Half of rental units reserved for Maui fire victims (and paid by taxpayers) are sitting vacant
HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - The federal program trying to find longer-term housing for Maui fire victims is facing criticism for miscommunication and wasted taxpayer dollars.
About half of the rental units being reserved for Maui fire victims — more than 600 mostly former vacation rentals — are still vacant even as taxpayers fork over above-market rent for them.
Survivors and their supporters had heard that there were hundreds of FEMA rental units sitting empty but it wasn’t until late last week that the details came out.
Survivor Charles Nahale lived in four hotels in eight months and finally got the call for housing in January — an offer of a one-bedroom rental in West Maui. The contact from the program told him it would take some more time for background check and inspection.
Maui Wildfires Diaster
“It would take her maybe at the most three weeks to actually get into the property,” Nahale said. “It ended up turning out to be two months.”
During those two months, FEMA was paying about $1,000 a day for his hotel and expenses and $5,100 a month for the vacant rental.
When he finally was cleared to move in and saw it for the first time, it ended up being a studio — not the one bedroom on the rental contract. Nahale said he runs his business out of his home so needed the one bedroom and laundry appliances in the unit, which had neither.
“I was broken-hearted,” Nahale said. “I waited two months for this property that FEMA had described to me.”
After hearing similar stories from others, Kim Ball, a business owner on Mayor Richard Bissen’s Lahaina advisory team, questioned FEMA about vacant units at a community meeting last week.
“They’re doing the best they can, but there’s been a lot of, let’s put it, wastefulness,” he said.
The FEMA coordinator for Maui, Curtis Brown, said that of the 1,361 units reserved by FEMA for survivors “we are paying for about 600-700 units.” Brown said the process takes at best a month for background checks and matching survivors to a unit, but is often longer.
“It could take up to two months,” Brown said. “But we still committed to that property. So we still have to pay that monthly fee to that property.”
Reached on Monday, Brown said he estimated about 700 units are now occupied.
Ball said the vacancies were an open secret, finally confirmed officially.
“It’s happened enough now that it just seems kind of crazy. But yeah, it was just good to get it out in the open, I guess,” Ball said.
Now, Charles Nahale is trying to get out of his commitment to the unit, which he said was not only too small but moldy and full of damaged fixtures. He’d felt pressure to sign the contract.
“They were really giving me the sense that if you don’t take this one, we’re not promising we’re going to help you more than likely you’ll be kicked out of the program,” he said.
“So I didn’t want that to happen.”
Brown confirmed that survivors are supposed to be given up to four chances to reject rental offers and Nahale said he hoped that policy would be applied to him.
Business people say that some of these problems could have been avoided if FEMA hired local property managers for the rental program because of their familiarity with the market, the properties and the people who they are trying to help.
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