Initiative works to keep Lahaina lands in local hands

Autumn Ness feels like a time bomb is ticking in her chest, but the explosion risk she’s worried about is in Lahaina’s residential property market a little over a year after roughly 3,500 homes were destroyed by fire.

A handful of those razed properties have been bought from fire victims to date, and Ness fears that a few additional particular sales could strongly influence the long-term makeup of homeownership in the West Maui town when rebuilt.

“It keeps me up at night,” said Ness, who heads up a nonprofit community effort to preserve and increase landownership by Lahaina residents over outside investors.

Ness is executive director of the Lahaina Community Land Trust, which was formed after the Aug. 8, 2023, wildfire and is taking several approaches to achieving its stated mission of “Keeping Lahaina Lands in Lahaina Hands.”

One initiative is to help local residential property owners avoid selling their Lahaina land. Another is to buy such property from owners who are committed to sell and then using the property to perpetually house local families.

So far, the trust has made five purchase offers and signed one contract. But Ness is concerned that at least a couple of properties currently on the market are appealing to all-cash buyers at well above fair market values and could spark a rush of more acquisitions by investors.

“Everyone is like watching and waiting,” Ness said. “We are at the very beginning of this.”

Maui Mayor Richard Bissen said in a statement that while some owners will exercise their right to sell their parcels, offshore investors driven by profit rather than the best interests of the community pose a serious threat to Lahaina’s recovery.

“I’m grateful for community land trust organizations that are working to protect Lahaina lands from speculative practices and from those who would seek to capitalize on the devastation of Lahaina town,” he said.

Earlier this month the trust led by Ness signed a contract to buy a lot in the Wahikuli neighborhood where a four-bedroom, three-bathroom house stood before the fire.

The sellers, a couple in their 80s who bought their Lahaina home for $885,000 in 2007, left Lahaina to stay with their grown children on the mainland after the fire, and later reached out to trust representatives after hearing about the organization’s formation and purpose.

For the sellers, Rick and Judith Kimball, their decision was driven in part by a prior understanding of how community land trusts work, given that Rick Kimball had started one himself. The couple’s perspective on landownership in Hawaii also played a role.

“Even as kamaaina who loved Lahaina, we never had a true sense of belonging in Hawaii knowing how the islands were slowly, even covertly, taken from the Hawaiians and exploited by outside interests,” Rick Kimball said in a statement.

The trust plans to build a new home along with two ohana units on the property, and hold a lottery to sell the units to an extended or multigenerational Lahaina family under an initial 99-year land lease. The land lease would be renewable, inheritable and transferable with conditions to ensure the homes, if resold, would remain affordable and occupied by Lahaina residents in perpetuity.

Mikey Burke, a Lahaina resident who lost her family home in the fire and helped establish the trust, where she serves as board president, said the pending purchase represents the first step toward realizing the trust’s vision for a signifi­- cant portion of Lahaina to be permanently protected from outside investor interests.

“With every parcel we protect, our Lahaina residents will no longer have to compete with outside wealth just to be able to stay home and raise their kids in the Lahaina we love so much,” she said in a statement.

Land legacy

The trust, according to Ness, does not make unsolicited offers for property. Trust officials do make offers on suitable properties that are listed for sale, but prefer that property owners contact the trust if they think they want or need to sell and haven’t listed their property for sale.

Ness said the trust can connect property owners who lost their primary residence with resources to help them avoid selling under financial pressure.

The trust is receiving $3.5 million from Maui County to provide grants to such owners who were underinsured, in return for a “kamaaina easement” that would require all future owners of the property be Lahaina residents. Rolling out this program is being planned now.

As for buying property, the trust has made five offers at what Ness said is the high end of fair market values based on appraisal work, including two offers for parcels listed at prices that are of concern.

These two parcels, both within the Komohana Hale subdivision developed by the county in the 1990s as starter homes, are listed well above fair market value estimates produced by appraisers working with the trust, Ness said.

Asking prices for the two lots, a smaller lot for $540,000 and a larger one for $650,000, appear to be more than what the fair market value would be for the lot with the prior house. That concerns Ness because a typical household wanting to buy the property and build a new home to live in wouldn’t be able to get a loan to buy the lot for well over an appraised value.

This leads Ness to believe that such properties are being marketed largely to all-cash buyers instead of working families wanting to live in Lahaina. Sales at such prices could establish higher market values that make more land in Lahaina less affordable for local residents.

“I feel like there is a ticking time bomb in my chest right now,” she said.

