Editorial: Alternative from Department of Hawaiian Home Lands

For most of its 100-year history, the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands has limited the reach of its investment in housing reserved for Native Hawaiians to a total of 203,000 acres that Congress authorized as a land trust a century ago. But due to various stumbling blocks, while this homesteading program now has 8,400 residential lessees, its wait-list includes some 23,000 eligible beneficiaries.

As the state agency tasked with managing the program, DHHL clearly is failing to develop homestead lots at a pace that meets demand. So, a new plan to start offering financial help to beneficiaries — those who are at least 50% Hawaiian — seeking to buy housing situated outside of homesteading acreage, seems a sensible move.

Approved last week by the Hawaiian Homes Commission, the initiative allows DHHL to remove a set count of beneficiaries from the wait-list by providing them with some down-payment assistance to purchase fee-simple homes (the buyer owns the land) on Oahu — the island with the greatest demand but where the trust has the least amount of acreage suitable for housing.

Should these properties be sold, DHHL would have the right to purchase the homes, and the properties would be added to DHHL’s too-tight inventory. About half the residential applicants on the statewide wait-list want to live on Oahu, yet just 575 acres here are suitable for housing.

Given Oahu’s sky-high housing market — the median resale price for single-family home was $872,500 in November — the $1.5 million pilot program is not expected to help a large number of beneficiaries. But getting some people off the wait-list could help shorten the wait for others.

So far, the main way to get off the wait-list has been for a beneficiary to wait — in some cases, for decades — until it’s their turn to accept a 99-year lease for land on which they can build or buy a home. Since the mid-1990s, DHHL has also focused on developing subdivisions with developer-built houses, a too-expensive proposition for many beneficiaries.

Compared to a controversial proposal backed by the commission last week — a plan to seek the Legislature’s support for envisioned development of a casino resort on trust land in Kapolei — this one is more realistic. It creates an immediate opportunity for DHHL to further chip away at the obstacles that prevent it from fully realizing its mission: to manage the Hawaiian Home Lands trust effectively and to develop and deliver lands to Native Hawaiians.