LAHAINA, Hawaii — Josephine Fraser feared that her young family’s next home would be a tent.
Fraser and her partner, two sons and dog had moved nine times in nine months, from one hotel room to another, since the worst U.S. wildfire in a century destroyed their hometown of Lahaina, Maui. Sometimes they had just 24 hours to move, with no immediate direction of where to go.
Now the Red Cross was warning that the hotel accommodation program would soon end, and Fraser was struggling to explain to her three-year-old why they couldn’t just go home.
“He just kept asking, ‘Why?'” she said. “It really got to me.”
Like Fraser, thousands on Maui have endured a year of fear and uncertainty since the August 8, 2023 wildfire in Lahaina, the historic former capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom, brought apocalyptic images of destruction and forced some survivors to flee to sea. The fire killed at least 102 people and left 12,000 homeless.
The government and nonprofit organizations are offering temporary solutions to displaced residents, including providing hotel rooms, renting apartments, building prefabricated houses and paying people to take in their relatives.
Shelter experts say the effort, expected to cost more than $500 million over two years, is unprecedented in its collaboration between federal, state, county and philanthropic organizations to keep the community together.
But on an island dependent on tourism, where affordable housing was in short supply even before the fire, a housing market tightened by vacation rentals continues to hamper efforts to find long-term accommodation for the survivors a year later.
Almost all of the 8,000 survivors housed in hotels have been moved to other accommodations, but these are often expensive condominiums that were previously rented to visitors and are not close to the residents’ workplaces or their children’s schools.
Work to complete the temporary shelters has been delayed by the difficulty of cleaning up toxic waste, sourcing materials from thousands of miles away, blasting and leveling volcanic rock, and laying water, sewage and electricity lines.
According to some estimates, members of at least 1,500 households have already left for other islands or other states. Locals fear that even more will leave if they cannot find stable, affordable and comfortable housing.
This is particularly painful for Hawaii, where politicians have long feared that the islands are losing their culture because high housing costs are leading to an exodus of Native Hawaiians and other locals.
“This is where the fabric of Hawaii begins to change,” said Kuhio Lewis, executive director of the nonprofit Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement, which works to house survivors. “That’s what’s at stake, the future of what Hawaii is.”
In an interview with the Associated Press, Governor Josh Green said the state is building transitional and long-term housing, changing laws to convert 7,000 vacation homes into long-term rentals and quickly resolving fire victim lawsuits so plaintiffs can get the money they need to rebuild.
“Will some people leave? Of course,” Green said. “But most will stay, and they will really be able to stay if they get their compensation and can invest in their new homes.”
According to court documents, plaintiffs and the state agreed to a $4 billion settlement on Friday.
The Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement is building 16 modular housing units in Lahaina and 50 in Kahului, about an hour away, so Fraser and her family didn’t end up in a tent. In May, they moved into the first completed unit in Kahului, a small, white building with two bedrooms and one bathroom.
The neighborhood remains a dusty construction zone. The location isn’t exactly convenient for her job as a manager of a hotel restaurant in Lahaina, but Fraser, 22, is grateful. She can cook for her children and they can play outside.
“Everyone wants to leave Lahaina, leave the island and move to the mainland, but we don’t want to do that,” she said. “Lahaina is our home.”
With human-caused climate change increasing the severity and frequency of natural disasters, Lahaina’s plight raises an important question: How far should governments go to keep communities together after such disasters?
Shannon Van Zandt from the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center in Texas AandM University, said it was a worthy goal. Being part of a community that supports its members is important not only for their livelihood but also for their mental health, she said.
Jennifer Gray Thompson, executive director of the nonprofit fire relief initiative After The Fire, said she has worked in 18 counties that have suffered massive wildfires since 2017, when she first experienced the fires in Northern California’s wine region.
Thompson has never seen the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) invest so much in community cohesion, she said.
“Maui is the first island state where I have ever seen the federal government fully listen to the people … and really try to do what they are asking, which is to keep people on the island,” she said.
FEMA has focused on providing rental housing to survivors who did not have insurance coverage for fire damage. The agency is directly renting homes to more than 1,200 households and providing owner-occupancy subsidies to 500 more households. Many of the rental homes are located in Kihei, 25 miles from Lahaina.
However, this approach is proving difficult, not least because holiday rentals and timeshares account for a quarter of the housing supply.
In October, FEMA raised its fees by 75 percent to encourage landlords to rent to locals. The agency now pays $3,000 a month for a one-bedroom apartment and more than $5,100 for a three-bedroom apartment. People looking for housing on their own say this has inflated the rental market even further.
Frustration over the large number of vacation rentals after the fire prompted the mayor of Maui to propose removing them from areas designated for housing, a measure still under review.
FEMA is also building 169 manufactured homes next to a similar site being built in Lahaina by the state and the Hawaii Community Foundation. Residents will move into FEMA’s site in October. The $115 million project next door will provide 450 homes for people who are not eligible for FEMA benefits; the first families will arrive in the coming weeks. Residents will move into FEMA’s site in October.
Bob Fenton, FEMA’s regional administrator, told AP that the agency is even paying airfare for survivors to temporarily fly to another location and return when shelters are available.
“Our goal is the community’s goal,” Fenton said. “We’ve tried to do everything we can to support that.”
Lucy Reardon lost the house her grandfather had left her and her brother. As of July, she was still living in a hotel with her partner and two children. She twice turned down offers from FEMA to temporarily move off the island and provide her with a car, she said, because her grandfather would have wanted her to stay.
Eventually, the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement moved her and her family into a two-bedroom apartment in West Maui, in the same building as her brother and his family.
“Getting that call was like someone shining a light in the air,” Reardon said. Her daughter can go to kindergarten with her cousins, the school she would have attended before the fire.
The council also pays people who host displaced relatives, giving them $500 a month per guest. That’s helped Tamara Akiona, who bought a small condo in central Maui with her husband after losing the multigenerational home she lived in with 10 family members in Lahaina. The money covered food and other expenses since they took in her uncle, Ron Sambrano.
“Without my family, I would probably be living on the beach or under a bridge or something,” Sambrano said.
With a stable living arrangement, Fraser’s family can once again develop a regular daily routine. She works during the day while her partner looks after their sons. She returns to prepare dinner and bathe before he leaves for his night shift as a waiter at a restaurant.
“It’s great to have a roof, a place to call home,” Fraser said. “At least for now, until we get back to Lahaina.”
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McAvoy reported from Honolulu. Freelance journalist Mengshin Lin shot drone video to accompany this article.
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