On Monday, Gov. Josh Green declared a housing emergency. Now it falls on journalists, advocates and concerned citizens to hold his administration accountable to produce housing that local families can afford.
Of course, emergency proclamations are usually issued in response to a natural disaster or statewide crisis. For example, the state’s COVID-19 response was addressed through the issuance of several emergency proclamations.
Is the housing crisis an emergency on par with the state’s response to COVID-19? Given our state’s steady outmigration, a shortage of essential workers (especially in health care), and the negative health effects of unaffordable housing, I think there’s a compelling case that Hawaii’s lack of affordable housing is indeed an emergency.
As the executive director of Housing Hawai‘i’s Future, a movement led by young locals who will create opportunities for Hawaii’s next generation by ending the workforce housing shortage, this emergency is personal to me.
We hear from families making the difficult decision to leave Hawaii and from kanaka maoli and kama- aina on the continent who don’t feel like they have a future here at home.
How will this proclamation lead to solutions? A working group of 22 members will evaluate developers’ applications for exemptions and create a development agreement if the project is approved. That development agreement specifies how much affordable housing the developer must build and which exemptions they will receive.
The working group includes representatives from state agencies, the state Legislature, county leaders, utilities, and economic and environmental experts. This includes agencies tasked with environmental protection and historic preservation.
Some advocacy groups have expressed reasonable concern that housing development will proceed without adequate environmental and cultural protections. However, this emergency proclamation isn’t a blanket suspension of law.
At a news conference Monday, the governor’s chief housing officer, Nani Medeiros, also promised opportunities for public input.
Housing Hawai‘i’s Future views our role as holding the working group accountable to produce housing that locals can afford. And our participation fulfills one of our nonprofit’s core missions: to convene stakeholders to find solutions to the housing crisis.
One issue that Housing Hawai‘i’s Future co-founders Zachary Yamada and Evan Gates identified early on was lack of coordination in government. To put it simply, departments and agencies didn’t cooperate, and the state and counties were often at odds.
When I joined Housing Hawai‘i’s Future two years ago, I confirmed this issue through conversations with former mayors and governors, with senior policy makers, with community advocates, housing experts and industry stakeholders.
So in the months before the last election in November 2022, I met with candidates for governor. I shared brief recommendations for how an administration could coordinate a pro-housing policy. My recommendations weren’t original. They were all common sense: Get everyone in a room, identify the barriers to building affordable housing, and find solutions to move beyond them.
This working group isn’t just a step in the right direction. It’s the step that the state needed to take. But it’s not the final step. Now, we must ensure this group does more than expedite projects. We need this group to come together around commonsense reforms, propose them to the Legislature, and translate those proposals into law and administrative rules.
We have one year under this proclamation to plan and enact sweeping, systemic change to reverse Hawaii’s decades-long housing crisis. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get started.
Sterling Higa is executive director of Housing Hawai‘i’s Future (staymovement.org), a movement creating opportunities for Hawaii’s next generation by ending the workforce housing shortage.
