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Cost Of 450 Temporary Homes For Maui Wildfire Victims: $411,000 Each

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Cost Of 450 Temporary Homes For Maui Wildfire Victims: $411,000 Each

By Stewart Yerton/Civil Beat
Up to 1,500 fire survivors will be able to live at Ka La’i Ola for up to five years. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2024)
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Up to 1,500 fire survivors will be able to live at Ka La’i Ola for up to five years. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2024)

Gov. Josh Green celebrated the groundbreaking last spring for a development of 450 small homes in West Maui, hailing it as a pivotal housing project for wildfire survivors ineligible for federal aid.

A short nine months later, residents are moving into the simple wood-framed dwellings and futuristic modular tiny homes of Ka Laʻi Ola village.

It’s been a fast turnaround. But the project’s price tag has swelled to $185 million from $115 million, penciling out to $411,000 per home, not including the cost of the land, which is owned by the state. And thereʻs a catch: the homes are temporary, with a shelf life that is uncertain in the salty air and harsh sun of West Maui.

Hawaiʻi Rep. Elle Cochran, who represents Lahaina, questions the investment of big bucks into temporary homes. Among her concerns is what will happen to the modular dwellings in five years, when the village is due to close. The state hasn’t laid out a longer-term plan for the dwellings.

“Somebody should know something because we’re just going to be stuck with these things,” she said. “The temporary thing is just the crazy part.”

Cochran has concerns beyond cost, about whether water used for Ka La’i Ola will mean less for people trying to rebuild in Lahaina, for instance. And officials say they don’t know how much the tenants will pay after an initial grace period.

What is known is that after five years, in August 2029, the Hawaiʻi Housing and Finance Development Corp. will transfer the land and new infrastructure to the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, which provides housing for Native Hawaiians.

There are only guesses about what will happen to the homes at that point, despite the big outlay of public money.

“I could foresee us using this for workforce housing where we have needs,” Green said in an interview. But he acknowledged the uncertainty.

Kali Watson, DHHL director, said the agency, which has a waiting list of about 29,000 people, looks forward to taking over the property for Native Hawaiian beneficiaries. He didn’t say whether it would use the tiny homes.

“The department remains open to exploring opportunities to repurpose Ka Laʻi Ola’s existing tiny homes as potential housing solutions for beneficiaries in the future,” he said.

Yes, the project is costly, Green said, but it represents a rapid solution to a crisis, especially when the government had been paying up to $1,000 a night for hotel rooms for families.

“We have the resources to do it, and we need to bridge the gap,” he said.

The Department of Human Services and its contractors built Ka La’i Ola from scratch, sped up by an executive order by Green that has lowered regulations on home building.

The homes are available for residents affected by the Lahaina fire who don’t meet income or background qualifications for FEMA housing. People who have moved in so far say they’re relieved to have stability after a year of living in their cars, hotels and rental homes. 

Lana Vierra, the matriarch of a family of 13, saw her clan splinter after the 2023 wildfires destroyed their multi-generational home in Lahaina. More than a year after being spread out all over Maui, Vierra’s family is regrouping at Ka Laʻi Ola.

Vierra, her two adult sons and daughter-in-law last month moved into a 586-square foot, three-bedroom, futuristic modular home she calls “my fish tank.” It looks like a double-wide trailer built for outer space, with smooth white surfaces and walls of tinted glass.

Vierra’s daughter moved into a nearby home, which she shares with her boyfriend and three sons. Another daughter and her family who now live in FEMA housing are also trying to move to Ka Laʻi Ola. Vierra’s cousin lives next door.

“Life at Ka La’i Ola is beautiful,” said Vierra, who works for Maui’s Department of Public Works. “You walk in. You close the door. And you can just breathe.”

Site Change Added To Costs

After the Lahaina fire destroyed more than 2,200 structures and killed 102 people, FEMA paid for hotels and rental housing. Knowing the federal money was short-term, Greenʻs administration pushed Ka La’i Ola as a longer-term solution, one that could help fire victims quickly and eventually help Native Hawaiian homelands beneficiaries.

