May is Now Wildfire Awareness Month in Hawai‘i
A necessary, but certainly late springtime designation in Hawai‘i
(No. 32, a ±06 minute read)
As Hawai‘i reckons with the actuality of wildfire the reality of land use is brought to the fore
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Welcome to the Tuesday morning newsletter! I had a lovely weekend without it, thank you. See you next Tuesday!
The month of May has been declared Wildfire Mitigation and Risk Reduction Preparedness Month in Hawai‘i. It is a necessary thing, this designation, to ensure that the critical issues of wildfire preparation and preparedness remain in the public consciousness. To announce May’s additional role (it is already the month that begins here not so much with International Workers’ Day, but May Day — “lei day” in Hawai‘i) Governor Green summoned to a presser the heads of the Hawaiʻi Emergency Management Agency, the Hawaiʻi Wildfire Management Organization, DLNR and DOFAW. And a couple of fire chiefs, for good measure.
Recently become banal, but no less consequential, statistics were reiterated, (more than 99% of Hawaʻi wildfires are human-caused; this will likely be a particularly hot, dry, and dangerous summer; etc), department heads spoke of their commitments to community safety from and during wildfire incidents, underwear was touted as an important part of one’s “go bag” which every Hawai‘i resident should have prepared — along with their seven day hurricane ration of food and water. Go bags! Rations! What is this paradise?
It is a paradise of a different sort in Hawai‘i, after Lāhainā, more for some than others. 628 fire-displaced people were still without permanent housing on Maui as of mid-May.
One of Hawai‘i’s principal issues, prior to, and more acutely since the fires, has been housing. Short-term vacation rentals have been a boon to investors outside the islands and devastating to local housing markets on the archipelago’s prime tourist destination islands; O‘ahu, Maui, Kaua‘i, and Hawai‘i island. Since the fire Green has repeated some version of this statement, more times than I can recall:
“52% of all STRs [short-term rentals] in Hawaii are owned by non-state residents, with 27% owning 20 units or more. In addition, 75,000 of the 89,000 units in our STR market are ‘not legal,’ according to existing laws. That represents more than 80% of the STRs here — and more than our entire statewide housing deficit of 50,000 units.”1
And the UH Economic Research Organization (UHERO) repeatedly crunches the grinding numbers and comes up with charts like this one:
That from a report dating to April of last year titled, ‘Short-term Vacation Rentals and Housing Costs in Hawaiʻi.’ It is as grim as economic statistics can be when considering the ability of people from here to be able to continue to reside here. And, of course, this discourse is occurring on top of an underlying conversation that sounds like this:
“Kauai’s average home price currently sits around $970,000. Though expensive, Kauai has the highest ceiling for annual income of any Hawaiian market. That means owning a vacation rental here can be especially lucrative in the long-term.”
So, obviously, when a disaster occurs that removes substantial housing from the body of habitable dwelling units we must look at a painful reality; our desirability as a tropical destination. That thing itself, tropical dedsireability — which sustains a substantial portion of the local economy — is killing housing prospects thanks to tech’s mantra to, “move fast and break things,” colliding with market availibility of residential units. STRs moved fast and broke things: vanishing housing prospects left a wake of foundering local communities, torpedoed by their own attractiveness.
Today, thanks to Airbnb and its internet-powered ilk, investors now see STRs as a property right, and lucrative income stream, while eliding the social consequences this tech-era inflationary menace causes local housing markets in “destination” locations. Hawai‘i is certainly not alone facing this reality.
Urgently since last August Green and state legislators have been working to fix something plainly broken, and there is now both law and plan to sharply curtail what has effectively been an open, unregulated market in renting dwelling units to vacationers. Green has signed SB 2919, making national news as it brings Hawai‘i’s STRs “one step closer to being phased out.” Maui mayor Richard Bissen has promised to cut 7,000 STRs, half Maui County’s stock, using the levers SB2919 has provided him.
So Lāhainā’s loss has prompted two responses to already existing problems in Hawai‘i: Addressing the lack of sober awareness, and concern, in comprehending Hawai‘i’s local wildfire threat, and spurring a reasonable reaction to the consequences of the tech world’s savage social disruption of vacation destination communities — by its insertion, without a legal leg to stand on relative to typical planning codes, of short-term vacation renting into community housing use and outcomes.2 Expect the powerful real estate and vacation rental industries, as well as individual investors, to take SB2919 to court.
