Rebuilding hundreds of affordable housing units burned in Lahaina fire is key priority of county’s recovery plan

LAHAINA — Busaba Yip wiped away tears as she thought about the long grieving process she’d gone through since losing her home and job last year in the Lahaina fire. 

“The tears are different because they’re not from sadness this time,” she said, sitting in the cafeteria of Lahainaluna High School on Wednesday night. “They’re from the deepest (part) of my heart, of acceptance. … I still think of the loss. But I can see there is hope also.”

The 72-year-old former docent and cultural director at the Wo Hing Museum and Temple along Front Street was feeling hopeful after looking through charts of a draft long-term recovery plan for Lahaina.

Last week, Maui County released its long-anticipated plan, which offers a broad glimpse of the community’s priorities for the seaside town and the estimated timelines and costs of rebuilding residences, historical buildings and the commercial center. 

The wide-ranging document was compiled over 11 months with input from more than 3,800 residents. It features 40 short-term, mid-term and long-term projects, including the creation of a Lahaina memorial, the buildout of a Lahaina Business Park, improvements to street connections and watershed recovery.

The plan also calls for replacing the roughly 700 affordable housing units that were lost in the fire, one of the most ambitious projects.

Saumalu Mataafa, the deputy director of housing, said it also is probably the most important. The goal is to make sure that both homeowners and renters who were living in Lahaina can get back to living in the community and the town that they grew up in.

“It’s a huge priority not only for me, but also for the mayor and the entire administration,” Mataafa said.

A PLACE TO COME HOME TO

Yip woke up at 4 a.m. on Aug. 8, 2023, to find the electricity was out in her Liberty Apartment complex on Luakini Street. When the power stayed down for hours and the fire started to spread across town, Yip knocked on everyone’s doors. She was among the last to leave, hitching a ride with some friends to Olowalu where they waited, hoping to return when the fire passed. 

“We like to come back and sleep in our own bed,” Yip said. “We did not take anything. I lost everything.” 

After losing her home, Yip moved four times, from Wailuku to Kīhei to Kula and finally to Nāpili. Lahaina had been her home for about 25 years, the place she came to live and work after earning her Ph.D. in Traditional Knowledge at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Every day she walked from her apartment to work at the Wo Hing Museum, which hosted cultural celebrations and shared the history of Chinese immigrants on Maui. Her one comfort is that their records were digitized. Like the town itself, the physical structures may be gone but the history lives on. 

Of the more than 2,200 buildings destroyed in Lahaina, the single-family homes and apartment complexes were some of the biggest losses for a community that was forced to scatter among hotels, rentals and the homes of family and friends. 

Ten affordable housing complexes totaling 700 units were destroyed, according to the recovery plan. They included the 300-unit Front Street Apartments that the state fought to save from increasing rents; the 112-Lahaina Surf units that were federally funded and run by Hale Mahaolu; and the 94-unit Ka Hale A Ke Ola Homeless Resource Center that served as an important shelter for unhoused people in West Maui. 

Others include the state-owned David Malo Circle (18 units) and Pi‘ilani Homes (42 units), the county-owned Lahaina Crossroads (20 units) and Komohana Hale (20 units), the privately owned but publicly funded Kaiāulu O Kupuohi (89 units) and the nonprofit-owned Weinberg Court (62 units) and Hale Mahaolu Eono (35 units), which was also publicly funded.

Rebuilding these projects, and increasing the number of units where necessary, is one of the short-term projects given a timeline of 1 to 2 years in the recovery plan. Mataafa said the timeline is an internal goal, and it’s “aggressive for a reason.”

“We’re going to try,” Mataafa said. “But there’s a lot of external factors that play into it.”

Because the projects all had water and wastewater allocations, they’re “low-hanging fruits” that could be rebuilt after those utilities were restored, he said.

The county is currently working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to figure out if there’s funding for the projects and whether there’s a possibility of expanding the Komohana Hale site. 

“A lot of these projects, they have some level of insurance, but it’s not going to get them over the hump to actually rebuild what was lost,” Mataafa said. “So one of the things is making sure funding is available for some of these projects to fund the gap that’s needed to bring back what was lost.”

