Local 5, which represents 10,000 hotel, health care, and food service workers in Hawai‘i, and ILWU Local 142, which represents 16,000 longshoremen and workers in the service industries, are calling on the State and Maui County to take action to control rapidly increasing Maui residential rental rates by regulating short-term rentals, and vigorously enforcing the rules. This is necessary to control rent increases and ensure adequate residential housing for local people.
Lahaina’s wildfire was the deadliest in the U.S. in more than a century. Now the community is grappling with the botched response as it tries to rebuild. Read the comprehensive story from the New Yorker.
Kalo dominated the local landscape in the mid-1800s with 352 recorded loʻi in Kauaʻula Valley alone. But once water began being diverted for sugar production, taro farmers fought back in the 1895 court case Horner v. Kumuliʻiliʻi. In an unusual outcome for the time, the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court ruled against Pioneer Mill owner John Horner, and in favor of 60 Native Hawaiians from West Maui, who claimed rights to the water flowing in Kauaʻula Valley. But it would take another century for that court decision to be backed up with regulatory laws to enforce it. However, in the wake of the Lāhainā wildfires, these rights are being challenged once again.
At the county level, the Maui Emergency Management Agency was led by an administrator who had left the island despite National Weather Service warnings of a serious fire threat. At the state level, high turnover of staff weakened the agencies abilities. Communication between the state and county proved faulty. The Hawai‘i Emergency Management Agency should have been monitoring the situation in the days before the fire from its EOC and the state could have stepped in, even without the county asking. But that would likely require the support of the Department of Defense, to which HIEMA reports, and the governor’s office.
What happened once Kihawahine leaves Hawaiʻi may be coincidental. But the Hawaiian Kingdom was overthrown six years later. And by the 1900s, Mokuhinia Pond was all but dried up by sugar plantation skimming wells and stream diversions. By 1914, the sacred Mokuʻula Island was covered by a baseball field.
In the late eighteenth century, a British captain called Lahaina the “Venice of the Pacific.” In the nineteenth century, Lahaina was the capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii; Moku‘ula, the home of Hawaiian royalty, was situated on a tiny island in the middle of a pond. But, when colonizers razed native forests to make room for sugarcane, pineapple, and cattle, the area dried out.
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.
A fast-moving wildfire that incinerated much of the compact coastal settlement last week has multiplied concerns that any homes rebuilt there will be targeted at affluent outsiders seeking a tropical haven. That would turbo-charge what is already one of Hawaii’s gravest and biggest challenges: the exodus and displacement of Native Hawaiian and local-born residents who can no longer afford to live in their homeland.
Maui Ola: A benefit concert for Maui brings together Hawaiʻi’s musicians, production professionals, media community, and dozens of others who are donating 100% of their efforts to aloha Maui, using music as a vehicle to help the healing process, rallying much needed aid from across Hawai‘i and around the world.
On an archipelago with limited land and even scarcer water resources, we have to seriously consider the ways that the “build, build, build” narrative is hurting us. The endless line of real estate investors seeking to buy a “piece of paradise” means a larger housing inventory may not alleviate a shortage of housing for local or low-income communities.
Governor Green’s Emergency Housing Proclamation represents a bold opportunity for developers, for investors, bankers, contractors, and real estate investors moving here from the continent. Local residents desperately in need of affordable housing are last in line. There is language in the proclamation’s rules that states “The amount of affordable housing included in the project may affect the priority given to the project.” The use of the word “may” rather than “shall” says it all. If the primary purpose is to increase affordable housing for local residents, the word “SHALL” would be there in all caps.
Rlected officials applaud the governor’s ambitious effort to boost the island’s housing stock, though the scope of the proclamation and its possible negative consequences is making them uneasy.
Developers have minimal requirements and generous loopholes. On a project-by-project basis, housing units that start as affordable units can be converted to market-rates. This can occur in months or years. The Proclamation does not define “Hawaii resident.” To establish residency under HRS §78-1 a person must minimally believe or say, “I intend to make Hawaii my home” while he or she is in Hawai`i.
The governor keeps pointing to a truncated historic properties and environmental review process in his proclamation. But the lead housing officer can exempt certain projects from that truncated process.
These are very weak protections. They take away the rights of private working citizens like us to enforce protections of our cultural heritage.
Our iwi kupuna are not a cause of the shortage of safe and affordable housing in Maui or across Hawaii. It is developer greed and global demand for luxury forms of housing.
To be clear: this proclamation does not target or require affordable housing development. It does not reserve new units for those truly in need of housing relief. New units built under its wide-ranging legal exemptions could even be purchased by individuals who own multiple residential properties. And the “Hawaiʻi residents” it purportedly serves could be anyone from anywhere who wishes to move here.
WATCH: Paʻa Ke Aupuni is a unique 60-minute hand-drawn, animated film that gets straight to the point. It zooms in on key facts explaining how the Hawaiian Kingdom came to be, how it evolved to stand firmly on the international world stage of sovereign nations, and how the United States came to claim Hawai‘i.
Voting for O’ahu Neighborhood Board Elections Begins today! Got questions? Call the Neighborhood Board Commission at (808) 768-3710.
With the recent eruptions on Moku o Keawe, we asked Dr. Pualani Kanaka‘ole Kanahele to share some mana‘o with the lāhui about how we might connect to and reflect upon the activities on Maunaloa and Kīlauea. Her lifetime of contemplating and becoming one with these elements and energies created a flow of messages that blew us away. Her words continue to reverberate in our thoughts and settle deeply in our naʻau. Watch the full interview here.
No keiki should be sent to the back of the line to receive less support than others. Charter schools have had to seek additional funds to ensure their students are well supported. If charter schools were equitably funded by the State, they could fully focus on the high quality education they offer to the 12,000 students they serve each year. Submit testimony in support of charter schools.
No keiki should be sent to the back of the line to receive less support than others. Charter schools have had to seek additional funds to ensure their students are well supported. If charter schools were equitably funded by the State, they could fully focus on the high quality education they offer to the 12,000 students they serve each year. Submit testimony in support of charter schools.
When we mālama ʻāina and aloha ʻāina, we must always first huli ka lima i lalo, and it is now becoming clear that neighborhood boards are another tool in our aloha ʻāina arsenal. Interested? Sign up to become a candidate today. Registration runs from now until February 17, 2023.
The Navy & EPA negotiated a consent order without the consent of the Board of Water Supply or the affected communities on O‘ahu. For suggested talking points for written testimony, visit sierraclubhawaii.org. The deadline to submit written comments is February 6, 2023.
WATCH: Paʻa Ke Aupuni is a unique 60-minute hand-drawn, animated film that gets straight to the point. It zooms in on key facts explaining how the Hawaiian Kingdom came to be, how it evolved to stand firmly on the international world stage of sovereign nations, and how the United States came to claim Hawai‘i.
After exhausting all measures towards a pono resolution with the County of Hawaiʻi, Waipiʻo Valley kūpuna, taro farmers, residents and lineal descendants of Waipiʻo for many generations plan to blockade the road to Waipiʻo on September 19, 2022 starting at 8 am to protest decisions that will negatively impact them and the place they love.
WATCH: Inspections, repairs, and maintenance did not prevent a leak in 2014. Operator error only exacerbated the problem of the corroding tanks and the outer concrete shell that the Navy admits is “impossible to maintain.”