Every afternoon Diana Tevaga rushes back from work to her hotel room to feed her pitbull, Pe’a, and tabby cat, Kenzie, bracing herself for another dispiriting evening searching online for an affordable apartment in Maui.
Tevaga, 41, has been living in a hotel since losing her home – a rent-controlled apartment she’d shared with her mother and pets – in the catastrophic Lahaina wildfire on 8 August. Before the fire, she spent evenings with her nephews and nieces, who lived in the same neighborhood. Now, Tevaga watches reality TV and eats Red Cross meals with other survivors who have no place else to go.
“As soon as I wake up, there’s a physical tightness in my chest. I worry about where we will go when the help runs out. I am grateful, but this hotel is not a home, it’s a shelter. It’s not right that so many of us are still here. How can we dream about rebuilding when we don’t have a stable home?” said Tevaga, wiping away tears.
Six months after the deadliest American fire in more than a century, almost 5,000 people are still in emergency hotel accommodation in West Maui, struggling to grieve and navigate the labyrinth of post-disaster bureaucracy amid throngs of tourists.
According to figures from the American Red Cross, the non-profit contracted to manage the hotel program, only a third of the households who sought emergency shelter in the immediate aftermath of the unprecedented fire have so far moved into homes – places where they can once again cook, invite friends over and begin to recover.
Anger and despondency is growing as survivors in the hotels feel pressured to move off island or accept apartments far from work and school – even though West Maui has thousands of short-term vacation rentals. The Red Cross shelter program is scheduled to expire in April.
Hawaii’s Democratic governor, Josh Green, reopened Maui to tourists at the end of October, spending millions in marketing campaigns urging visitors to return and save the island – despite residents’ pleas to wait until fire survivors had been rehoused. Since then Green has pledged – but failed – to issue a temporary moratorium converting some of the island’s 27,000 short-term rentals into long-term housing for fire survivors.
Tevaga said she had been stunned when an agent with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) had asked her about relocating off the island – a question displaced survivors are regularly confronted with by the Red Cross and Fema. She was furious when asked to consider apartments where pets are not allowed.
“Maui is my home, and these fur babies are my family. It is so traumatizing, having to repeat my story over and over again. I’ve worked with tourists my entire adult life, but I’m so angry that it’s hard to be around them now. We’re tired of broken promises … it’s not easy staying hopeful,” said Tevaga, who was born and raised in Lahaina.
As tourists started to return to West Maui in early November, a group of young local residents erected a protest camp on Kaanapali Beach, a long stretch of golden sand and crystalline ocean where several high-end resorts are located.
“We set up in the tourism mecca of Maui, to push back and educate tourists that drinking mai tais will not save our economy, that tourism is stripping us of our land and water resources,” said Jordan Ruidas, co-founder of Lahaina Strong.
The sprawling encampment is impossible to ignore, and tourists must walk past a yellow and red sign listing the groups’ demands: house the people; restore the wai [water]; heal the ‘āina [land]. Activists are pushing Green to at least issue a moratorium on the 2,200 or so unpermitted short-term rentals in West Maui, which would house most of the fire survivors and enable them to remain close to work, school, healthcare and each other.
“The housing crisis is not an inventory issue, it’s a tourism issue … we’ll be here until the governor stops putting profits over the people and drops the hammer on short-term rentals,” said Ruidas.
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Six months on and the historic town of Lahaina is still a mess of scorched rubble, with efforts to remove the toxic debris only just getting under way. There is only one main road in and out of West Maui, so survivors must drive past the charred remnants of their lives. Traffic jams, high winds and sirens continue to trigger flashbacks and anxiety, as many continue struggling to process what they witnessed and lost.
The firestorm killed 100 people and razed more than 2,200 structures, mostly working-class family homes, with the estimated cost of the damage about $5.6bn, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).
While survivors are grateful for the help they’ve received, dealing with the bureaucracy – insurance companies, Fema, Red Cross, state and county agencies and health and safety experts, is extremely stressful and time-consuming.
For some, it proved too much, and they opted out or moved away.
In a park a few miles north of Kaanapali Beach, brothers Glen and Ray Delatori are camped out waiting for the insurance company and health authorities to greenlight their return home – which was among a handful left standing in one razed neighborhood. “I’d rather sleep in my car and be free, not like in the hotels,” said Glen, 68.
Anecdotal reports suggest that a small but growing number are being kicked off Fema’s housing support list and the Red Cross shelter program with nowhere to go, but they no longer appear in the official numbers.
One morning in late January, Robert Elliott found a typed note from the Red Cross taped to the hotel room door, that said he was no longer eligible for housing assistance and had 48 hours to vacate the hotel – or start paying for the room himself. This was, the note said, because Elliott, 35, was not engaging in his recovery planning and had “refused all solutions”. A second letter listed possible reasons for ineligibility, including failure to provide documents proving he had been renting in the now uninhabitable burn zone.
