, Downtown, Kaka‘ako and the Ala Moana area, and high-rise condominiums called The Park on Ke‘eaumoku and The Sky Ala Moana are under construction now.

Once rail reaches town, Streitz says, more people will see the benefits of public transit and TOD.

“It’s going to be really eye-opening to the public to finally see what TOD is really about when you get to actually get off and explore, having that sense of freedom of not having to drive everywhere,” he says.

I think the lack of housing is our No. 1 problem. I and my staff have covered the issue in many ways over the years and we will continue to do so. This time, I’m turning the floor over to people who were panelists at a soldout event on housing that I moderated Sept. 20 at YWCA Laniākea. Here are a few condensed highlights.

Joe Kent, Executive Director, Grassroot Institute | Photo: Aaron Yoshino

Joe Kent, executive director of the Grassroot Institute: “Our research shows about 5% of the land in Hawai‘i has been zoned for housing and the other 95% is open space and ag. I’m not talking about building on all that 95%, but even if you built on a fraction of a fraction more, it would allow for more housing. And I think we need not be afraid of the word ‘density,’ because in my mind increased density means affordable.”

Alana Kobayashi Pakkala, executive VP and managing partner of Kobayashi Group: “Joe was wondering why people are so against urban density. What changes when the building goes from 350 feet to 450 feet? It gets a lot less expensive to build – the land cost gets divided over more units. And guess what? Dense properties won’t become luxury because of their density. So you’re building housing that will stay in that target market naturally. The market deserves market housing. Our young people deserve to do what our parents did: Build home equity. We just have to make it easier.”

Alana Kobayashi Pakkala, executive VP and managing partner of Kobayashi Group | Photo: Aaron Yoshino

Sarah Love, Partner, Lung Rose Voss & Wagnild | Photo: Aaron Yoshino

Sarah Love, partner at Lung Rose Voss & Wagnild and president of the Building Industry Association of Hawaii: “Density correlates to our infrastructure issue. If you’re trying to build housing in an area that doesn’t have infrastructure, it will cost a lot more to build. If you’re adding density in areas that already have infrastructure, then you save on project costs. So we need to maximize density where we can.”

Sterling Higa, Executive Director, Housing Hawai‘i’s Future | Photo: Aaron Yoshino

Sterling Higa, executive director of the nonprofit Housing Hawai‘i’s Future: “What we do at Housing Hawaii’s Future is get people informed with our newsletter and provide them with the targeted opportunities to engage because you have jobs, you have things to do, you’re not going to show up to every committee hearing. But there are critical moments at the county council and state level, where if even half-dozen people show up and say something I sensible, a difference can be made. The problem is sometimes it’s just B.J. Penn at some meetings or retirement-age homeowners. If you’re not a retirement-age homeowner, your voices are not represented at those meetings. There is no countervailing force. Who calls a politician’s office and complains? It’s retirement-age homeowners because they have plenty of time. Meanwhile, their children and grandchildren are leaving because they can’t afford housing. The people making decisions are influenced in the wrong direction. You don’t have to show up to every meeting, but sometimes you have to show up, write a letter, give testimony or call a legislator. Because one voice at the right moment can shift an entire discussion.”

Billy Pieper, senior VP and director of strategic partnerships at American Savings Bank: “Halewai‘olu Senior Residences is a new affordable rental housing project (in Honolulu’s Chinatown) and people are already moving in. I remember the pushback from the community. It wasn’t until we actually personified the people who would be moving into this housing – brought them to meetings and they actually locked eyes with folks who had previously said, ‘Not in my backyard’ – that critics of the project finally said, ‘OK, we’ve got to do something different. Yes, continue.’ I feel like we need more of that. Bring back the aloha, that kindness.”

Billy Pieper, Senior VP & Director of Strategic Partnerships, American Savings Bank | Photo: Aaron Yoshino

Joe Kent: “When it comes to individual projects, we need to allow more by-right development, like they do in other parts of the world, such as Tokyo. (By-right means if the development is allowed by all existing regulations such as the zoning code, parking requirements and so on, it’s not subject to the discretion of local officials.) In Tokyo, if you want to build within your zone, you can, and you don’t have to ask your neighbors for permission. I hope we can find more ways to allow by-right development here.”

Kalihi-Pālama and Waiawa will experience the largest growth in new homes on O‘ahu after 2025 largely due to master planned communities envisioned by Kamehameha Schools.

That’s according to the Honolulu Department of Planning and Permitting’s most recent land use report. The report provides an overview of 120 known O‘ahu projects, with 105,322 units planned as of fiscal year 2021.

Kamehameha Schools hopes 4,500 homes will be built in its Kapālama Kai community and 11,000 in Waiawa. Together they would help reduce the island’s housing shortage, but full buildout will likely take 20 years in Kapālama Kai and 50 to 60 years in Waiawa.

KS anticipates that many of those homes will target households earning less than 140% of the area median income; for a family of four, that threshold is currently $182,840 a year.

Kamehameha Schools owns about 105 acres of land in the Kalihi-Iwilei area and almost 9,000 acres in Waiawa, between Pearl City and Waipi‘o. The master plans call for the creation of mixed-use communities that take advantage of denser, transit-oriented development close to the rail line. The trust would partner with developers to bring its visions to life.

Walter Thoemmes, managing director of Kamehameha Schools’ Commercial Real Estate Division, says the larger goal is to create a return on the trust’s land value to support its mission of providing educational opportunities to improve the well-being of  Native Hawaiians.

