Our keiki are leaving. Families who lived in these islands for generations are being priced out of the very homes their kūpuna once built. What used to be starter homes or quiet retiree housing has been transformed into unstaffed vacation rentals, managed from afar and marketed on global platforms.
We are standing at a point of precedence where our leaders must decide: Will Maui remain a place for its people, or will we surrender entire neighborhoods to investors chasing profit?
When Maui’s apartment-zoned properties were first built, their intent was clear. They were meant for residential housing and not for commercial use. It was primarily for young families to begin their lives, and for elders to settle into retirement.
The historical documents prove this: many of them explicitly forbid hotel use or transient rentals. The overwhelming intent was residential. Yet over decades, online platforms like VRBO and Air-bnb turned these apartments into commercial commodities. What began as seasonal, or family use, became commercial inventory.
The numbers tell the story of loss. In just 10 years, many complexes saw owner-occupancy drop by 40-60 percentage points. Lahaina Roads, once built for private dwellings, went from a third of owners living on site to essentially zero. Pacific Shores, marketed in 1989 as affordable housing, lost more than 60 resident units in a decade.
Across Maui, thousands of homes disappeared from the residential market, converted into nightly rentals that no longer serve the community.
But the deeper truth is not in the numbers, it is in the human cost. Our young families cannot afford to live where they grew up. Many are forced to move to the continent, leaving behind their ʻohana and their culture.
Our kūpuna and retirees, whose successive generations already left, can’t afford to retire in those smaller units in walkable neighborhoods, because they were taken over by transient vacation rental investors for profit.
That brings us to the choice now before the Maui County Council. The bill that passed out of the Housing and Land Use Committee is a “clean” bill that is exactly what the community needs.
However, attempts to undermine it can be found in proposed amendments that would make it all fall apart in the courts. Passing it clean, means passing the bill without catastrophic carve-outs or amendments.
Passing Bill 9 clean is the only way forward. The community has fought long and hard and we have seen historic levels of public engagement because our local people know – we are standing at the precipice where drastic change must happen or we will lose the Hawaiʻi we know forever.
Speculative investors will move on to the next spot, but we will suffer the consequences of our council’s actions – or lack thereof.
We are now “exporting” our own people at an alarming rate, and the justification for not changing is because we need tourism dollars.
If the tourism economy is more important than our people’s ability to live here, then we are already too far gone. We need decisive action – like the clean passing of Bill 9.
