Janssen Vergara, 35, couldn’t wait to rebuild the three-bedroom house she owned in west Maui before it burned down in last year’s historic wildfire. She had been granted a building permit and the burn zone had been cleared for construction.
But as the months passed, rebuilding came to feel more and more out of reach.
As tourism to the island dropped in the year and a half since the blaze, her income dwindled and she struggled to keep up mortgage payments nearing $4,000. Before the fire, a tenant living in Vergara’s ADU had been contributing $1,500 to the mortgage.
Meanwhile, expenses piled up. Vergara, along with her husband and parents, all still work in Lahaina. But since they could only afford a rental in Kahului, a city nearly 25 miles east, their gas bills have doubled due to the longer commute. The costs of groceries and basic necessities have spiked too, as inflation proved more persistent on the island than in mainland US.
Rebuilding costs that would exceed a half million dollars have become an unthinkable expense.
“We’re cutting down on what we eat just to save,” she said, adding that she goes to food pantries at least once a week to procure frozen meat, vegetables and milk for her two young children.
More than a year after the deadliest blaze in modern US history destroyed historic Lahaina, thousands of displaced residents are struggling to make ends meet. The poverty rate among survivors has more than doubled since the 8 August wildfire, according to an October report from the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization, or UHERO, which surveyed 402 individuals who lived, worked or owned businesses in west Maui or Kula at the time of fires.
Unemployment has risen from 2% to 14% over the past year, the study found, and 20% of respondents say their income has dropped by more than half. At the same time, median rent has jumped by more than 40%, and a vast majority of survivors remain in temporary housing. Many have become homeless.
“Many people in our cohort were close to the poverty line before the fire happened,” said Daniela Bond-Smith, a research economist at the university who co-authored the study. “They were already in a precarious financial situation, and all these factors taken together resulted in a jump in the poverty rate.”
Among those who worked in tourism, fewer than half who had full-time jobs still do. Vergara’s entire family works at resorts in Lahaina and gets paid by the hour. Her mother is a housekeeper, her father an engineer and her husband a cook. Everyone’s hours have been rolled back, she said, due to lower occupancy rates. Vergara, who works as a barista at the Westin, has had her hours reduced by more than 25% a week.
“We all have to work overtime to make money for food and mortgage,” Vergara said. “We haven’t received any help from the county.”
Loss of jobs and housing has sparked frustration and despair on the island. About a third of fire-affected households now live below the poverty line, compared with 14% before the fires, the UHERO report found. Two-thirds of Maui county residents said the mayor of Maui, Richard Bissen, and the county council have not done a good job steering the island to recovery, according to a Honolulu Civil Beat survey from September.
In an email statement, Bissen said his administration had implemented various relief programs for wildfire survivors, including food distribution and tax incentives, as well as economic diversification efforts. He added that the county has built 928 new housing units and expects to complete an additional 565 units by 2026.
“Although we have exceeded expectations and have restored infrastructure, issued permits and cleared debris in record time,” he said, “it should be expected that Maui’s path to recovery will take time.”
Nicole Huguenin, director and co-founder of the social services group Maui Rapid Response, said there had been a noticeable increase in the island’s homeless population. In recent months, she said, requests for food, gas money and rent assistance have all spiked.
“There are many people who have multiple jobs but are barely making it,” Huguenin said. “It’s very hard to make sound long term choices for yourself when you’re in survival mode.”
The housing crisis didn’t just affect wildfire survivors, the UHERO study found. More than a third of workers and business owners in west Maui and Kula who lived outside the burn site have also been displaced from their homes since the disaster.
Trey Gordner, a policy researcher at UHERO who co-authored the report with Bond-Smith, said the fires wiped out 5% of Maui’s housing supply overnight, and loss of housing would inevitably drive up prices in what’s already one of the most expensive rental markets in the country.
“There is a resupplying of the housing market to fit all of the displaced folks on the island,” he said. “Even those who weren’t displaced by the fires directly are still finding that they have to move due to increases in rent.”
At the same time, greed has also hampered recovery. Fema and state emergency housing programs, which offered property owners a premium to house wildfire survivors, have enabled landlords to engage in predatory behavior, according to an investigation by Civil Beat and ProPublica. Tenants said they were evicted on short notice so landlords could lease their property to Fema, the state and private aid organizations. The state, for example, offered $5,000 a month for a one-bedroom home and $7,000-$9,000 for a two or three-bedroom unit – more than double the rate landlords were renting to locals before the fire.
Miguel Ceballos and his four children moved between hotels 14 times before signing a one-year lease in March on a four-bedroom home in west Maui. Fema is subsidizing his rent, which Ceballos said is comparable to pre-fire rates because his landlord refused to price gouge.
Ceballos leaned on a host of non-profits and community-led groups to get back on his feet. He received new furniture through Brown Kross Hui, a grassroots initiative of the Indigenous Hawaiian activist Makani Christensen. Catholic charities provided him vouchers for groceries and rent. But trauma from the fire continues to take its toll: Ceballos and his wife recently separated after 20 years together – a trend that he said has become common in fire-affected households.
“We joke that getting help is a full-time job in itself,” Ceballos said.
In late September, more than a year after the fire, Ceballos found work as an events coordinator with the Kauai-based Waikomo Shaved Ice, helping them expand operations in Maui. While he earned significantly less than at his job before the fire, he said he was on track to get by without Fema assistance in the next few months.
“We weren’t well off before the fire,” Ceballos said, “but what wouldn’t I do to be in that position again.”
