How an Increase in Affordable Housing Can Also Help Local Farming Efforts within Maui Nui
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before—Maui County, and all of Hawai’i, have a serious housing problem.
With the current median sales price for single-family homes soaring well over a million dollars—and the median price of a condo hitting a new all-time high in January, according to the REALTORS® Association of Maui—there’s never been a more-challenging time for our citizens to secure their futures, both here on the island and across the state.
What you might not have heard before is just how bad this also is for the future well-being of the islands themselves. So many of our citizens have had to abandon their literal and spiritual homes for the mainland due to the ongoing housing boom, resulting in a severe lack of talent to staff many critical positions across the islands. The oft-reported “brain drain” is indeed a serious concern for our future, and one that will require ongoing attention…but the struggles of our agricultural community often go under-reported within the media at large as well by way of comparison.
The Housing Crisis and Agriculture: An Ongoing Problem
Last April, Brittany Lyte wrote an excellent piece for the Honolulu Civil Beat detailing how the ongoing lack of affordable housing for island kama’aina also impacts our agricultural workers as well, which severely hampers any ongoing efforts to establish food production in Hawai’i in turn. Historically, agricultural workers across the country have struggled with low pay and inadequate accommodations, a fact that’s further exacerbated in the Aloha state by the inordinate costs of housing. The workers who do remain are often forced to live in overcrowded conditions and face extremely long commute times, often driving hours one way to their worksites—which harms the environment as well as the stability of our local communities.
In this way, so many of the issues we face are indeed interconnected: the housing affordability problem makes it difficult to sustain our agricultural workforce (and workforce in general), which in turn jeopardizes our state’s already-precarious sense of food security and the local food production which helps to sustain our people. With the state already importing over 85% of its food, the time is now to ramp up the creation of workforce housing to ensure our agricultural workers can secure their futures on Maui, thereby bettering our own production of local food and relationship to the ‘aina in turn.
“In order to maintain a healthy vibrant community we need to have a multi-varied approach to building sustainable affordable housing for our children’s children,” said Lawrence Carnicelli, VP of Development for Alaula Builders. “We are simply failing our future generations. However, we can right the ship with updated planning and new smart growth principles that support sustainability and protect our precious natural resources as well as provide enough housing to keep our children home, right here on Maui.”
The Movement Towards Sustainable, Attainable Housing on Maui
Recently, Alaula Builders were honored to provide workforce housing to forty island residents with the recent Hale Kaiola lottery, with move-ins slated to take place later this year. Currently, we’re hard at work to bring our next two projects to fruition to bring more affordable housing to our island kama’aina:
Hale Waipuilani, 28 workforce condos located in Central Kihei
Kuikahi Village, 202 workforce homes in a mixed-use neighborhood in Wailuku Town
Stay tuned for more information as our projects move forward to construction!