by When Charles Nahale checked into a one-room shared condo in Kapalua Bay, a main tourist attraction on Maui’s northwest coast, in mid-October, he was told by the front desk staff that he would only be staying for 12 days. The blunt announcement didn’t surprise Nahale, a Native Hawaiian musician who lost his home in west Maui in a raging wildfire on August 8: He’d been bouncing from hotel to hotel, often on the spur of the moment, under a shelter 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 non-perishable food. He brought only toiletries and essentials into the hotel room. When he was hungry, he went to the truck to get a bite of tuna. The only possessions he was able to save from the fire were a ukulele, guitar and work clothes. “I live a casual life,” said Nahale, who is in his 60s. “What’s the point of unpacking if I’m moving again after 12 days?”
Related: Evictions can kill: how US communities are trying to break the cycle of violence
The deadliest US wildfire in more than a century – which burned the historic town of Lahaina, killed 100 people and destroyed 3% of Maui’s residential housing stock – pushed the island’s long-standing affordable housing crisis to a new tipping point. More than 10,000 survivors lost their homes, and, four months later, 6,300 are still sheltered at 33 hotels contracted by the Red Cross and FEMA. For the thousands of displaced evacuees, the haphazard way in which the program is managed has serious social consequences, along with tourists returning to the region devastated by a fire in October: there are concerns residents about rising suicide rates, and monthly calls to the county’s 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 would stay for at least half a year, gave her the stability to start regrouping after the fire destroyed her home.
But on October 17, just over a week after west Maui reopened to tourism, the resort informed Lukela that her family would be relocated the next day to another hotel 40 minutes away, which had no kitchen. her to cook there for her teenage children. . The move also meant she had to find a new home for the dogs as the property did not allow pets. The shock and stress of being displaced again brought her to the brink of collapse, she said.
Lukela felt sure that the resort wanted to provide more space for visitors. She said she didn’t hold any grudges but felt the resort could have easily put tourists in another room rather than evicting families who had lost everything. “Relocation breaks my heart because the outside world doesn’t understand what we’re facing,” she said. “This was supposed to be a safe haven.”
In recent weeks, hundreds of survivors have been forced to relocate as several hotels have terminated their contracts with the Red Cross. The precarious housing situation in which residents like Lukela and Nahale live has sparked legal action and protests. In October, Nahale filed a complaint with the Hawaii civil rights commission over what he considered to be the hotels’ preferential treatment of tourists. “The claim is that we’re displacing tourists, and that’s discrimination,” he said, adding that his family has lived in Maui for generations.
The Red Cross said that in the past month, more than 100 families have moved into long-term transitional housing through the organization’s efforts with federal, state, county and nonprofit partners on a range of housing solutions, including tax incentives, Fema direct . leasing and philanthropic rental of property.
“We do our best to communicate all changes and expectations to survivors in advance of necessary actions to ensure the least disruption to people’s lives,” said Stephanie Fox, head of media relations for the American Red Cross, in an emailed statement. “Our current protocol is to notify residents two weeks before the hotel contract deadline.”
On Halloween, the night before Nahale’s move out date, a hotel manager informed him that he could stay until December 15th. The news brought little recovery. “It’s hard to be in the spirit of giving, the spirit of the holiday, when you have nothing,” he said.
The return of the visitors and the constant threat of displacement, he said, was a slap in the face to those who had not had a chance to fully process and heal from their trauma. For nearly a month, more than two dozen community organizers with the Lahaina Strong pool have camped out at Kāʻanapali Beach, staging fishing demonstrations to demand long-term interim housing.
With few long-term housing solutions in sight, island residents are looking for other solutions.
The most effective way to house fire survivors is by focusing on short-term rentals and Airbnbs, said Matt Jachowski, a Native Hawaiian software developer who built the Maui Hale Match website, which matches displaced families with landlords and homeowners. . The more than 12,000 short-term rentals in west and south Maui can house all evacuees, many of which are currently unoccupied, according to Jachowski’s analysis of current property tax data.