To build it, the state is spending $145 million from the Department of Human Services and $40 million from the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation, a nonprofit that administers the Maui Strong Fund to support fire recovery. HomeAid Hawaii, a nonprofit best known for building tiny houses, or kauhale, for homeless people, is managing development.

The cost of Ka La’i Ola has surged by 60% in just a year because of a change in location, said Kimo Carvalho, HomeAid Hawaii’s executive director.

The original proposed site, about 2 miles south of Lahaina, would have gotten its water from a private company. That would have required a difficult and time-consuming process for Ka La’i Ola to get a permit from the state Commission on Water Resource Management.

Eventually, at the urging of Maui County, the developers moved Ka Laʻi Ola to a state-owned property with county water, which also was closer to schools, grocery stores and other necessities.

The new site’s land is on a steeper slope, requiring expensive grading of land that is mostly tough lava rock.

The largest cost involves not the dwellings, Carvalho said, but roads, a water system and other infrastructure. These “horizontal costs” amount to $106.6 million of the $185 million total budget.

While Ka La’i Ola will shut down in 2029, the infrastructure will remain — and be passed on to DHHL. This will help speed up the development of the second phase of DHHL’s nearby Villages of Leiali‘i project — expected to include 181 new homes — by 17 years, Carvalho said.

But it’s not all infrastructure. Ka La’i Olaʻs budget includes $10.6 million for development and soft costs, including $187,000 for community relations. HomeAid, which recently brought on a team of four to bring its staff to 11, is taking $1.5 million to serve as development manager.

Dwelling Costs Compare Favorably To New Homes

The homes themselves pencil out to an average of $122,000 per dwelling, not counting infrastructure, installation or common areas like barbecues. They range in types and sizes and costs, from approximately $53,000 to about $218,000.

The construction consulting firm Rider Levett Bucknall, which provides data on construction costs in the U.S., estimates the typical range for new construction of a new single-family home on Maui is approximately $350-$500 per square foot as of this month.

So a permanent 586-square foot, three-bedroom home the size of the Vierra’s $91,000 Nano Nest would cost between $205,100 and $293,000.

However, such a home would be designed to be permanent, while officials with Greenʻs office and DHHL can’t say exactly what will happen to the Ka La’i Ola dwellings after five years. Nor does HomeAid know how long the homes will last in the West Maui conditions.

“We don’t,” Carvalho said. “That’s the honest truth.”

Micah Kane, chief executive of the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation, considers his organization’s $40 million contribution to Ka La’i Ola a good investment.

“We continue to offer our strong support for Ka La’i Ola and the many short-, mid-, and long-term benefits it will bring to West Maui,” he said in a statement. “While the initial infrastructure investment contributing to higher upfront costs is significant, it will pave the way for hundreds of homes for local Maui families in the years ahead.”

Kane said the high costs reflect trends that have driven up home prices on Maui, and “reflect a broader challenge that has affected local housing for decades — the government’s deferment of essential offsite infrastructure investments … This delay has resulted in these costs being shifted to homebuilders and, ultimately, to future homeowners.”

Cochran, the state lawmaker from Lahaina, said the shift from the original site with a private water source to one on the public system public water system doesn’t eliminate concerns about perennial shortages on West Maui. She wants to make sure property owners in Lahaina will have water when they rebuild their homes.

“How’s that going to work out when we start rebuilding the town?” she asked.

In an email to Civil Beat, Carvalho said Ka La’i Ola will use existing county water that is considered “unused allocations from the burn zone.”

Meanwhile, tenants like Christina Paragoso are just happy to have a permanent place to live. She and her family lost their home at the edge of Lahaina. They lived in four or five places after the fire, she said, including their cars and hotels. Ka Laʻi Ola, she said, gives them time to recover.

“It really does take a lot of weight off our shoulders to have a place to stay for the next five years,” she said.

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.