It would cost an estimated $667 million in state taxpayer money for a massive infrastructure upgrade, Green says. The trade-off: 27,500 new homes and upward of $5 billion in investment into an area Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi has targeted for redevelopment.
Green said he’ll include a request for some Iwilei infrastructure money in his housing package for the upcoming session.
“This is already being formulated in the housing plan,” he said.
The Iwilei effort reflects Green’s current approach to housing, which relies on development along the Honolulu rail line, coordinating with county initiatives, building on government-owned land and focusing on affordable housing — all expedited by an emergency proclamation more modest than the one he announced to great fanfare in 2023.
Housing remains a major initiative, Green said in a sweeping interview.
“It’s still our top priority,” the governor said. “Affordability, in other words, cost of living and housing still are the top two concerns that our people have, and they are still our top priorities.”
The market has shown few signs of improving since Green took office. While the resale prices of single-family homes and condos have leveled off, rents have increased 17% since his December 2022 inauguration, according to the University of Hawaiʻi Economic Research Organization. Polls show 53% of residents feel burdened by housing costs, Green said, and 28% feel severely cost-burdened.
Housing was one of Green’s major campaign issues. And upon taking office, he quickly announced bold measures to address Hawaiʻi’s housing crisis. An emergency proclamation on homelessness heralded a statewide initiative to build villages of tiny homes combined with social services to get people off the streets.
His emergency proclamation on housing was even bolder. Designed to encourage home building of all types, not just homes designated as affordable, the proclamation suspended an array of land-use and environmental laws that developers have long complained led to interminable delays and increased costs. The proclamation established a working group to approve projects according to a set of emergency rules set up in place of the suspended laws.
The order triggered applause from builders but fierce opposition and lawsuits from environmentalists. Green quickly scaled back the order, restoring many of the suspended laws and issuing a new proclamation focusing on affordable housing.
Although the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court in September agreed the original proclamation on housing had gone too far, the court upheld the current proclamation on affordable housing. Green calls the ruling a victory — and sees it as an opening for county governments to also address the problem.
“I intend to keep the emergency housing proclamation active through the entire first term,” Green said. “And I’m encouraging the mayors and other government officials to consider their own emergency housing proclamations as they see fit going forward.”
"Still Our Top Priority"
Much of the governor’s attention for the past two years has been focused on issues other than housing.
The Maui wildfires that killed 102 people and destroyed much of Lahaina in August 2023 created massive suffering for residents and economic damage for property owners. In response, Green’s office created a victims’ settlement fund, built hundreds of modular homes near Lahaina and crafted a settlement of thousands of lawsuits, which saved Hawaiian Electric Industries and its utility subsidiaries from bankruptcy.
Last session, Green pushed lawmakers to pass a historic law imposing a fee on hotel and other short-term rental users to raise money to help offset the negative impacts of tourism on the environment. There was also a tax bill intended to put more money into the hands of people struggling to get by.
“Though people might not hear me utter the words ‘housing crisis’ as often, we’re still under the housing emergency proclamation,” he said. “And I wouldn’t be under an emergency housing proclamation and all that comes with it, if it wasn’t still our top priority.
Hawaiʻi now has 64,000 units in the “affordable housing development pipeline,” Green said. Only about 3,000 of those are included in the 27,500 new homes envisioned for Iwilei.
The housing Green speaks of includes 24,000 units on state lands: 7,000 by the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, 4,000 by the Hawaiʻi Housing Finance and Development Corp., and 12,000 rentals being redeveloped by the Hawaiʻi Public Housing Authority, which recently came under criticism for the way it was relocating tenants from existing properties slated for redevelopment.
In reality, nearly 31,000 of the 64,000 homes are in their infancy and still must go through the arduous process of obtaining land-use permits and other entitlements that can take years to obtain.
Green also pointed to his tiny home, or kauhale, initiative. It’s led to 23 kauhale being built since 2022 at a cost of $128.3 million. The Legislature last session handed out $88.2 million over the next two years to keep the program on track toward Green’s goal of 30 villages by 2027.
