In March, Hawaii was hit with two back-to-back storms, bringing the worst flooding it’s seen in 20 years. In Lahaina, Maui, muddy flood waters turned streets into rivers and carved new paths through the barren landscape, breaking open roads and flooding houses. In their wake, sinkholes appeared, engulfing cars.
This is nearly three years after the deadliest wildfires in US history ravaged Lahaina, destroying more than 2,000 structures and killing more than 100 people. Hundreds of affected households are still in temporary housing. Poverty, unemployment and housing instability, rife before the fires, have only worsened.
“So many people were hanging on by a thread as it is,” said Paele Kiakona, an organizer with the grassroots group Lahaina Strong.
And yet, organizers and residents remain determined to protect Lahaina from further climate crises and to rebuild the town for their community – not for tourists. Some, like Kaiāulu Initiatives, are planting acres of native plants to restore the land that was fallowed by decades of water diversion, making it susceptible to fire. Others, like Nā ’Aikāne o Maui Cultural Center, are now advising on the redevelopment of Front Street, the main drag of shops and restaurants that catered to tourists, to better honor its Native Hawaiian heritage and the local community.
But perhaps organizers’ greatest victory so far comes after years of talks with the mayor and local officials: in December, the city council passed a law to phase out 7,000 vacation rentals on the island – 15% of the island’s housing stock – to house fire survivors and other locals.
“We passed legislation as community members, which is unheard of,” said Kiakona. “We’re just community members organizing grassroots from the bottom up, bringing our people in.
The fires, and now the storms, have been a reminder to many in Lahaina that community must often take care of itself. In the immediate aftermath of the 2023 blaze, community efforts intervened where federal emergency assistance was too slow to respond. Amid the recent storms, Kiakona described seeing – and joining – community members coordinating to remove fallen trees, pulling cars from a riverbed and digging trenches to divert flooding in the streets. If there’s one thing that residents can rely on, organizers say, it’s their ability to mobilize.
“We were just jumping in everywhere we possibly could,” said Kiakona. “The community is so activated.”
After the fires, one of the greatest fears among community organizers was that recovery would be too slow, too difficult and too expensive for locals to stick out. And that became an unfortunate reality. Since the fires, about 3,400 residents have left the island due to gaps in insurance pay-outs, uneven access to federal aid and soaring rents.
But by advocating for a future Lahaina that prioritizes locals, organizers are hoping to not only keep residents here but also create opportunities for those who have left to return home.
After the fires, Lahaina Strong led an encampment behind high-end resorts on Kāʻanapali beach to demand long-term housing for fire survivors. The juxtaposition of dozens of locals camping on the public beach with signs that read “fishing for housing”, amid the throngs of tourists staying at the hotels towering above them, illustrated how the local government prioritized tourists over survivors after the fires, activists said.
Ultimately, the pressure made an impact: after seven months of camping in protest and talks with local leaders, Lahaina Strong stood with the mayor as he introduced a proposal to phase out apartment-zoned, short-term rentals in June 2024. These rentals in west Maui, which includes Lahaina, will be phased out by 1 January 2029, with the rest of the island by 2031.
“I think there’s an understanding that the status quo led us to where we are,” said Kiakona. “We’ve put so much effort into making things better for our home that the status quo would be the end of us, again.”
It’s why Kiakona is running for the district 14 seat in the Hawaii statehouse, representing west Maui. “I want to do what’s right for my place and my home,” he said. “If we stay where we are now, the less Hawaii will be Hawaii.”
Another initiative to keep local land in local hands is the Lahaina Community Land Trust, which buys homes for sale in Lahaina and resells them to locals at an affordable rate. The idea is for homes to stay locally owned, instead of being sold to investors or non-locals. The trust, made up of multigenerational Lahaina residents, also provides grants to homeowners to rebuild.
“We get called an affordable housing organization a lot, which, that’s not wrong – because our people need to stay – but what we are doing is bigger than that,” said Autumn Ness, executive director of the land trust. “Our vision is restoring relationship to ‘āina [land], whether it’s through housing, commercial spaces or open space that is really grounded in the real history of this place.”
So far, the trust has bought at least 20 parcels of land for housing and intends to expand into commercial spaces for businesses that want to serve the community’s needs.
Acquiring enough homes, of course, is only half the battle. The other half is returning residents to them and healing as a community.
Many are still struggling to survive, especially those who had a hard time accessing formal assistance in the first place – like Lahaina’s Filipino immigrants, who make up about 40% of the town’s community.
“Filipinos in Hawaii are largely a service labor class,” said Nadine Ortega, executive director of Tagnawa, a group that advocates for women and working-class Filipino immigrants. “They are working multiple jobs. The people who get to be heard, get to be seen, are those who have the time and opportunity to attend these meetings and push for their issues. Who gets left behind are immigrants [and] mothers who cannot go to the meetings in the middle of the day because they can’t find childcare.”
Tagnawa has stepped in to fill some of those gaps – connecting fire survivors to disaster relief in the immediate aftermath with resources in their language, facilitating health risk assessments, producing reports on the status of the community for the attention of policymakers and, lately, organizing mental health workshops.
Dr Ruben Juarez, director of the Maui Wildfire Exposure Study, said some fire survivors had been deported under the increased US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in the area. Enforcement has been quieter in Maui than on neighboring islands, but arrests are happening nonetheless.
“Just because we’re not seeing it on Maui does not mean that it’s not impacting them,” said Veronica Mendoza, executive director of Maui Roots Reborn, a group of immigration lawyers and community organizers serving predominantly Latino immigrants. “It feels like you can’t relax.”
Mendoza said that news of deportations has done the job of striking fear in the immigrant community and pluralizing their grief. “You always have to be looking behind your back,” she said. “I don’t know how full recovery is possible with that.”
For Maui Roots Reborn, recovery efforts now include “know your rights” trainings, an ICE watch group, a rapid response network and a tip line. “If there is anything that we can do to provide stability in some way or another – like having a place for them to come for good information, for education on their rights with immigration – we’re not only creating community, but we’re also creating stability in meaningful ways,” Mendoza said.
Earlier this month, weeks after the initial storms, Donald Trump finally approved a disaster declaration for Hawaii. Kiakona, once again, points to the necessity of community to pull through tragedy.
“Bureaucracy gets in the way a lot of the time, so sometimes the community just needs to take action,” Kiakona said. “That’s how we are in Hawaii – we take care of one another.”
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