New affordable housing project to serve large families

The Honolulu City Council has granted approval for Kealahou West Oahu to run a new affordable housing project for those earning 60% of the annual median income on Oahu.

The project will consist of eight five-bedroom homes on land that the city purchased using the affordable housing fund. The Council on Wednesday approved leasing city property to Kealahou West Oahu for $800 a month for the next five years.

Kealahou West Oahu currently runs an emergency and transitional homeless shelter and has the state outreach contract in Wai­anae. The organization’s executive director, Tanya Tehotu, hopes the new affordable housing project will help keep large families together.

“We found that it’s hard to place big families,” she said. “Families, basically meaning that whoever they foresee within their household, so it could be auntie, uncle, mom, dad, grandkids, you know, intergenerational families that want to stick together and don’t want to split up.

“A lot of our transitional shelters, they don’t have the capacity to place a family of more than, I think, 12. And we’ve come across families from our coastline that have that many people in their household.”

Currently, their only option is to try to find private housing for those families, Tehotu said. However, she said that can often be extremely difficult, adding that the new affordable housing project would fill that gap.

“We wanted to offer that space for larger families that are falling into homelessness, are at risk of becoming homeless, along with clearing that pathway for those who are in transitional shelters, for large families that need a place to stay at a fee that is manageable,” she said.

Kealahou West Oahu will determine who will be able to access the new affordable housing units using a tiered preference list. The first tier of priority will be those who are employed, make below 60% of the annual median income but can afford to pay the monthly rent of $2,247, which includes utilities. The second-priority tier is those who are currently in the transitional shelter.

Tehotu said the project is going to focus on those who are at risk of homelessness. For example, the family already might have housing but be at risk of losing it due to rent increases or possible eviction.

This new affordable housing project is part of the city’s strategy to use the affordable housing fund. Community Services Director Anton Krucky said the city will acquire property and lease it to organizations for a small fee to manage the property.

He said the city is constantly looking for properties to acquire but that sometimes people will even come to the city with property that they want to see used for the good of the community.

The affordable housing fund is also used for the development of new affordable housing units. For example, the city put out a solicitation last summer for six projects to create 1,000 new affordable housing units. That used that year’s portion of the affordable housing fund, which is funded through 0.5% of property tax revenue the city collects. It usually comes out to about $9 million a year.

Krucky said that the city plans to put out another solicitation either this month or in November to use the most recent portion of the affordable housing fund.

“I’m going to take that $9 million, I’m going to add some other funds, affordable housing-type construction funds, to it, and this fall come out with another solicitation,” he said.

“It’ll be north of $25 million. … So I’m been really, really trying to push these projects.”

However, Honolulu voters this year will have the chance to decide whether even more funds should be allocated to the affordable housing fund. There is a charter amendment on the ballot asking voters, “Shall the Revised City Charter be amended to increase the mandatory percentage of the City’s estimated real property tax revenues to be appropriated annually for deposit into the Affordable Housing Fund from one- half of one percent to one percent?”

If the majority of Honolulu voters approve of the change, that $9 million could turn into $18 million.

Krucky thought that the change could become extremely useful as more parties are pushing to do affordable housing development, beyond just the typical commercial developers.

“I think that the nonprofit development industry has really stepped up as well. And so we have good nonprofit developers that are willing to participate in this kind of funding, to bring affordable housing to communities, in a good way, so it’s not just commercial developers,” he said.

“It’s also the growth of the nonprofit developers that also allows us to do this, and then the last click is the communities being willing to accept these projects.”