In contrast, he said, there are only about 3,100 units on the island under one-year leases. “There aren’t enough long-term rentals anywhere to house everybody,” even if they’re all empty, he said.
Since the launch of Jachowski’s website in early October, he has received more than 900 housing applications but less than 100 matches. One reason for the discrepancy is that market rents have risen sharply since the fire: monthly rates for one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments are $600 to $1,500 more than what fire survivors can afford. to pay, according to Jachowski’s analysis of the real-. estate listings. “Landlords are offering rents that only rich transplants or tourists can afford,” Jachowski said. “The money is stopping this process of housing those people who have lost their homes and jobs and are still paying mortgages.”
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Hawaii governor Josh Green said his administration was working to convert 3,000 short-term rentals to long-term housing for displaced residents. The state and federal governments, through FEMA, will encourage 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’s willing to issue a moratorium on short-term rentals. “I completely understand people’s concerns and fears,” Green said. “We’re not going to let people be homeless.”
While he sympathizes with survivors affected by tourists returning to heal, Green said he had a responsibility to rehabilitate the economy for the many hospitality industry employees who had to return to work. “It breaks my heart that we have to keep moving forward and we can’t pause for two or three years. We have to keep our economy alive or we won’t have the resources to pay for long-term rent or schools or hospitals,” Green said.
Officials estimated it could be two years before locals in Lahaina can begin rebuilding their homes. Meanwhile, many still have mortgages to pay, since home loans on burnt houses have not been forgiven.
Brandon Fujiwara, sous chef at the Old Lahaina Luau, lost his half-century-old family home in the fire. He is currently staying at Honua Kai Resort, a sprawling resort in Kāʻanapali, north of Lahaina, with emerald lawns and numerous pools, with his wife, mother, brother-in-law and two children. He hopes the government will provide financial support for mortgage or rent payments over the next few years, he said, because west Maui rentals big enough for his family of six are too expensive. After weeks of searching, he has a three-bedroom unit in Kihei, a city more than 20 miles south of Lahaina. The rent will cost him over $90,000 a year.
“There’s no way I can pay all that for the next three years,” Fujiwara said.
Due to rising housing costs in Elms in recent years, it was not unusual for multiple families and dozens of people to live together, young style. On defunct Front Street, the town’s main thoroughfare where beloved cultural institutions sat alongside mid-century homes, many families added accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to their main buildings to accommodate all residents.
Ester Dumayas, a Filipino immigrant who works at the Royal Lahaina Resort, lived in a nine-bedroom, two-story house off Lahainaluna Road in Lahaina with 23 family members, including her five siblings and all their children. Shortly after immigrating from the Philippines, Dumayas and all her siblings worked two jobs, pooled their resources and bought the property in 1998.
Since the fire burned their home, they have been sheltering in five separate hotel rooms near Kāʻanapali Beach. Dumayas, 62, said she wasn’t sure the family could afford to build the same type of house under the current building restrictions and building costs.
“But we have 20 years of memories in that house,” she said. “That’s why my kids said we have to rebuild no matter what.”
Meanwhile, thousands of Lahaina residents who lost their homes and jobs during the fire are relying on community support to meet their most basic needs.
Uilani Kapu runs an aid distribution hub near Kāʻanapali Beach with the family, providing children’s clothing, food, water and medicine to evacuees sheltered at nearby resorts. The five major community-led hubs in west Maui serve more than 12,000 people daily, Kapu said. In October, she noticed more people asking for tents, sleeping bags and stoves – a sign that some survivors were homeless. (About 200 wildfire survivors who were homeless before the fire, and a similar number of undocumented immigrants, were estimated to be ineligible for the Red Cross’s unconsolidated shelter program.)
A sense of generosity and relentless ingenuity was built into the DNA of the Hawaiians, Kapu said.
“Our grandparents grew up together. We grew up together. Our children and grandchildren are growing up together,” she said. “We are so excited because we have each other’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.
