Editorial: Aim higher for teacher housing

It sounds like a promising project to kill the proverbial two birds with one stone: $15 million to build teacher housing on Maui, that tackles both the need for affordable rentals and offers important incentive to recruit and retain teachers.

If done right, it could indeed serve as a model for future projects statewide, as many hope.

But $15 million for just 10 to 16 homes, on land already owned by the state? It seems underwhelming. We hope for a bigger splash, in order to inspire the out-of-the-box thinking that’s needed to meet the huge demands for workforce housing statewide.

Gov. David Ige last week released $15 million appropriated by legislators to develop housing for teachers in the Lahainaluna school complex area. The rentals would be for teachers in the area that includes Lahainaluna High School, Lahaina Intermediate School, and Princess Nahi‘ena‘ena and King Kamehameha III elementary schools.

To be sure, the acreage for this project is modest: eight 1-acre vacant lots located off Lahainaluna Road across from Lahaina Intermediate School. The mostly contiguous parcels are unused remnants dating back to the 1990s, when the Lahaina bypass was being constructed and land was set aside for relocation of displaced homeowners, said Department of Education (DOE) spokeswoman Nanea Kalani.

The parcels are owned by the state Department of Transportation (DOT), but the DOE is actively working on ownership transfer to enable the teacher housing. These are eight single-family lots, so the DOE could potentially build duplex units on each.

But it could be more, much more.

The Maui project involves the DOE and DOT — plus the Hawaii Housing and Financing Development Corp. (HHFDC), the state agency integral in facilitating affordable housing development. In Kakaako, HHFDC worked with another state agency and nonprofit developer EAH Housing Hawaii to bring to fruition Nohona Hale, a 16-story rental tower on a 9,660 square-foot parcel of state land on Cooke Street, providing affordable micro- unit housing for more than 100 residents.

No one wants to see urban high-rise towers across the Lahaina school, of course, or to have resident educators crammed into just 300 square feet of living space. But the idea here is to prod creative thinking that could yield more units.

Housing costs are rising, so affordable rentals are a huge incentive as the state struggles to address a chronic teacher shortage of about 1,200. The Maui project would be the DOE’s first teacher housing development in at least a decade. Surely, many more than 16 educator families — as currently envisioned under a duplex plan — should benefit.

Site zoning that limits building heights and densities must be considered, as well as factors such as area traffic and appropriateness. But it’s intriguing that the new School Facilities Authority (SFA) has been mentioned in connection with the Maui project. The agency was created with powers that could streamline conventional processes, and is currently bolstered by interim staff from the DOT.

And though the DOE’s Kalani noted on Wednesday that “SFA is not currently involved,” agency executive director Chad Keone Farias said earlier this week: “The SFA stands ready with its authority to work with the DOE.”

Clearly, sorting out how this project proceeds, and which agency takes the lead, must be quickly resolved. The state can’t afford to get mired against making headway to meet multiple needs.

“This innovative partnership creates the kind of housing needed to attract and retain quality teachers to our schools,” said Maui state Rep. Angus McKelvey, upon release of the $15 million. “It will also help serve as a model for these types of projects elsewhere.”

Indeed, this project means much to Maui’s teachers and the public schools system. But true success would show that state-provided housing for its workforce can be achieved — on a larger scale, to meet the moment’s affordable housing crisis.