Gov.-elect Josh Green and Mayor Rick Blangiardi on Tuesday asked the owners of thousands of illegal Oahu rental units to help ease the island’s affordable housing and homeless crises by renting to local families instead of tourists as both named new housing directors to lead state and city housing efforts.
“If you’ve been part of an illegal Airbnb … make that decision now to rent to a local family,” Green said. “Don’t wait for us to enforce things.”
Green also asked builders to engage with city and state officials to get more involved in developing more affordable housing.
Green and Blangiardi on Tuesday teamed up to help announce a $2.5 million grant to Family Promise of Hawai‘i, a nonprofit group that helps homeless families with children.
Half of the money will go to acquire a temporary shelter on Oahu that will house four to six families at a time who will receive case management services — assistance that also will be available to families not living in the shelter, said Ryan Catalani, executive director of Family Promise of Hawai‘i.
Other funds will be used to help families with rent or utility payments to keep them from becoming homeless, or to get newly homeless families back into housing, Catalani said.
The grant is the largest ever for Family Promise of Hawai‘i and comes from the Bezos Day 1 Families Fund, which was created in 2018 by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
The need to help homeless families and those at risk of becoming homeless is rising as the number of landlords and tenants in mediation declines.
As Hawaii’s economy bottomed out due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, Gov. David Ige imposed a moratorium on evictions in April 2020 “to prevent mass evictions,” he said at the time.
Ige lifted the evictions ban on Aug. 6, 2021, and state Act 57 subsequently offered access to rental assistance and mandated mediation services on all islands intended to make landlords whole and keep families in their homes.
Between Aug. 7, 2021, and Sept. 4, 2022, the Mediation Center of the Pacific was involved in 3,047 eviction mediations.
But when Act 57 ended in August, the number of mediation cases fell to a third of what they had been each month — 127 in August, 115 in September and 128 in October — said Tracey Wiltgen, executive director of the Mediation Center of the Pacific.
“You want them to reach an agreement where the tenant can stay and the landlord can recoup their loss,” Wiltgen said. “There’s the potential that they could become homeless if they don’t have a place to go.”
Catalani called family homelessness “one of Hawaii’s most urgent challenges.”
Green and Blangiardi see homelessness, the need for affordable housing and illegal Airbnbs as interconnected.
Blangiardi estimates that there are 10,000 to 14,000 illegal Airbnbs operating across Oahu, many of them targeted by residential neighbors who complain about the lack of parking and a constant turnover of tourists.
Green and Blangiardi said illegal Airbnbs could better be used as rental units for local families while keeping landlords out of trouble and preventing neighborhoods from becoming tourist magnets.
On Tuesday, Blangiardi announced that he had hired state Finance Director Craig Hirai to the new position of chief of affordable-housing policy and strategy.
“We know that Craig will help us considerably when it comes to making the necessary and critical adjustments to better serve the public, and we’re thrilled that he has decided to join us here at the city,” Blangiardi said in a statement.
Hirai has been director of the state Department of Budget and Finance since 2019. Before that he was executive director of the Hawaii Housing Finance and Development Corp. from 2013 to 2019 and co-chair of the Hawaii Interagency Council for Transit-Oriented Development from 2016 to 2019.
In his new job with the city Department of Planning and Permitting, Hirai will oversee the city’s private-activity bond and general excise tax exemption programs. He’ll also be charged with leading the city’s affordable-housing infrastructure working group, which aims to better align the city’s initiatives with the state’s affordable-housing programs.
He will start with the city Dec. 1.
Green announced Tuesday that he has hired Nani Medeiros, executive director of the builder hui HomeAid Hawaii, as the “governor’s housing chief.”
Medeiros worked with Lt. Gov. Green to build Hawaii’s first “kauhale” of 100-square-foot homes in Kalaeloa, providing permanent housing for some of Hawaii’s chronically homeless and most-troubled people living on the street and in shelters.
There are 37 homes in the kauhale, which is named Kama‘oku and was built on 1.5 acres of decommissioned Naval Air Station Barbers Point land off Yorktown Street.
In 2019, Medeiros and Green traveled to Austin, Texas, where they borrowed the idea for Kama‘oku.
It was built under an emergency proclamation by Ige with the Hawaii Public Housing Authority collaborating on construction with HomeAid Hawaii, the local chapter of a nationwide organization of builders, contractors, developers and others working to improve their communities.
Star-Advertiser reporters Timothy Hurley and Jack Truesdale contributed to this report.