At the same time, lawmakers prohibited building off-grid villages, a practice Green’s former homelessness coordinator, John Mizuno, had criticized, and requested an audit of the program.
Still, Green said his housing initiative is on track.
“I think it’s been successful,” he said. “You know, there’s a ton of examples here of housing projects that are on the go, you know, where we’ve had groundbreaking and even (people moving in).”
(David Croxford/Civil Beat/2023)
A studio apartment in Honolulu can rent out for as much as $3,724 per month and still be considered affordable under HHFDC guidelines, which are set by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. A home for a family of four can be priced as high as $757,300 at today’s interest rates and still count as affordable.
In exchange for building such affordable housing, projects built by government or private developers with HHFDC approval are exempt from all statutes, ordinances, and any other “rules of any government agency relating to planning, zoning, construction standards for subdivisions, development and improvement of land, and the construction of dwelling units.”
The law gives county councils 45 days after plans are submitted to approve, modify or nix the projects. If the councils don’t act by the deadline, the project is considered approved.
Critics say the law limits the ability of local governments to regulate land use and essentially promotes gentrification in the guise of affordable housing. But lawmakers handed such critics a resounding loss – and Green a victory — during the 2025 legislative session. The bill, which Green signed into law, prohibits county councils from making any modifications that would increase the project’s cost.
Green said the law was inspired by his emergency proclamation on affordable housing.
“We don’t want to add extra conditions once we get a project approved by HHFDC,” he said. “If they’re ready to go, and then you add in two, three or four extra conditions … That’s a lot of the time how things get bogged down.”
Green also defended the use of the statute even if it meant destroying existing homes that working people could afford to make way for housing that was technically deemed affordable but still priced out of reach for many.
The Kobayashi Group did just that with its HHFDC-approved Kuilei Place project, located on Kapiʻolani Boulevard in Mōʻiliʻili. To make way for the 1,005-unit, 43-story project, the developer razed a neighborhood of about 120 two-story walk-up apartments: true workforce housing walking distance from Waikīkī’s hotel and restaurant jobs.
About 600 condos were set aside as affordable, priced for families of four earning between $104,500 and $158,600.
Green said on balance the project was good for society.
“It will house many hundreds of additional people, and that’s the macro housing proposal,” he said. Those who had to relocate were “comparatively a very small number of people for a greater benefit to society, which is to build thousands of additional houses.”
(Iwilei Infrastructure Improvement Master Plan and Liliha Civic Center Master Plan Final Environmental Impact Statement)
Median rents are around $1,400 per month in the broader Liliha-Nuʻuanu neighborhood encompassing Iwilei, according to the University of Hawaiʻi Economic Research Organization’s housing data dashboard. The annual income needed to afford rent is about $56,760 — far lower than the $91,000 median household income for Oʻahu. Still, the EIS notes, people struggle: the median household income is just $45,400, creating more housing affordability stress for Iwilei residents than Oʻahu residents in general.
That said, the EIS says, the state’s infrastructure project “will not in itself impact housing stock, but its intent is to enable other planned developments to proceed.”
Ultimately, Green said, the goal is to allow residents to live in Hawaiʻi and stop the outmigration that has occurred for years before now starting to level off.
He sees two potential outcomes for the state. In one, the yearslong pace of outmigration levels off and a surge in housing produces “a win for local people, Pacific Islanders, Hawaiians: people can afford housing, and your population can grow normally, so you get some economic growth … and it’s good.”
The other, he said, pointing to a chart in a slideshow, is for the population to continue declining.
“And then here’s the very bad scenario,” he said. “We go the opposite direction, we fail to build housing. It tightens even further. And it’s really dangerous. It’s dangerous because then only affluent people can live in Hawai‘i.”
This story first appeared in the Honolulu Civil Beat. Read the original here.
