In the days since a North Shore home dramatically collapsed onto the beach along Rocky Point, workers have since hoisted it back up onto the lot. The modest wood-frame house is now perched uneasily atop makeshift stilts, primarily stacks of pallets, right beside the lot’s main house and farther back from the ocean.

It’s not clear what the property owner, listed as Annie L Guerrero Trust, plans to do with the home at 59-181 H Ke Nui Road. Multiple attempts to reach the Guerrero family were unsuccessful.

Hugo Villalobos, a long-term tenant of the house that fell onto the beach last week, suggested to Hawaii News Now on Friday that the plan was to maintain the house farther back on the lot. But Honolulu’s Department of Planning and Permitting told the Star-Advertiser that it didn’t see any way that the home could remain and to relocate it would require an environmental assessment, a certified shoreline survey, a special management area permit, a shoreline setback variance, a zoning variance, a building permit and, most likely, approval from the Hawaii Department of Health — permits that typically take many months, or even years, to obtain.

In any case, much of the land the house rested on will likely be ceded to the state. The public shoreline in Hawaii extends to the highest wash of the waves, which for decades has been lapping at the home’s foundation.

“History indicates that the house has straddled the (conservation district) boundary for decades,” said DPP by email. “Our records indicate in 1969 the sandy beach was already at the edge of the structure and by 1986 exposed vertical wood planks were used as a bulkhead to prop up the house. By 1996, sand erosion left the house cantilevered over a 4-foot-deep escarpment.”

DPP did not respond to questions asking if the city planned to take any enforcement action against the property owner if the house isn’t removed.

While the spectacle of the home collapsed onto one of Hawaii’s most famous beaches last week was a stunning sight, attracting onlookers who peered through the windows as surfers paddled in and out of the nearby surf breaks, it was largely anticipated. Indeed, Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources sent a letter to the property owner on Feb. 4, a month before the collapse, warning of just that. And coastal geologists have warned for years that many of the homes along this stretch are also at risk of failing, particularly during the winter months as heavy surf pounds the shoreline. The beach increasingly has become littered with thick concrete pillars that have broken off of beachfront homes, mangled black tarps, heavy sandbags and two-by-fours with nails and screws sticking out.

The lack of any coordinated response to the growing public safety emergency has alarmed groups like the Hawaii Surfrider Foundation, as well as the general public, who complained last week that government just keeps applying Band-Aid sollutions to the growing problems along Hawaii’s increasingly threatened shorelines.

“So the response — as we are seeing, we don’t really have a response,” said Lauren Blickley, Surfrider’s Hawaii regional manager.

That a home fell onto a public beach is dangerous enough. Fortunately, the tenant had evacuated just hours before the home and everything in it went lurching toward the ocean in the middle of the night. But there are other public health and environmental hazards at play, noted Blickley, who has been part of a working group that has been trying to come up with solutions for this stretch of coastline. In addition to the risk of falling live electrical wires, she said that the home at 59-181 H Ke Nui Road, as well others stretching toward Sunset Beach, are on cesspools, which are essentially holes in the ground that collect sewage and other waste that can flow into the ocean amid the intensifying erosion.

Blickley said that she hopes the collapsed home will serve as a “lightning rod” for state and local leaders to come up with solutions to prevent it from happening again.

“The situation I think represents a crucial turning point for coastal zone management in Hawaii and it is such a challenge because unfortunately we are at this point without our state and local agencies really having the toolkit that they need to be able to make decisions when something like this happens,” she said.

An unmanaged retreat

Mark M. Murakami, an attorney at Damon Key Leong Kupchak Hastert in Honolulu who specializes in land use issues, said that there are steps that local government can take to address immediate public safety hazards. He said the city can declare homes unsafe for habitation and condemn the structures, in which case the city isn’t taking the land from the owners or compensating them, but revoking whatever permit authorized the construction and occupancy.

That’s what city officials did in Pacifica, Calif., in recent years as storms and king tides eroded a bluff lined with apartments. The city helped tenants relocate and shouldered the demolition costs, which totaled several hundred thousand dollars.

Murakami also said that both the state and city have the power to acquire the properties through eminent domain, in which case the owners would receive some compensation. He said that calculation would take into account many variables, including the potential use of the land given sea-level projections.

It’s further complicated because of the migrating shoreline boundary. As the shoreline pushes mauka due to erosion or sea-level rise, the dividing line between public and private ownership also migrates mauka, which could significantly decrease appraised land values.

Murakami said he thinks eminent domain is still the “cleanest thing to do and, I think, the most constitutional thing to do.”

“If we as a society and government don’t want to have a house on the beach, then we as a society can invoke that power of eminent domain and acquire the house from that person and pay them the compensation and damages they are owed,” said Murakami. “That I think is the more fair thing to do. But we have a lot of houses on the beach and the government would have to dole a lot of money to do that.”

Murakami’s firm has represented beachfront property owners, including homeowners who have fought the state to maintain unpermitted seawalls and other protections for their properties, but Murakami said he does not personally represent homeowners in the North Shore area.

He said he doesn’t think it is so much the dollar value that is keeping the government from moving in and acquiring properties, but rather the policy implications. “They don’t want to be in a situation that everyone’s house that is going to fall into the ocean, they are going to condemn the lot and pay for it,” he said.

State and local leaders still seem at an impasse as to how to deal with the immediate emergency on the North Shore, much less the longer-term solutions to Hawaii’s coastlines. They were vague or non-responsive this week when asked if any form of property condemnation was being considered.

Officials with DLNR’s Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands “are currently asking questions about any possible condemnation processes, but don’t have answers,” said DLNR spokesman Dan Dennison.

He declined to be more specific when asked who they are seeking answers from. “They’ve just begun asking questions, but did not specify how or whom they hope to get answers from,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi said the mayor was too busy for an interview in recent days to discuss what if anything the city is considering to address the growing safety hazard along Oahu’s North Shore. In a statement Blangiardi said DPP is seeking funds to prepare a plan for managed retreat.

The concept of managed retreat has been discussed among policymakers and scientists for years. In 2019, Hawaii’s Office of Planning released a long-awaited 67-page report on managed retreat that provided a broad overview of the issues and challenges. It concluded that retreat was “a necessary adaptation strategy,” but there was a lack of consensus among policymakers on “what needs to be retreated, where to retreat to and how much it will cost.”

Honolulu City Council Chair Tommy Waters also didn’t respond to interview requests or specific questions about potential eminent domain proceedings, which can be initiated by the City Council. In a statement, he said that “with houses already falling onto washed-out beaches, we must act now,” but didn’t specify what type of actions he would propose.

Honolulu City Councilwoman Heidi Tsuneyoshi, who represents the North Shore, said in an interview that she hoped the North Shore community plans that are under development would focus on the issue. She said it’s complex and will likely take the coordination of the “federal, state and city governments.”