Housing: Lawmakers fund more housing, not special treatment for locals

The bill that Hong and his wife, Jamie Yamagata, testified in favor of would have funded county programs that give homeowners or homebuyers grants in exchange for agreeing to deed restrictions that limit ownership to people who work in Hawaiʻi.

A similar bill would have allocated funds so counties could provide grants to homeowners to construct accessory dwelling units—separate living quarters on the property—in exchange for deed restrictions.

The bills were based on a program in the ski town of Vail, Colorado. Since 2018, about 1,000 homes have been taken off the market in Vail for people who don’t live or work there, according to the text of one bill.

Advocates said the bills’ failures set back efforts to offer immediate help to residents in a state where the median single-family home price is now just over $1 million, more than half of renters pay upwards of 30 percent of their income in rent, and a quarter of homebuyers in the last quarter of 2024 lived elsewhere.

“We missed a huge opportunity to give counties power to say, you know what, we’re going to give residents money so that right now, when they sell it or when they rent out that property, we can 100 percent guarantee it’s going to another resident,” said Arjuna Heim, director of housing policy at Hawaiʻi Appleseed, a social justice policy research and advocacy organization.