Congresswoman Colleen Hanabusa said that if elected governor she would work with the Legislature to raise the penalties developers must pay if they want to opt out of a project’s affordable housing requirements, and create additional state financing tools to spur the development of more affordable housing.
She also wants to speed up the development of housing on Hawaiian Home Lands and explore opportunities to create urban high-rise apartments for Native Hawaiian beneficiaries on Oahu who don’t want to commute from areas such as Waimanalo and Leeward Oahu. If elected, she said she would aim to reduce the list of Hawaiian beneficiaries awaiting a homestead lot by 20 percent in her first term.
The suite of affordable housing proposals was provided to the Star-Advertiser by the Hanabusa campaign Wednesday, days before Saturday’s Democratic primary.
Hanabusa didn’t discuss many of the ideas in two interviews with the Star-Advertiser that focused on her housing views. Asked about the timing of publicizing the proposals, she said, “It’s not a matter of putting them out later, it is just a matter of trying to refine it to a point that you want to be able to share it for discussion.”
Hanabusa said fees developers must pay to elude
affordable housing requirements are set too low — a problem that has spurred luxury developments in the Kakaako district, overseen by the Hawaii Housing
Finance and Development Corporation — betraying the original vision of the area as a working-class community. She would like to see the fees raised to a level that sufficiently discourages developers from opting for them, which would require the passage of state legislation.
“What you want to do is discourage it. So you make it high enough that people would not exercise the rights to use it,” said Hanabusa. For developers that
decide to go ahead and pay the fees, the money goes back into building affordable units.
Hanabusa said she would also explore establishing a not-for-profit development bank that would exclusively finance affordable housing by providing favorable loans. The funding source would likely be tied to the state, but it would operate as a nonprofit. She also would like to see the creation of a state housing trust that would guarantee a minimum rate of return to developers in exchange for a lower area median income level that’s associated with a housing project. The trust would ideally provide an incentive to developers by guaranteeing a base level
of profit.
Hanabusa also set an aggressive goal of reducing the waitlist for Hawaiian Home Lands by 20 percent. There are currently 27,000 applicants on the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands’ waiting list — a problem that has persisted for decades. Hanabusa’s campaign has been critical of the Ige administration’s track record in creating more housing for qualified Hawaiians. Under the Ige administration, DHHL issued a net of only 61 residential lease awards, according to a report released last month by the Sovereign Council of Hawaiian Homestead Associations.
DHHL also has lost about $30 million in federal grants since 2015, money that could have helped create housing, because the department had amassed
$60 million in unspent funds. Hanabusa said that as governor she would work to spend down the surplus and coordinate with Hawaii’s congressional delegation to restore the $10 million in annual grant funds.
In response to Hanabusa’s housing proposals, Gov.
David Ige issued a general statement criticizing her command of housing policy.
“Colleen’s proposal demonstrates that she does not understand existing state affordable housing
programs. Nothing in her proposal is new,” Ige’s statement said. “The Hawaii Housing Finance and Development Corporation, using the Rental Assistance Revolving Fund and the Dwelling Unit Revolving Fund already serve many of the functions contained in her proposal. In fact, I have utilized these tools and low income housing tax credits to complete thousands of affordable units. For all her years in political office, Colleen has not completed a single affordable unit.”