The county also has to work with the state and local partners on the permitting side to see what can be done to move these projects along. That includes discussions on how to handle multifamily rental units near the shoreline that would typically need to go through the special management area permitting process, which under normal circumstances can take a year or more. A report by the University of Hawai’i Economic Research Organization found that stiff permitting regulations, particularly on Maui, are among the drivers of high home prices.

Rebuilding of single-family homes and commercial buildings already is progressing in Lahaina. According to county data as of Friday, 207 properties had submitted building permits, with 100 permits issued and one property with construction completed.

Keeping Lahaina affordable for locals to return to has been a primary concern since the fire. Early on, the governor signed an emergency proclamation prohibiting unsolicited offers for Lahaina properties, and the newly formed Lahaina Community Land Trust has been trying to buy properties from owners who can’t rebuild in hopes of keeping outside investors away.

Temporary housing projects currently under development in West Maui include Ka La’i Ola, where the state plans to house up to 1,500 wildfire survivors in 450 modular units for up to five years. Homes are also starting to be delivered to FEMA’s Kilohana project site, which will house 169 households.

On Thursday, FEMA announced plans to place temporary housing units on vacant lots in Lahaina. The agency is working with the county and Lahaina property owners to lease lots where owners don’t plan to rebuild within the next two to three years.

Jen Mather, a volunteer at the recovery plan open house on Wednesday night, lived in Lahaina for nearly 20 years until high prices pushed her family of four to leave behind their one-bedroom, 363-square-foot home during the pandemic. They’d been on the waitlist for the Kahoma development only to learn their household income was a mere percentage point outside of the affordable guidelines. 

Mather, whose mother and brother also left Lahaina over high home prices, agrees that people and housing are the most important things to bring back to Lahaina. But after having “a front-row seat” to the 2018 fire, she cautioned that the rebuild has to consider fire preparedness.  

“If we build these things, these affordable homes in two years, knowing full well that the reasons why the fire happened aren’t remediated, then how do we protect our newly built affordable homes from being burnt down again?” she said.

The recovery plan also includes a short-term project to enhance emergency communication networks after cell service failed during the Lahaina fire and left many unable to contact loved ones and unaware of the growing danger. It also includes a mid-term project of three to five years to boost the Maui Emergency Management Agency’s staffing and emergency response technology.

Other mid-term projects would improve emergency response by extending and connecting multiple streets around Lahaina to improve access to evacuation routes.

FACES OF THE TOWN 

Before the fire, Tamara Paltin knew that if she went for lunch or groceries at the Foodland near Front Street, she had to be ready to spend 30 to 45 minutes talking story. Now Paltin, who holds the West Maui seat on the Maui County Council, misses those familiar faces — the workers at Foodland, the tellers at American Savings Bank, the senior swimmers at the Lahaina Aquatic Center. 

Life in West Maui has changed completely. So many people, restaurants, banks and stores are gone. When Paltin goes to Wailuku, she’s taken aback by the wide array of services and open roads. 

“If it weren’t for me being in this role, it would be really easy just to retreat and not be involved, stay home or even move away, maybe, where things are normal, especially if you have kids. You don’t want them to go through the hardships or the lack,” said Paltin, whose two children attend Lahaina Intermediate. 

But she urged people to stay invested as Lahaina’s recovery rolls out. The open houses for the recovery plan on Wednesday and Saturday were among the early opportunities for people to weigh in on the draft recovery plan. Residents can also provide input online.

“Definitely dream the biggest dream, but also be practical,” she said. “Work on what is realistic and try to be engaged.”

Yip, who took up ‘ukulele after the fire as part of her healing process, said she’s not ready to move back to Lahaina just yet, partly because she wants to take care of her emotional and mental health first. She spent so much time isolated over the past year and said she’s finally at a different stage in her grief and starting to feel ready to share her journey.

She’s still holding on to her connection to Lahaina and said while she may not live long enough to see the town fully rebuilt, “it gave me hope for the future generations.”