Maui’s Housing Crisis Only Got Worse After The Fires. Will This New Department Help?

In November 2022, with Maui deep in a housing crisis and needing about 10,000 new units, voters overwhelmingly passed a county charter amendment to create a new department dedicated to the mission.

The Department of Housing is scheduled to launch July 1, and not a moment too soon with the destruction of about 5,700 homes in the Aug. 8 wildfires pushing rent and home prices to new heights and forcing some residents to sleep in cars and tents or leave the island.

But there are many questions about the authority and direction of the new housing department with just three months before the voter-mandated split of the Department of Housing and Human Concerns. Namely, who will lead it and will its focus be to develop affordable housing or to facilitate development?

County Managing Director Josiah Nishita, who also heads the Office of Recovery, did not have answers to those questions during public appearances last week before the Maui County Council and the Salary Commission, which set the compensation for the director and deputy director of both new departments.

Nishita said the “visioning process” for what will soon be two standalone departments began last year but was put on hold when response and recovery to the wildfires took priority.

“We are still in the process of collecting community and stakeholder feedback and drawing out those plans,” Nishita told the Salary Commission on Friday. “I will just say that what we’ve heard is that there is some sentiment towards a development arm within this department coming to fruition.”

But whether developing residential housing becomes a major function of the new department “remains to be seen,” he said.

Dave DeLeon, who spearheaded the amendment while serving on the Charter Commission, said he wanted to call it the Housing Development Department and have an advisory committee of development gurus to aid the director. He added that the director should be someone in that field.

“The problem is people keep on trying to water (the new housing department) down and turn it into a bureaucratic entity rather than a proactive entity that would find ways to develop housing that our people can afford,” he said.

The new Department of Housing has a proposed budget for the fiscal year starting July 1 of $74.4 million and 39 full-time positions, including two added leadership jobs and three new positions.

It will be created primarily from the current Housing Division and handle county-funded housing initiatives, such as those for first-time homebuyers, compliance with county housing codes and the new Ohana Assistance Program, which provides grants of up to $100,000 to help build accessory dwelling units.

The new department also will include the Housing and Community Development Division which will have the added position — created through the charter amendment — of a liaison with the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands. It is responsible for supporting efforts to create affordable housing to meet the needs of county residents. These two divisions will have a combined 17 employees.

Rounding out the new department will be the grant-funded staff of 22 who oversee the federal housing programs through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Existing housing staff work with existing developers to provide funding, assist in getting past regulatory hurdles, furnish guidance for workforce housing agreements and “helping to push projects along,” Nishita said.

But will the new department have more authority to improve what most agree is a cumbersome process of navigating housing projects from start to finish through myriad requirements and permitting by many other county departments and agencies?

Maui County Council member Tom Cook tried to get the answers during a council committee meeting Wednesday: “Will it enable you to do things that you couldn’t do before?”

Lori Tsuhako, the current director of the Department of Housing and Human Concerns, wasn’t sure, saying “most of the people in the department are in a wait and see.”

That appears to include herself. Nishita told the Salary Commission that Tsuhako would not automatically get one of the new directorships and would have to be reappointed.

Mayor Richard Bissen’s communications office said that he hasn’t chosen anyone yet.

Nishita said the appointment would need to be moving forward through the council approval process by early May for the person to start by July 1.

Hitting The Ground Running?

Council Chair Alice Lee, who served as director of the Department of Housing and Human Concerns from 1999 to 2006, told Nishita at the meeting last week that the county needs a housing director “who is able to hit the ground running because there’s no time for training.”

Nishita said recruiting people to run the new departments has been delayed in part by the Salary Commission not having set the compensation levels for the top positions.

The commission took care of that Friday though, setting the salaries for the directors at $147,992 and the deputy directors at $133,193.

The charter amendment also called for the creation of a five-person housing board. When asked how much authority the board would have and how it would work, Tsuhako said that neither the Department of Housing and Human Concerns nor the administration asked for it.

“And frankly I don’t know how it would work,” she said. “I’m assuming that the board would be appointed by the nominations board like everybody else.”

Jeffrey Ueoka, an attorney for several affordable housing projects underway on Maui, said he doesn’t know how the creation of a Department of Housing will help speed up a process that has become so technical and detailed and “just takes a long time.”

He said it may be possible to give power to the housing director to expedite certain things through county code. But he added that the department is not going to be the only one reviewing the permits, and rattled off a long list of reviews that need to take place including zoning, historical, environmental, fire and water.

To deal with this, council member Nohelani U’U-Hodgins introduced a resolution last week that urged the mayor to establish a housing coordinator for Maui County who could work with all the departments and agencies and provide a tracking system of all the affordable housing projects.

This would include the new Office of Recovery that was created following the fires. Nishita said the office has been focused on moving forward housing projects that already have government approval, and will transition to looking at the longer-term goals of developing affordable residences on county land and rebuilding county-owned multifamily structures that were lost in the fire.

Lee said she was against a “housing czar” because in her experience the position doesn’t come with authority to demand action “other than a title.” She said it would be better to create a team of people in all the relevant departments — including planning, water and public works — that the mayor would hold accountable.

The number of affordable units needed on Maui will be better known when the updated housing planning study by the Hawaii Housing Finance and Development Corp. comes out later this year. In the meantime, single-home prices in Maui County hit a record $1.34 million in January.

No matter what the data shows, Cook, who’s also a general contractor, said the county needs to “evolve” because “we’re not going to build 15,000 houses in the next six years or seven years the way we’re going now.”

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