When Charles Nahale checked into a one-bedroom time-share condo in Kapalua Bay, a tourist mainstay on Maui’s north-west coast, in mid-October, front desk staff told him he would only be staying for 12 days. Nahale, a Native Hawaiian musician who had lost his west Maui home in the ferocious wildfire of 8 August, wasn’t surprised by the blunt notice: he’d been bouncing from hotel to hotel, often at a moment’s notice, under a sheltering program run by the Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
After the move, Nahale turned his pickup truck into a storage unit – part closet and part pantry – filled with boxes of clothes and nonperishable food. He brought only toiletries and essentials into the hotel suite. When he was hungry, he went to the truck to grab a can of tuna. A ukulele, a guitar and a set of work clothes were the only possession he was able to save from the fire. “I live a nomadic life,” said Nahale, who’s in his 60s. “What’s the point of unpacking if I’m moving again after 12 days?”
The deadliest US wildfire in more than a century – which incinerated the historic town of Lahaina, killed 100 people and destroyed 3% of Maui’s residential housing stock – pushed the island’s longstanding affordable housing crisis to a new inflection point. More than 10,000 survivors lost their homes, and, four months later, 6,300 remain sheltered at 33 hotels contracted with the Red Cross and Fema. For the thousands of evacuees who have been shuffling around, the haphazard way in which the program is managed, along with the return of tourists to the fire-ravaged region in October, have carried dire social consequences: residents share concerns of rising suicide rates, and monthly calls to the county domestic violence hotline have more than doubled since the disaster.
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For the first two months after the fire, Kanani Lukela stayed at a two-bedroom unit at the Sands of Kahana Resort, north of Lahaina, with five family members and two emotional support dogs. The temporary space, where she thought she’d be staying for at least half a year, provided the stability for her to begin regrouping after the fire destroyed her home.
But on 17 October, just over a week after west Maui reopened to tourism, the resort informed Lukela that her family would be relocated the next day to a different hotel 40 minutes away, that had no kitchen for her to cook in for her teenage children. The move also meant that she had to find a new home for the dogs because the property didn’t allow pets. The shock and stress of being displaced yet again pushed her to the brink of a breakdown, she said.
Lukela felt certain that the resort wanted to make more room for visitors. She said she harbored no resentment toward them but felt the resort could easily have put tourists in a different room rather than completely moving out families who had lost everything. “The relocation tore my heart because the outside world doesn’t realize what we’re facing,” she said. “This was supposed to be a safe haven.”
In recent weeks, hundreds of survivors were forced to relocate as several hotels ended their contracts with the Red Cross. The precarious housing situation that residents like Lukela and Nahale find themselves in has spurred legal action and protests. In October, Nahale filed a complaint with the Hawaii civil rights commission for what he perceived to be the hotels’ preferential treatment for tourists. “It’s the claim that we’re being displaced for tourists, and that’s discrimination,” he said, adding that his family has lived in Maui for generations.
The Red Cross said that over the past month, more than 100 households have transitioned into interim long-term housing through the organization’s efforts with federal, state, county and non-profit partners on an array of housing solutions, including tax incentives, Fema direct leasing and philanthropic acquisition of rental properties.
“We do our best to communicate all changes and expectations with survivors in advance of necessary moves to ensure the least amount of disruption to people’s lives,” Stephanie Fox, the media relations lead for the American Red Cross, said in an email statement. “Our current protocol is to alert residents two weeks in advance of a hotel contract deadline.”
On Halloween, the eve of Nahale’s move-out date, a hotel manager informed him that he could stay until 15 December. The news brought little reprieve. “It’s hard to be in the spirit of giving, the spirit of the holidays, when you have nothing,” he said.
The return of visitors and the threat of continued displacement, he said, was a slap in the face to people who haven’t had the chance to fully process and heal from their trauma. For nearly a month, more than two dozen community organizers with the Lahaina Strong collective have camped out at Kāʻanapali Beach, staging a fishing demonstration to call for interim long-term housing.
With few long-term housing solutions in sight, island residents are looking for other solutions.
The most efficient way to house fire survivors is by targeting short-term rentals and Airbnbs, said Matt Jachowski, a Native Hawaiian software developer who built the website Maui Hale Match, which matches displaced families with landlords and homeowners. The more than 12,000 short-term rentals in west and south Maui can easily house all evacuees, and many are currently unoccupied, according to Jachowski’s analysis of current property tax data.