“We try to understand what are the needs today and how do we use our lands to support our mission but also solve for some of the challenges we have in our community today, as well as pursue some of the opportunities that we see,” he says.

Near Planned Rail Station

About 50 acres would be transformed under Kamehameha Schools’ Kapālama Kai plan. The warehouses and industrial yards bounded by Kapālama Canal, Dillingham Boulevard and Waiakamilo Road would be replaced by mixed-use towers and open, green space. The towers would be taller and denser closer to the canal, especially near the planned Niuhelewai rail station at the intersection of Dillingham Boulevard and Kokea Street.

The anticipated 4,500 homes would be built at various heights and include both for-sale and rental units. Thoemmes says Kamehameha Schools anticipates that many homes would be part of 201H projects. The state’s 201H statute allows projects to receive building exemptions and fee waivers in exchange for providing a certain amount of affordable housing.

He adds that Kamehameha Schools has been working on its Kapālama Kai master plan for about five years and is committed to maintaining the area’s industrial footprint.

Rail construction is ongoing in the area, which Thoemmes acknowledges can make it hard for developers and future residents to envision a community with homes and other uses. One of the trust’s early projects would turn the Dillingham Plaza retail complex into a hub for food systems and creative industries. Foodland, Office Depot and Savers Thrift Store currently anchor that complex.

Photo: courtesy of Kamehameha Schools

“We see this opportunity to create a hub of creative industries at this place that will help put Kapālama on a map as a community that we can build out housing and other complementary type businesses and retail around creative industries and food,” he says.

In Waiawa, KS plans to focus on about 2,000 acres, many of which are already designated for urban use. The community would consist of 11,109 homes, 51 farm lots, 105 acres of schools, 371 acres of open space, 134 acres of parks, and 558,666 square feet of retail and commercial space, according to the master plan the trust submitted to the state Land Use Commission in 2019.

The idea is to incorporate ahupua‘a planning principles by placing businesses, retail, food, health and other necessities near homes.

“It’s that type of cultural view that, in my personal opinion, has been kind of gotten lost in the way we plan and zone and entitle land,” Thoemmes says. “You put all the houses over there, you put industrial over there, you put retail over here. How do people live? You have to get in your car to drive to all these places.”

Kamehameha Schools envisions that as many Waiawa homes as possible would be affordable – targeting households earning less than 140% AMI – if not all of them. The initial development focus will be on the southern portion of the trust’s Waiawa lands, which is less than 1 mile from the Pearl Highlands rail station and bus transit center.

“It’s really about creating a new community there that has the multimodal connection to our rail system,” Thoemmes says.

Infrastructure Needs

Redevelopment of the two areas is expected to be a long process. The transformation of Kamehameha Schools’ lands in the Kalihi-Iwilei area is expected to take 20 years and consist of multiple phases. Waiawa could take three times longer and would involve five phases. Those estimates include time for much-needed infrastructure improvements.

Kamehameha Schools has been talking with the county, state and Hawaiian Electric Co. about increasing the Kalihi-Iwilei area’s electrical capacity to support future development, says Serge Krivatsy, senior planning and development director.

Iwilei is expected to grow by 27,000 new homes over the next 30 years and nearly 2 million square feet of existing commercial, institutional and mixed-use space would be assigned other uses, according to the Iwilei Infrastructure Master Plan prepared for the Hawai‘i Housing and Finance Development Corp. and Department of Accounting and General Services.

The plan, completed in February of this year, anticipates that infrastructure improvements needed to realize the potential of transit-oriented development will cost $951 million to $990 million. That includes about $175 million for sewers; $31 million for water; $414 million to $446 million for drainage; $170 million for walkway, bikeway and roadway improvements; and $159 million to $166 million for electricity and telecommunications.

Part of those improvements include turning the area along the Kapālama Canal into a mile-long recreational area. The project is estimated to cost between $227 million to $258 million and will include water quality improvements, floodwalls, a pedestrian and bike trail, picnic pavilions, footbridges at Kalani and Kaumuali‘i streets, parking and a lawn area.

Photo: courtesy of Kamehameha Schools

Kamehameha Schools says it hopes to concentrate many of its Kapālama Kai homes along the canal. Ian Scheuring, deputy communications director for the City and County of Honolulu, wrote in an email to Hawaii Business that the county just completed design work for canal dredging and has applied for federal grants to help pay for the project.

He added that the county has an intergovernmental agreement with the state on the planning, designing and construction of infrastructure improvements in the Iwilei area. And a financing study led by the state is looking at options to implement and prioritize the identified improvements.

Some government funds have been earmarked for infrastructure work. The state Legislature’s latest budget bill, House Bill 300, includes $86 million in fiscal year 2024 for Iwilei-Kapālama infrastructure upgrades. The bill is pending the governor’s signature. And Scheuring says that Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi allotted $2 million in his proposed budget to conduct infrastructure regional planning studies for affordable housing needs in Iwilei. He did the same for West O‘ahu and Hālawa.

Kamehameha Schools’ Waiawa land, which was formerly used for plantations, doesn’t have any infrastructure, except for dirt roads and two solar farms. Thoemmes says the Waiwa project would be tough to build because of high infrastructure costs.

“It’s this kind of puzzle that we’re hoping we have a compelling enough vision of what this community can be that a developer or a group of developers can come forth and say, ‘We can make this work economically, KS, let’s get started,’ ” he says.