Housing shuffle vexes Lahaina fire evacuees

Paul Maloney, his wife, Sandra, and their Pomeranian, Zeus, are about to move for the eighth time since the Aug. 8 wildfire that swept through Lahaina killing up to 98 people and destroying about 2,200 buildings, mostly homes.

The Kahoma Village townhome where the couple lived with the owner, their son Randall Baybayan, did not burn down in the fire as some of the other homes in the newer community. But conditions are far from normal.

Maloney said FEMA initially said the family could return to the home to live. He said it took two appeals for FEMA to conclude, as the insurance company already had, that the property was uninhabitable without power and water.

The home, which is in a burn zone, also is hard to access. To visit, the Maloneys have to go through the scrutiny of a National Guard-manned checkpoint. Outside the home, plants are dry and dying. The home’s inside reflects the chaos of a family having to flee for its life and then hastily return again and again to pick up supplies to support each new move.

“We keep having to move. It’s so tiring and we miss our family,” Maloney said during a recent supply run to the home with granddaughter Kamryn Bosque. “The uncertainty is so stressful, and we haven’t even had time to grieve. We lost three family members in the fire, and nine family members lost their homes.”

Maloney and Bosque still recall the fiercely hot flames that came within 20 yards of the townhome. Fire burned the entire block of town ­homes across the street and cast cinders onto their lanai furniture. They drove north to other family homes in the Hawaiian Homelands section of West Maui and, when the flames got too close, bolted again.

Just over two months after fleeing the fire, the Maloneys and their ohana, like many other Lahaina residents, are still in limbo and facing mounting housing insecurities. They and others are coming up short as they search for mid-to longer-term rental units in a market that was already one of the nation’s tightest and most expensive before the fire. Also, the phased reopening of tourism to West Maui, which began Oct. 8, is expected to affect the availability of noncongregate shelter space in hotels and in the resort condominiums, which are more suited to longer-term stays.

The Maloneys, who first stayed with family and friends, already have had to leave two noncongregate hotel shelters. They moved from the Fairmont Kea Lani after the American Red Cross contract ended early and with little notice. The Maloneys were next assigned to a noncongregate shelter room at the Hyatt Regency Maui Resort &Spa; however, they were forced to give it up when they had to leave Maui for a few days. Maloney said the family was told that they could reapply for new shelter upon their return.

“It’s frustrating because we need a room, and we are worried about getting one when we come back,” he said. “Tourism is reopening and people are getting displaced.”

The Hyatt is in the county’s last reopening zone for its phased restart for West Maui tourism since that zone is housing most Lahaina evacuees. However, it is already advertising on its website that it will welcome guests with existing reservations Oct. 29 and is taking new reservations for stays starting Nov. 17.

The lack of available units even has hindered the nonprofit Maui Economic Opportunity’s Maui Fires Relief Transitional Housing Program, which assists fire-affected kupuna and families by paying six months of rent and a security deposit directly to the landlord. It’s a crucial gap program because it has broader qualification criteria and sometimes is able to assist those whom FEMA has denied.

A major complication to finding longer-term housing for residents who were displaced by the Lahaina fire is that much of the housing stock in West Maui is not necessarily available to rent. Paul Brewbaker, principal of TZ Economics, said, “Maui is among those places, and West Maui specifically, with a lot of offshore investor homeownership and seasonal and other part-time occupancy.”

Brewbaker said the 2021 American Community Survey the Census estimated that there were 11,730 housing units in West Maui, with a relatively low occupancy rate of 62% and high vacancy rate of 38% because of absentee owners, turnover and the like. For the rest of Maui, the occupancy rate is 79.5%, with a vacancy rate of 20.5%. Statewide, housing units are 86% occupied and 14% vacant.

Brewbaker noted that Maui also has been extremely slow to deliver new housing stock. He said data from the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism shows that Maui built about 1,100 new housing units per year from 1999 to 2007, and from 2008 to 2022 delivered about 520 new units annually.

But the lack of longer-term units in West Maui is not the only challenge getting in the way of housing more fire evacuees.

Trauma as well as the trickle-down impact of the tourism downturn on Maui have caused high unemployment. Before the pandemic, Maui’s share of the GDP for tourism was 38%, according to DBEDT data.

Cabebe said without longer-term housing, people might postpone returning to work, as they don’t know where they will be living. “Thirty days in a hotel is not enough time to make a decision about what will work best for the family,” she said. “Six months at least gives some breathing room.”