Hawaii residents fear losing Lahaina as fires make housing crisis worse

LAHAINA, Hawaii - The ground is still hot here, the site of the country’s deadliest wildfire in more than a century, but this historic town is already confronting another existential crisis: a dire and immediate housing shortage and a serious threat of long-term displacement.

The blaze last Tuesday and Wednesday torched nearly 3,000 structures, officials said, and razed entire neighborhoods. It drove out residents who can trace their family history here back generations, and it immediately exacerbated an already dire housing crisis in one of America’s most expensive places.

Now, families are filing into shelters, jamming into homes, sleeping five to a room and camping in front yards. In between filling up their cars with donated food and diapers, they’re doing some painful math, contemplating whether to drain their savings to stay in the only home they’ve ever known.

A local Realtors association is compiling lists of vacant vacation homes, where the group hopes to house displaced residents. But that’s only a Band-Aid, said Mary Kerstulovich, a real estate agent assisting the effort.

“It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” she said. “What happens three months from now?”

The disaster response is entering a new phase, even as rescuers carry out the solemn task of recovering and identifying the bodies of those who died. The official toll stood at 96 people Monday but was expected to rise as searches continue. Meanwhile, survivors have gradually been able to meet their basic needs. Donated supplies have poured in. Slowly, power is being restored. Cell service is improving.

[They were alone in a fight to survive. Maui residents had moments to make life-or-death choices]

But as the initial emergency wanes, the housing crunch looms larger. And tension is growing between the many competing interests on the island — the billionaires and real estate developers who have made Maui their playground, and the longtime locals, including renters who work low-wage jobs in hotels and restaurants and Native Hawaiians, or Kanaka Maoli, for whom Lahaina is a sacred place and a cultural capital.

Even before the fire, these groups were being priced out of paradise, and they are now urging one another to ignore inquiries from real estate agents who are calling with offers to buy their charred properties.

“We want to make sure that we’re able to keep Lahaina Lahaina, and Lahaina strong,” said Archie Kalepa, a decorated waterman and Native Hawaiian community leader whose family has lived in the town for nine generations. “We don’t want it to be Lahaina was.”

Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell said Monday that the agency has activated its disaster relief housing programs, which include paying for hotel and motel rooms for survivors.

Criswell said she spoke at length with Hawaii Gov. Josh Green (D) about the state’s long-term housing needs and pledged to be “very creative” in how FEMA uses its authority, acknowledging that the approaches employed in the continental United States may not work in Hawaii. She said FEMA was exploring bringing in tiny houses or transitional housing units.

The anxieties circulating here grip every community devastated by a massive natural disaster, especially as climate change drives an era of mega-fires that has widened the gap between rich and poor in places reduced to ashes. But on an island with limited space, sky-high property values, a soaring cost of living and a long history of battles over land rights, these issues are magnified tenfold.

Even before the fire, “the cost of everything was going up, and people were feeling squeezed out,” said Tamara Paltin, who represents the area on the Maui County Council and has watched with dismay in recent years as wealthy outside buyers have snatched up land in exorbitant all-cash deals. She worries this disaster will only accelerate the process, changing the western edge of the island forever by driving out locals who can no longer afford to live there.

“If all those people from outside with a lot of resources come in and rebuild Lahaina the way they want it to be, it won’t be Lahaina anymore,” she said. “We don’t want to make it like Anywhere Else, USA.”

Even before the fire, a crisis

A poignant symbol of the town’s serious housing scarcity can be found on a hill overlooking Lahaina’s main drag: a brand-new 89-unit affordable-living complex, reduced to rubble.

The Kaiaulu o Kupuohi development had its grand opening in December, bringing optimism that future projects could also successfully navigate the island’s strict building codes and eventually help ease the crisis.

But like so many other buildings here, it went up in flames last week.

Hawaii leads the United States in cost of living. A family of four making less than $93,000 here is considered low-income. And Maui County is one of the country’s most rent-burdened places, with more than half of renters spending upward of 30 percent of their income on housing. Around Lahaina, roughly half of residents rent.

But even those who owned their homes, like many Native Hawaiian families whose houses were passed down through generations, will face profound challenges. Because many of these houses don’t have mortgages, they aren’t required to have insurance, leaving owners who lost everything with few options to rebuild.

There was already a “severe housing crisis before the destruction,” said Kerstulovich, who has worked in Kihei, southeast of Lahaina, for more than 30 years. The price of an “affordable” home starts at half a million dollars — “if you can even find one,” she said.

The problem is so acute that Las Vegas, home to tens of thousands of Native Hawaiians who decamped there in search of cheaper housing, has been dubbed Hawaii’s ninth island.

Yvette Crosby, an interior designer, is housing 27 people in and around her home in Kula, in the island’s upcountry region. Many of them are from Lahaina and immigrated to the United States from the Polynesian kingdom of Tonga nearly 50 years ago. Those who can’t fit in Crosby’s home are camping out around a small cottage on her property.

