Bill in Hawaiʻi Legislature would speed up rebuilding of affordable housing complexes destroyed in Lahaina fire

Six lawmakers, including Maui senators Angus McKelvey and Troy Hashimoto, have introduced a bill in the State Legislature that would make it easier to rebuild four affordable housing complexes that burned in the 2023 Lahaina wildfire.

Senate Bill 1170 would enable Maui County’s planning director to directly issue special management area permits for four specific projects — with a combined 358 units and a planned 50 more — instead of going through the lengthy process required by the state to build within a certain area of the shoreline.

“We’ve got to move double time to save what we can so we can ensure we have a town of Lahaina that resembles something of what it once was,” said McKelvey, whose district includes West and South Maui. 

Lahaina lost about 700 affordable units in the devastating August 2023 wildfire that killed at least 102 people and destroyed more than 2,200 structures. Rebuilding affordable housing complexes is one of the top priorities in Maui County’s draft long-term recovery plan released in October. 

The bill applies to the 142-unit Front Street Apartments, 112-unit Lahaina Surf, 62-unit Weinberg Court and 42-unit Pi’ilani Homes. 

Hashimoto, who represents Central Maui and serves as vice chair of the Senate Committee on Housing, said the projects were chosen because they were state- or nonprofit-owned projects that could be redeveloped quickly. 

Hashimoto and McKelvey said lawmakers also will be considering measures this session to extend special management area exemptions on Maui and speed up rebuilding for businesses on Front Street.

All four affordable housing projects are located within the special management area, which in Lahaina, means everything makai of Honoapi’ilani Highway, according to the county. In order to be rebuilt, they need a special management area use permit.

Projects that cost less than $500,000 can get minor permits that are approved by the county planning administration and don’t need a public hearing. But projects that cost more than that, such as the housing complexes lost in the fire, need major permits that typically call for a public hearing and approval by the Maui Planning Commission. 

Maui County Planning Director Kate Blystone explained that the bill “is mostly an extension of the Emergency Proclamation and will allow the Lahaina projects more certainty about their permitting path forward.” While rebuilding close to the shoreline has raised concerns about the risks of sea level rise, Blystone has said the county plans to protect Front Street because it contains important infrastructure that serves Lahaina. Maui County Council Member Tamara Paltin said it’s up to landowners to take their own risk.

The governor’s latest emergency proclamation suspended certain coastal zone management rules for the reconstruction of multifamily structures that existed before the fire, as well as single-family homes that met certain requirements.

Blystone said while every process is different depending on the project and the conditions of the property, in general, the bill would “significantly shorten their permitting time.” But, she pointed out the projects still would be subject to zoning, building code and fire code requirements. And McKelvey added the projects also would still have to follow state rules on environmental and archaeological reviews. 

Anders Lyons, executive director of the nonprofit Hale Mahaolu that owns Lahaina Surf, estimated the bill could shorten the permitting process by eight months to a year and a half.

But lawmakers acknowledged that even if they can eliminate one barrier in the process, the projects, like most of Lahaina, will likely still take years to rebuild.

“It is a huge loss for us,” Hashimoto said of the projects burned in the fire. “And I’m extremely worried about it in terms of what does our future look like? Because I think when you take a look at all the factors on why people are moving out of Hawai’i, and specifically Maui, it’s the cost of living. But what is the biggest driver of the cost of living? And that’s housing.” 

The bill also would apply to the proposed Kahului Civic Center mixed-use development project, which is slated to include 303 affordable housing units on land next to the Queen Ka’ahumanu Center.

“I wish the bill had been crafted to allow all government and nonprofit-owned multi-family projects to access this provision for Lahaina, rather than calling out a few projects,” Blystone said via email. “We had a huge housing shortage before the fire (approximately 7,000 units on the west side), so giving these projects a quicker path will ensure that more residents will be able to get home more quickly.” 

She said most of the developers “are proposing to rebuild very similar projects.”

And once the planning director issues a special management area for these projects, the county would need to post a notice in the periodic bulletin published by the state Office of Planning and Sustainable Development.

“This is something that’s being done very carefully, but we’ve got to speed this up because we are now facing a huge ton of other pressures coming in because of Los Angeles,” McKelvey said.

He pointed out the destructive fires in Southern California will start to suck up the resources and construction materials that Lahaina needs for its own rebuild. 

Of the four housing projects named in the bill, two are government owned — the Front Street Apartments by the Hawai’i Housing Finance and Development Corporation and Pi’ilani Homes by the Hawai’i Public Housing Authority. The other two are under private control — Hale Mahaolu owned Lahaina Surf and Hawai’i Technology Associates, an affiliate of The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation, owned the Weinberg Court, also known as the Lahaina Affordable Rental Apartments project. 

Before the fire, the state fought to keep the Front Street Apartments affordable, acquiring the land under the property for nearly $15 million in 2019 after the owner announced plans to increase rents to market rate. After the project was destroyed in the fire, the project owner gave up the ground lease and the Hawai’i Housing Finance and Development Corporation board approved the acquisition of the project. 

The agency is now working with Hale Mahaolu to redevelop the Front Street Apartments as well as the Lahaina Surf project next door. Hale Mahaolu said it plans to expand the Front Street Apartments from 142 to 192 units, while Lahaina Surf will be rebuilt with the same 112 units. The nonprofit will hold an open house on the redevelopment plans from 5 to 7 p.m. on Wednesday at the Lahainaluna High School cafeteria.

