The Hawaiian Homes Commission Act was signed into law in 1921, and in the century that the statute has languished on the federal books, its implementation has continually failed to meet its mission.

Enacted in the decades following the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom and the republic’s annexation to the U.S., the aim was to provide the indigenous people with a claim to land, promoting self-sufficiency and countering the sociological decline of the Native Hawaiians.

A comprehensive analysis of the record, compiled and published Sunday by Honolulu Star-Advertiser writer Rob Perez in collaboration with Agnel Philip of the nonprofit newsroom ProPublica, has outlined the dismal truth.

The homesteading effort is overseen by the commission and executed by the state agency designated to its implementation, the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands. The program has only 8,400 residential lessees, viewed against a backdrop of a waitlist that’s now past 23,000 eligible beneficiaries who by law are at a minimum of half Hawaiian ancestry.

The reporters’ probe goes deeper, assessing the median income of the census tracts where the lessees live. This is just aggregate data, but there’s enough to indicate that about 60% of the lessees are living where the median annual household incomes exceed $75,000. That’s higher than many of the individuals in the benefit class, and the tales of beneficiaries who die while on the waiting list are, sadly, all too common.

In recent years, the Star-Advertiser has run multiple stories about the waiting lists and the low yield of leases for delivery. And while the identified barriers have included managerial lapses, fiscal shortfalls and bureaucratic lags, the dysfunction is even more basic than that.

Adopting the model of leases on conventional subdivision houses has moved the benefit beyond the reach of many who legally qualify for it.

This is not news to those in charge of the DHHL currently, or to lawmakers who contend with the problems year after year. And there has been a welcome shift, albeit years overdue, to a more realistic approach.

William Aila Jr., the chairman of the Hawaiian Homes Commission, provided some feedback to the analysis in a commentary published on Wednesday in the Star-Advertiser’s “Views & Voices” section.

Aila wrote that chronic funding shortages for infrastructure development have hampered leasing. It’s a deficit that surely will be hard to cure in the coming session, with the expected budget cuts caused by the pandemic.

But he also acknowledged, rightly, that the agency should not have been uniquely focused for so many years on building subdivisions that were too expensive for many Hawaiians who then could not qualify for a mortgage.

That’s how the commission has passed over beneficiaries higher on the waiting list until the process lands on someone who can make the cut.

Housing construction has accelerated more recently, but it’s good that DHHL also has turned its attention to providing affordable rentals for those who need that housing assistance.

It’s also crucial that federal and state authorities take an interest in finding a solution. U.S. Sen Mazie Hirono seems to be on board, saying that lawmakers should hold hearings to reform the DHHL model, possibly focusing more on condominium projects.

Perez and Philip shared the stories of beneficiaries such as Zalei Kamaile, whose financial problems meant she could not qualify to finance a lease when one was offered more than a dozen times. There are many sad tales like that.

And however you cut it, that spells failure to people who should not have had to wait nearly a century to have promises kept.