Ness knows that reasons vary for sellers wanting to maximize what may be their only remaining large asset, but she also wants them to know that they can be part of a legacy that helps secure more of Lahaina’s future housing stock for generations of Lahaina residents by selling for a fair price to the trust.

“Do you want to be the reason, the cornerstone reason, that your beloved neighborhood got sold off to offshore investors?” Ness asked. “Like, what is that worth?

“It’s not a conversation that we have in the real estate world very often,” Ness continued. “Land is no small legacy. It’s not just dollars in this situation. This is not normal buy-and-sell real estate. … Let’s figure out ways to make landowners that just went through this tragic situation whole in ways that are good for everybody.”

If the community land trust can succeed on a big scale, Ness said she believes that 10% to 20% of Lahaina’s residential land base can be permanently held by local households and protected from offshore investors pushing out community members.

According to state estimates, about 16% of the homes destroyed by the fire were owner-occupied, or 561 homes, while close to 3,000 units were rentals that include single-family homes, condominiums, vacation rentals and state-owned apartments for low-income households.

Ness is concerned that there are hundreds of property owners whose homes burned down and are uncertain about whether to rebuild or sell.

Early sales

Gov. Josh Green acted soon after the fire to prevent vulture investors from making unsolicited offers to buy real estate affected by the disaster as part of an emergency order with criminal penalties. He also floated the idea of a ban on Lahaina property sales, which was viewed as problematic and did not happen.

Over the past year, only around five residential properties destroyed by the fire have been sold to new owners, according to a search of property records and a tally by the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement.

One was a condo unit interest previously used as a vacation rental in the Aina Nalu Lahaina complex that sold for $140,000 in November.

According to property records, a married couple from Washington state bought the interest in the destroyed 190-unit complex zoned for hotel use from a Nevada couple who bought their condo in 2007 for $505,000.

Another sale involved a condo unit interest in a destroyed 57-unit complex called The Spinnaker. This condo interest was bought in February for $95,000 by a company formed by family members of Maui real estate broker Tonia Gebers, who said the former owner lived in the unit and moved to the mainland after the fire.

Property records show the former owner bought the Spinnaker unit in 2009 for $206,872. Gebers said she and her husband plan to use the property, after expected rebuilding in which they will have to invest, as a place for their children to stay.

Also sold in February was a lot for a single-family house not far from Front Street acquired for $200,000. The buyer, a longtime Maui resident who lost an underinsured workforce rental home in the fire, asked not to be named because of anger among some community members over housing. The buyer said he bought the lot from a friend and would like to rebuild both homes as rentals for the local market.

In May a couple who escaped the fire and lost their home they bought in 2022 purchased a neighboring single-family house lot for $350,000 from Maui developer Peter Martin, according to property records.

Soon, the community land trust intends to start a public campaign to enlist Maui real estate agents to help preserve future Lahaina housing stock for local households through the nonprofit in lieu of perhaps higher commissions from selling parcels to investors for above-market prices.

“We’re at the beginning of that, and I’m a little nervous,” Ness said. “It’s going to be a hard conversation, but it has to be had.”

Limited listings

Real estate data firm Zillow shows that about 35 residential properties in and around Lahaina town, not including nearby Kaanapali resort properties, are listed for sale. However, around 25 are homes or multi-acre lots outside the burn zone in or near the hillside Launiupoko subdivision, where homes are priced between $2 million and $17 million.

Another five listings are in the oceanfront Puamana townhome complex, which was partly destroyed by the fire. Of the five listings, two are for interests in units that were destroyed with listing prices of $749,000 and $1.1 million. The existing Puamana condos for sale are priced from $1.5 million to $3.2 million.

Ness said the community land trust is less interested in acquiring interests in multifamily buildings that were destroyed because of complexities with owner associations being responsible for rebuilding exterior structures. Higher-priced luxury properties also are not of interest to the trust.

Another limiting factor in what the trust can buy is available funding. The organization awaits receipt of $1.5 million in approved funding from Maui County, and has so far raised about $500,000 from donors. For its first purchase the trust is using funding from The Conservation Fund, a national land conservation organization.

The community land trust also is receiving $10 million from Maui County reserved in equal parts to acquire property from landowners wanting to retreat from the shoreline and property that might be better used for open space or cultural protection rather than rebuilding.

The trust is trying to raise more money for acquisitions, including $20 million through grant applications, and encourages more sellers to sell for the benefit of local residents.

“If you owned land in Lahaina as an investment, maybe it’s time to talk about giving that land back or selling that land back to the community,” Ness said.