Why is the progress so slow? Big government. Alex Hu has the story at City Journal:
Builders on Maui face a vast web of zoning restrictions, water-use regulations, and historical- and environmental-preservation requirements, and separate applications and schedules for electrical, plumbing, grading, and driveway work. The local permitting office is also poorly staffed, which makes processing take a ridiculous amount of time. Figures from September 2024 showed that the county took 206 days on average to issue a single building permit. Ordinarily, you need several to build a house from scratch.
The Maui County Council attempted to speed up permitting by passing Bill 21 in February 2024, establishing a consolidated permit for rebuilding disaster-affected homes. But permitting times remained slow. Even after the county took the extraordinary step of opening a dedicated Recovery Permitting Center in April—hiring private contractors to process permits—approvals still took over 50 days. Homeowners with houses older than five years still had to apply for a new permit, and those without floor plans on record still had to hire an architect to draft new ones.
Further permitting relief took eight more months. It was not until October 2024 that Hawaii governor Josh Green issued an emergency exemption sparing multifamily homes from “Special Management Area” reviews—coastal environmental reviews that would have added a whole additional year of permitting for 533 houses. Then there was another long lull. Only last month did Maui Mayor Richard Bissen work with Governor Green to extend SMA exemptions to 103 affected commercial properties.
A still unresolved issue is that many historic structures remain illegal to rebuild under modern zoning laws. Jonathan Helton, a policy researcher at the Hawaii-based Grassroot Institute, has reported on buildings like Lahaina’s Waiola Church, built in 1823. The church occupies a lot that planners designated as residential-only in the 1960s. The church was given an exemption at the time, but since the congregation has not met for a full year, the exemption expired. Only last month did the Maui County Council advance Bill 105, which would exempt historic buildings like Waiola church from zoning restrictions. It should pass this week.
It’s insane to demand this kind of stuff when rebuilding after a wildfire. But as Hu notes, it’s also insane that Maui’s onerous regulations have constrained supply such that housing prices there have quadrupled over the past 20 years. As a general rule, if an economic regulation has to be suspended during disaster recovery, it’s worth asking whether it needs to be there at all.
Read the whole thing here.