“They are one of thousands of families, and this devastation is so deep because each home gone represents multiple families,” she said. “We don’t know how we will handle it long-term.”

Rebuilding will be difficult, Crosby said, and she is encouraging longtime residents not to make any decisions about land sales now, during a time of deep desperation.

“Don’t sign over anything, because I’m sorry to say developers want it,” she said, her voice cracking. “And it’s only day four. We are all so worried that people will sign away family land for temporary housing or a quick payout.”

‘This shouldn’t be a land grab’

At a donation site near one of Lahaina’s hardest-hit areas on Sunday, Ke’eaumoku Kapu had his mind on long-term solutions. He was coordinating aid deliveries in a red vest and a hip pack that read “Keep Hawaii Hawaiian,” a mantra that describes his life’s work of establishing a cultural center in the town that has advocated Native Hawaiian land rights.

The center, Na ‘Aikane o Maui, located just off Front Street, burned down in the fire. But the fight for land, Kapu said, is about to heat up.

For Kapu, this latest struggle to prevent displacement is an extension of a battle Native Hawaiians have been waging since the 18th century, when the arrival of the British explorer James Cook ushered in an era of settler colonialism that would fundamentally reshape Hawaii.

A key moment in this history came in 1893, when U.S.-backed insurrectionists overthrew Queen Lili’uokalani and the Hawaiian Kingdom. The provisional government that took its place seized the kingdom’s land and eventually transferred it to the United States as part of the annexation of Hawaii — an episode for which the U.S. government would formally apologize in 1993. But that painful legacy resonates today.

“We’re just mad that we became the second class of our own aina,” Kapu said, using the Hawaiian word for land. “And the importance of what we have is being neglected.”

Kapu and his family spent 20 years in court, jousting with a development company over the rights to ancestral land. Last year, the Hawaiian Supreme Court sided with Kapu, solidifying a legal road map he is using to help other families prove their land rights. This sort of work — which often involves old, arcane legal documents — will be vital after the wildfire, he said.

“Right now, we’re on the verge of basically being erased,” Kapu said. “So every time these devastations happen, we need to be at the forefront. We need to be at the table.”

Native Hawaiian advocates and lawmakers are wary of state and federal officials’ pledges to rebuild, language that has become part of the post-tragedy lexicon. After Gov. Green toured the fire wreckage last week, he observed that “all of the buildings virtually are going to have to be rebuilt.” And he added: “It will be a new Lahaina that Maui builds in its own image, with its own values.”

For those whose personal and cultural histories have taught them to view official proclamations with skepticism, the phrase rankled, local residents said. Instead of sweeping and general promises, they are asking for a deliberate process that prioritizes local voices.

“This is an opportunity for our government to step in and make right by the people who have been wronged for so long,” said Keani Rawlins-Fernandez, a Maui County Council member and Native Hawaiian who represents the nearby island of Moloka’i. “This shouldn’t be a land grab.”

‘A starting point’

Residents have described this precarious moment as a fork in the road for Lahaina. Venture down one path, and the town drifts further in the direction of luxury estates, vacation rentals and golf courses.

Choose the other, locals say, and it could become a more sustainable place to live, one with ample affordable housing, inclusive politics and infrastructure designed to weather the new era of climate-change-fueled disasters.

At a weekend gathering in the Villages of Leiali’i, a Kanaka Maoli neighborhood in Lahaina, many hoped for the latter approach. On a fence outside the neighborhood, a hand-painted sign read “Tourist Keep Out,” while inside a community meeting gave way to a block party.

There was much talk of self-sufficiency, a mode everyone in the town was forced into when the unprecedented blaze overwhelmed authorities and services. Local musicians played guitar, the owner of a now-burned food truck assumed the role of chef, and volunteers doled out generators and pantry items.

“When it’s time, we will all rebuild one day at a time,” said Doreen Buenconsejo, who grew up in the neighborhood and whose parents lost their home in the fire. “I know our community is so strong that we will pull together and help each other to clean up our lands.”

Leiali’i narrowly survived the inferno — just two of the community’s 104 homes were lost — and it suffered a major scare late Wednesday morning, after fire had already spent some 24 hours churning through Lahaina.

About 11:45, flames crept toward the house where Kalepa, the community leader, lives with his family. They singed his backyard. Neighbors and firefighters, who were toward the end of their most harrowing shift, used hoses from surrounding houses and doused the area, eventually stopping the burn.

Their efforts prevented Kalepa’s house from catching fire and averted damage to a large swath of the neighborhood.

From his backyard, Kalepa said the crew saved more than just the structures. They preserved hope for months and years to come.

“They held the line to keep Hawaiian homes here,” Kalepa said. “Being able to save this part of Lahaina, it gave us a starting point.”

Wax-Thibodeaux reported from Washington. The Washington Post’s ZoeAnn Murphy in Lahaina contributed to this report.