Airbnb owners flood Maui council meeting on potential phase-out

By Yiming Fu, Report for America corps member

At Maui’s first council hearing to decide the future of vacation rentals on Monday, dozens of rental owners rushed to the front of the line to testify. They fear Maui’s economy will collapse without the tourism they bring in.

Rental owners say their units provide a good middle-income tourism option for those who cannot afford hotels, and the business they generate is fundamental to keeping small Maui businesses alive.

On the line is Bill 9, a bill that could transition over 6,000 vacation rentals into long-term housing in the next ten years.

Many against this phase-out cited an economic study that said transitioning vacation rentals into long-term housing would crash Maui’s economy, cut thousands of jobs and millions in visitor spending.

“Without employment, do you really need a house?” testifier Timothy O’Shaughnessy said. 

Steve Hogan is in his late 60’s and came to Maui 45 years ago with $600. He said he worked hard, saved, invested and housed people for free in his rental. Hogan and his wife are battling health issues, including cancer, and need their business to support themselves and the people they hire for their rental business.

Hogan said the vacation condos are not good to live in anyway because they’re in bad condition and demand high HOA and maintenance fees.

“Supporters have stated that we’re prioritizing profit over people, which is just not true,” Hogan said. “We’re prioritizing wisdom over wishful thinking, and math over emotions.”

New housing

Bill 9 aims to transition over 6,000 vacation rentals in areas zoned for apartments into long-term housing for locals. This is a specific set of vacation rentals approved through a decades-old loophole and is called the Minatoya List. Not all short-term rentals will be banned.  

Rental owners will have a 3-year period to pay off their mortgage and the option to rezone their apartments as hotels. 

This additional housing stock would make a huge difference, advocates say, quickly giving more options to locals. A home in West Maui costs a median of $1.9 million, or 20x more than what most locals can afford. Locals are crowded into family homes with no starter apartments for kids to move out. Many are also priced out entirely.

Bill 9 is projected to drop condo prices by more than 20%. This means a $750,000 condo would cost $600,000.

Maui-born Native Hawaiian data scientist and Executive Assistant to the Mayor Matt Jachowski estimates nearly half of Maui households will be able to afford these new units.

The transition must come on top of building affordable housing, but affordable housing builds are at an all-time low. Less than 10% of West Maui homes sold in the last 10 years were sold at affordable prices, Jachowski said. Further, already approved affordable housing projects in Maui cannot break ground because of the island’s water shortages.

Mayor Richard Bissen, along with groups like Lahaina Strong and Maui Housing Hui have pushed for this transition since the August 2023 Lahaina fires to create more housing opportunity for locals. Two years later, the council is holding the first hearing to decide on the issue.

If passed, Maui would join a long list of cities and counties worldwide regulating Airbnb to protect their communities. The list includes smaller tourism-dominant communities like Durango, Colorado and Irvine, California to larger metro centers like New York City and Barcelona. 

The value of home

On Maui, 21% of housing are vacation rentals, and more than 90% of vacation rental owners live off island.

“Housing is not a speculative asset, it’s a basic human need,” Bissen said. “And when the balance tips so far that our residents become outsiders, then we have a moral obligation to act.”  

Five-year-old Ruby Ray is preparing for Kindergarten this summer, and her mother said Ruby likes to testify at meetings because her friends lost family members and homes in the Lahaina fires.

“A lot of people don’t have homes,” Ruby said. “I don’t have a home. I see so many beautiful homes that are empty. Why? I wish everybody could have a home.”

Ceone Nojima-Jacinto is the owner of Baya Bowls Maui, an acai bowl food truck that burned down in the Lahaina fires and reopened in Honokohau Bay. Her business is doing well, even after locals told tourists not to visit Maui post-fire.

“We are on track to be pretty similar to what we were pre-fire in the last six months since we reopened,” Nojima-Jacinto said. “And I think a large part of that is we’ve prioritized our local clientele.”

A Napili resident, Nojima-Jacinto said the tourism industry is repeating Hawaii’s history of outside investors exploiting the island’s resources for personal profit, leaving locals to deal with the fallout.

After the August 2023 Lahaina fires, Nojima-Jacinto scrambled to house her in-laws as short-term rentals on the West Side remained vacant. Only one-in-ten short-term rental owners opened their properties to fire survivors, she said.

The council has the opportunity to right decades of history, Nojima-Jacinto said, and put its local people first.

Ki’inaniokalani Kaho’ohanohano is a mom of five. She doesn’t know how she’ll pay rent most months, but she works hard to make it happen. When she hears arguments about the vacation rentals not being fit to live in, she thinks of all the people she knows who would rather live in their cars or on the beach before leaving the island they call home.

“We need a place to live,” Kaho’ohanohano said, “and we need to stay home.”

Shane Albritton teaches agriculture at Baldwin High School. He said he can “feel the hopelessness” when he talks to his students about staying on Maui. They don’t feel like they have a chance to build a life and make a living.

Albritton waited hours to testify after the vacation rental owners burst through the doors in the morning. 

“We got to listen to the first hour of how hard it is to own vacation rentals on Maui,” Albritton said, “and I thought what a great representation of how these investors put themselves above the community.”

The county heard about 50 testifiers Monday, and recessed the meeting after six hours to continue testimony on June 18 at 9:00 a.m. More than 170 testifiers are in line, and the county expects more to sign up before the June 18 meeting.