And why wouldn’t they? Since I was a child Hawai‘i has been a place for the wealthy to visit, buy land, and generally live apart from the local population while profiting from their luxury properties’ appreciation. In the late 1970s and through the ‘80s this place was filthy with celebrities either visiting or in part-time residence. To whit: my sister tripped both Jim Nabors and Rod Stewart on a small local beach near Nabors’ home and where Stewart spent considerable time when he wasn’t on tour or playing football with an amateur club in San Francisco.3 Who takes out both Gomer Pile and ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy’ before kindergarten?! This place, paradise, afforded her the opportunity and she ran (into them) with it. She is forever proud of her accomplishment.
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But today it’s different. A Forbes Magazine investigative piece determined that “37 people, equal to just 0.003% of Hawaii’s total population of 1.4 million, own 11% of its private land.” These billionaires range from those often in the public eye like Oprah, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Benioff, and Bezos to less showy types like Steve Case (AOL, and from Honolulu), Quek Leng Chan (a Malaysian banking magnate who owns a third of Molokai), and Pierre Omidiyar (Ebay). Together they own, according to Forbes, “218,000 acres…5.3% of the state’s total land and 11.1% of all non-government-owned land—though it is likely even higher given the lengths to which these billionaires go to obscure their ownership.” This does not generally help local affordability. I do also wonder what mere multi-millionaires own of our island home.
But let’s reel this back into wildfire. Mark Benioff, CEO and founder of Salesforce (who has had leveled against him plausible accusations of cultural appropriation for his incorporation of Hawaiian cultural concepts into Salesforce’s codified company culture) owns substantial tracts of land on the Big Island. He has donated at least a dozen fire apparatus, two helicopters, and a rescue boat to Hawai‘i County. (Additionally he recently donated $150 million to improve healthcare services in Hawai‘i.) He clearly feels an attachment to this place and Big Island Fire is grateful for the needed equipment. It played a considerable role in preventing 2021’s Mana Road Fire from becoming anything more than one of the largest fires by area in state history. It could have consumed much more than grassland — as could any of the seven fires that burned on Hawai‘i island, and fought with equipment donated by Benioff, while the Lāhainā and Kula fires were raging.
So, how does Hawai‘i balance such complexities? Can it be both a vacationland and a place made up of viable communities? What does it mean when the archipelago is an ownership destination for the super-rich; some of whom are picking up the loose ends our government hasn’t been able to manage, some of whom are merely taking advantage of some of the country’s lowest property tax rates to maintain paradisiacal getaways or park cash? And what will happen to our housing stock, and home prices, after the next displacing disaster?
Wildfire shows all of these questions, and many others, to be plainly interdependent, all while it forces answers to be found — and quickly. Just wait until substantial property-affecting coastal erosion is also in the mix, the answers will come fast and furious. And they will not likely be popular.
Aloha, from paradise! 🌺
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Addendum: Today (05/21) UHERO published its annual assessment of Hawai‘i’s housing market. The Star-Advertiser called it, “bleak.” The newspaper also had this to say, pulled from UHERO’s Maui statistics, “…short-term vacation rental inventory on Maui is 2% higher now than a year ago despite many such units being destroyed by the Aug. 8 fire.” And, “UHERO’s report noted that more than half of all property owners in Lahaina appear to be nonresidents, based on property tax bill addresses.” One third of Maui homes are owned by people living out of state according to the UHERO survey. The newspaper goes on to list “Lowlights” from the report. Worth a read.
This time from a self-penned editorial in the Star-Advertiser.
Social media, that is a whole different story of tourists colonizing local places for their money shot selfies.
We used to visit this beach after our parents took us on pre-dawn visits to Leonard’s Bakery for a box of hot malasadas. The beach is no longer there, victim to shoreline erosion, and no sane local person goes to Leonard’s Bakery these days, if they can help it. The tourist lines are too long. Jim Nabors became well-loved here, Stewart I can’t speak to but he was very nice about my sister tripping him up. In either case their wealth represents small potatoes (manini kalo?) compared to today’s ultra-rich seeking three and four digit acreage in these small islands.
*Mark Benioff, not Steve. Sorry I couldn’t proofread this round 😍