People in Hawaiʻi are fed up with vacation rentals

Victor Geminiani, the executive director of Hawaiʻi Appleseed Center for Law & Economic Justice, told BuzzFeed News that Hawaiʻi has seen “a tremendous proliferation of people buying houses not to occupy them, but to invest in them.”

The Hawaiʻi Tourism Authority (HTA) study said almost 70 percent of vacation rentals were owned by people who live outside of Hawaiʻi.

Geminiani said this is because of the state’s low property taxes and the fact that a homeowner can profit by offering their home for rent, which he called the “siren song of economic attraction.”

HTA said that on Oʻahu almost 8 percent of housing units are owned by people who live out of state, while the island of Maui has the highest rate of out-of-state property owners with almost 30 percent.

In Hawaii, 43 perceny of households are renters, which is the fourth highest in the country, according to a report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition. So many residents in Hawaiʻi rent because of the high cost of living and low wages, but even this is becoming more challenging, as monthly rents rose by 14 percent between 2009 and 2015.

Geminiani said that vacationers are competing with longterm renters for property, especially since a homeowner can earn more than three times as much from renting short-term, according to the HTA.

Airbnb “likes to claim” that the hosts “are the mom and pop down the street trying to make pocket money by renting out a bedroom,” Geminiani said. “The reality is overwhelmingly that the units being rented now are full-unit rentals, which means they are being taken out of the market while they're used as vacation rentals."

A report commissioned by Airbnb says 74 percent of hosts in Hawaiʻi rent their entire property.

This is exacerbating the housing shortage, Geminiani said, contributing to Hawaiʻi having the highest rate of homelessness per capita of any state in the country, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s annual report.

According to Geminiani, the state has an obligation to enforce laws and actually “shut down [illegal] vacation rentals.”

“Politicians need to find a fair balance between the pressures we have to bring tourists into the state and the pressures we have to have residential neighborhoods retain their character for the people that live there,” Geminiani said.