Lyons said the bill “will be helpful to us in the long run” because of the complications that the nonprofit has run into with rebuilding. The organization had to wait months to go back to its properties after the fire and found out that not all of the buildings had been torn down because they were damaged by the rains after the fire and thus weren’t eligible for demolition by the federal government.

All but one building on the Front Street Apartments property and two buildings on the Lahaina Surf parcel have been demolished, Lyons said.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has a rule that allows it to demolish a building if the cost of renovating the structure is more than 50% of its replacement cost. Hale Mahaolu planned to go through this process, but the documentation was “very extensive,” and the expedited route proposed through the Senate bill looks more promising, Lyons said.

Hale Mahaolu plans to match the footprint of the buildings before the fire. Even with the 50 additional units proposed for the Front Street Apartments, Lyons said the plan is not to shrink units but to add a third story to some of the buildings. 

“There’s just a human need for additional units, and we’re trying our best to get as many units built as soon as we can for the Lahaina population,” Lyons said, adding that the plans are still conceptual and a starting point for discussion with the community. 

In addition to the Front Street Apartments and Lahaina Surf, the nonprofit also plans to rebuild Hale Mahaolu Eono, a 40-unit senior living facility on Lahainaluna Road that burned in the fire and is not in the special management area.

The Front Street Apartments complex is expected to be one of the first multifamily projects redeveloped after the fire, according to a Jan. 9 status report to the Hawai’i Housing Finance and Development Corporation board, which approved a $5.5 million loan for Hale Mahaolu from the agency’s budget. 

Meanwhile, at Pi’ilani Homes, the Hawai’i Public Housing Authority is still deciding how to proceed with rebuilding the complex that was considered a total loss with five buildings destroyed by the fire and another five still standing but likely requiring demolition, the bill said. The agency had not responded to a request for comment as of Friday. 

In the meantime, many residents who were displaced from these complexes continue to struggle.

After the fire, Ronda Pali, who had lived at the Front Street Apartments for 12 years, bounced between living in a camper van and in a third-floor apartment that didn’t have an elevator to accommodate her mobility needs.

She has fibromyalgia, a chronic neurological disorder that causes widespread pain and has been made worse by disk degeneration, pinched nerves, scoliosis and a hip replacement. She needs ADA accessibility and mobility support, as well as a live-in caregiver. 

Her husband runs Maui Music Mission remotely, and until he can find a space for the kids he teaches and they can find a home that will accommodate the two of them, their dogs and her caregiver, they have to live separately. 

She now lives at Ka La’i Ola, the state’s temporary housing complex north of Lahaina that will house up to 1,500 survivors for up to five years. While she’s grateful to live there, she misses the Front Street Apartments that “felt like a real home,” with sidewalks and grassy areas and places for kids to ride their bikes. Mostly though, she misses the people.

“What we had at Front Street Apartments was a community where we knew our neighbors,” Pali said. “We saw them face to face, coming and going.” 

Pali said moving back to a rebuilt Front Street Apartments is her “fallback plan” if she’s still at Ka La’i Ola. But she’s skeptical about how quickly it will move, saying: [I am] not holding my breath.”

Even though she wants to see the Front Street Apartments rebuilt, she’s wary of the bill and government speeding up the process, saying that “if we want to fast track, then we got to do it their way. .. It’s critical, but here’s the thing — it is critical that we build them in a way that gives people a quality of life, and doesn’t separate the haves from the have-nots.”

Victory Yokotake lived at the Front Street Apartments for about a decade. The rent was affordable, her studio was just the right size and she could ride her bike to her job as a server at the Feast at Lele luau. She was in Nāpili on the day of the fire when word-of-mouth reports from friends started trickling in about nearby complexes being destroyed, and a neighbor rode in with a dirt bike afterwards to confirm the apartments were gone.

When the zone reopened, she went back to the ruins hoping to find her Hawaiian bracelets but wasn’t able to recover anything. 

Yokotake said she spent seven or eight months at the Royal Lahaina Resort before moving into the Royal Kahana in May last year, where she’s been ever since. While some individual homeowners are rebuilding, renters like Yokotake have to either find new housing or wait for their complexes to rebuild. 

“We’re all struggling, but in a different scenario,” said Yokotake, who took another job at Happy Fish restaurant in Ka’ānapali after Feast at Lele burned down.

She was supportive of the bill’s effort to speed up the rebuilding of Front Street Apartments and other projects.

“It makes the most sense,” Yokotake said. “That’s the first things that we should be rebuilding is all the apartment complexes alongside with the people building their personal homes.”

Hashimoto said lawmakers don’t want state regulations to get in the way of permanent housing,  especially with the state already pouring millions into temporary housing after the fire. He said the goal is to offer relief for the county, which is already shorthanded and bogged down by permit applications beyond just Lahaina. While individual homeowners are rebuilding, Hashimoto said housing the many renters who lived in Lahaina is another crucial piece of the recovery.

“Although we want to build back what we had, we actually have to build back better and we have to build back smarter,” he said. “And that includes good land use policy and how we’re clustering and making sure that we have a little bit more density at the end of the day rather than just single-family homes.”