By contrast, he said, only around 3,100 units on the island are under year-long leases. “There are nowhere near enough long-term rentals to house everybody,” even if they’re all empty, he said.
Since Jachowski’s website launched in early October, it’s received more than 900 housing requests but yielded fewer than 100 matches. One reason for the mismatch is that market rents have soared since the fire: the monthly rates for one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments are between $600 and $1,500 higher than what fire survivors can afford to pay, according to Jachowski’s analysis of real estate listings. “Landlords are offering rents that only affluent transplants or tourists can afford,” Jachowski said. “The money is stopping this process of housing these people who have lost their homes and jobs and are still paying mortgages.”
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The Hawaii governor, Josh Green, said his administration was working on converting 3,000 short-term rentals into long-term housing for displaced residents. The state and federal governments, through Fema, will incentivize homeowners to issue two-year leases by paying them the same rental income they earned the previous year, he said. If he can’t get enough homeowners on board, Green said, he was prepared to issue a moratorium on short-term rentals. “I absolutely understand people’s concerns and fears,” Green said. “We’re not going to let people become homeless.”
While he sympathizes with survivors who found the return of tourists disruptive to their healing, Green said he had a responsibility to rehabilitate the economy for the many employees in the hospitality industry who needed to return to work. “It breaks my heart that we have to continue to move forward and can’t pause for two to three years. We have to keep our economy alive or we won’t have resources to pay for long-term rentals or schools or hospitals,” Green said.
Officials estimated that it may be two years before Lahaina locals can begin to rebuild their homes. In the meantime, many still have to pay mortgages, since home loans on burned-down houses haven’t been forgiven.
Brandon Fujiwara, a sous-chef at the Old Lahaina Luau, lost his half-century-old family home in the fire. Currently he’s staying at Honua Kai Resort, a sprawling resort in Kāʻanapali, north of Lahaina, with emerald lawns and multiple pools, with his wife, mother, brother-in-law and two children. He’s hoping the government will provide monetary support for mortgage or rent payments over the next couple years, he said, as west Maui rentals that are big enough for his family of six are far too expensive. After weeks of searching, he’s lined up a three-bedroom unit in Kīhei, a city more than 20 miles south of Lahaina. The rent will cost him upwards of $90,000 a year.
“There’s just no way I can afford all that for the next three years,” Fujiwara said.
Due to escalating housing costs in Lahaina in recent decades, it wasn’t unusual for multiple families and dozens of people to live together, ohana style. On the decimated Front Street, the town’s main thoroughfare where beloved cultural institutions flanked mid-century homes, many households added accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to their main buildings to accommodate every resident.
Ester Dumayas, a Filipino immigrant who works at the Royal Lahaina Resort, lived in a nine-bedroom, two-story house near Lahainaluna Road in Lahaina with 23 family members, including her five sisters and all of their children. Shortly after immigrating from the Philippines, Dumayas and her sisters all worked two jobs, pooled their resources and bought the property in 1998.
Since the fire burned down their home, they’ve been sheltering in five separate hotel rooms by Kāʻanapali Beach. Dumayas, 62, said she wasn’t sure the family could afford to build the same type of home under current building restrictions and construction costs.
“But we’ve got 20 years of memories in that house,” she said. “That’s why my children said we have to rebuild no matter what.”
Meanwhile, the thousands of Lahaina residents who lost their homes and jobs during the fire are relying on community support to fulfill their most basic needs.
Uilani Kapu runs an aid-distribution hub by Kāʻanapali Beach with family, providing children’s clothing, food, water and medications to evacuees sheltered at nearby resorts. The five major community-led hubs in west Maui serve more than 12,000 individuals daily, Kapu said. In October, she noticed that more people had been requesting tents, sleeping bags and stoves – a sign that some survivors had become homeless. (About 200 wildfire survivors who had been unhoused before the fire, and a similar number of undocumented immigrants, were deemed ineligible for the Red Cross non-congregate shelter program.)
An untiring sense of generosity and resourcefulness was baked into Hawaiians’ DNA, Kapu said.
“Our grandparents grew up together. We grew up together. Our children and grandchildren are growing up together,” she said. “We’re so spirited because we have one another’s support forever.”
This is part of a series on the aftermath of the Maui wildfires. Read the first story, on the mental health crisis unfolding among Maui’s children.