“I lost all my documents in the fire; I’m screwed. I have no plan,” said Elliott, who moved to Maui a decade ago and would be willing to return to the mainland, if he qualified for help. After leaving the hotel, Elliott procured some donated camping equipment and headed to Kihei, a coastal town south-east of Lahaina, with his dog, Biscuit.
A spokesperson for the Red Cross said the scale of the Maui shelter program was “unprecedented”, and that people could be discharged due to placement in an interim property, voluntary exit, breaking hotel rules or failure to maintain contact with the Red Cross and Fema, but most were given a week’s notice. “While nearly all survivors will be able to remain on Maui if they choose, we know that options are limited, and survivors are faced with difficult decisions. We recognize these are not easy conversations.”
“There seems to be a race to get to zero in the hotels, declare victory and transition into the recovery phase – even while the emergency for many survivors is still ongoing,” said Angus McKelvey, a state senator and fire survivor staying at the same beachfront hotel as Elliott.
“It could have been so different if we’d streamlined the bureaucracy, given people direct forgivable loans like in Covid, and dropped the hammer on the short-term rentals … instead the community is being run out by voluntary relocation and the Fema gold rush.”
Dozens of tents are pitched along the shoreline. Some belong to people who were unsheltered before the fire; others include those deemed ineligible for housing assistance.
A series of well-intended state and county incentives, including tax breaks for vacation rentals and above-market-value rents for landlords housing fire survivors, have failed to solve the crisis.
Instead, Maui’s already inflated rents have ballooned, and studio apartments in West Maui now cost as much as $5,000 a month on vacation websites. Social media sites are full of stories about landlords not renewing leases for long-term residents in order to cash in on Fema paying up to 175% above fair market rate rents – despite a ban on rent hikes while the emergency proclamation period remains in effect.
Fema said it would not knowingly enter into an agreement with a landlord who engages in this practice.
A spokesperson said: “We know the importance of empathy during such challenging times, and we’re committed to continuously improving our communication and support processes … [relocating to another island or the mainland] are options, however bothersome, we have to ask survivors along the way to offer a housing solution.”
According to Governor Green’s office, 2,345 of 3,000 (78%) of the housing units needed to rehouse displaced survivors have been secured for Maui wildfire survivors. “We should see survivors continuing to leave hotels and moving into safe, stable and secure housing over the next 30, 60, and 90 days,” Green said.
A spokesperson for the state department of business, economic development and tourism said: “Visitor expenditures continue to support Maui’s economy – not just hotels, but locally owned restaurants, retail stores and visitor-geared businesses, many of them mom-and-pop operators. These small businesses employ Maui residents, many of them displaced by the fires and in need of continued employment to feed their families.”
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The climate crisis is a risk multiplier. Extreme weather disasters like wildfires and floods tend to expose and exacerbate existing structural problems such as access to housing, land and water inequalities and gaps in insurance.
Last August’s fire turbocharged Maui’s affordable housing crisis – which dates back well over a decade, as investors converted residential properties into lucrative short-term rentals for tourists drawn to the island’s breathtaking beaches, tropical landscapes and ho’okipa – the Hawaiian word for warm hospitality.
Nancy Goode, a retired boat captain who lost her condo in the fire, is renting an apartment almost an hour away – the only place she could afford. Goode, 69, didn’t qualify for assistance from Fema since she had homeowner’s insurance, and she is living off the insurance lump sum and a stipend from the charitable fund set up for survivors by Oprah Winfrey and Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson.
But the condo was significantly underinsured, and rebuilding will be tough at her age. “I’ll need to remortgage or get a loan, but at 70 I don’t even know if I can,” said Goode.
Hundreds of families have mortgages on homes razed by the fire and must negotiate deferments and forbearance deals with lenders individually. Many lack adequate insurance to cover the rebuild and face dipping into the money to cover the mortgage payments – or risk foreclosure.
Anastasia Arao-Tagayuna has received more than a dozen calls and letters from property companies offering to buy the family property that burned down. The property, which belonged to her deceased parents, was underinsured, and a large balloon payment is due on 1 March – unless she can negotiate another mortgage forbearance with the bank.
Arao-Tagayuna, 52, is tired of being asked if she will consider relocating, and desperate for some stability after six months in a hotel with her husband and four children.
“A proper home would give us a sense of stability, a place to put my printer and air fryer, somewhere with a stove so I can cook for my children. I know there are short-term rentals out there – if only the governor would be firm and pull the trigger. But it feels like they are pushing us out.”
