Understanding Hawaiʻi’s Landlord-Tenant Code
Current Protections, Gaps and the Case for Reform
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Full report, including plain language guide to the current law, analysis of gaps in the current law, and recommendations for improvement. Suitable for digital reading or printing out at regular 8.5/11 size sheets.
Handbook, featuring just the plain language guide to the current law, designed at half-sheet size and printable on just three pages of paper. See instructions below:
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Why This Report Matters
HRS Chapter 521—the Hawaiʻi State Landlord-Tenant Code—provides a meaningful framework for landlord-tenant protections. However there are serious structural gaps that undermine housing justice in the rental markets. Most glaring, the nature of enforcement falls to the party whose rights have been violated.
This means a landlord or tenant must independently:
Know what rights are granted under the landlord tenant code;
Know how to exercise those rights and communicate them effectively to the other party;
Know what agency or department to log a complaint with; and
Know how to file a claim in court to recover damages or losses.
One of the most significant gaps in the landlord tenant code is that it acts largely as a self-help law. Both landlords and tenants must independently identify, assert, and litigate their own protections. This structural gap falls hardest on tenants.
Nationally less than 5 percent of tenants have an attorney in eviction court, compared to more than 80 percent of landlords. Eviction proceedings are complex and intimidating processes in which unrepresented tenants face a significant structural disadvantage. Many tenants lose their homes not because they lack a valid defense, but because they lack the resources to use it. As a result, case outcomes often reflect disparities in representation rather than the underlying merits of the case.
Compounding this, the no-cause termination loophole allows landlords to end a month-to-month tenancy for any reason, or no reason at all, with 45 days’ written notice. Although §521-74 prohibits explicit retaliatory eviction, landlords can sidestep this protection entirely by simply issuing a 45-day no-cause notice rather than citing a reason. This makes the anti-retaliation provision largely unenforceable in practice.
Just Cause Eviction would require a landlord to have a legally recognized reason before terminating a tenancy, defining two categories of permissible grounds: at-fault causes based on tenant behavior such as nonpayment of rent, lease violations, or property damage; and no-fault causes based on legitimate landlord decisions unrelated to tenant conduct, such as owner move-in or major renovation.
The Furman Center’s analysis of good cause eviction acknowledges that just cause protections provide real benefits in promoting housing stability and reducing evictions, which are associated with poor health outcomes, future housing instability, and decreased earning. Longitudinal studies on health outcomes and housing instability and eviction have been linked to the initiation of drug use, elevated risk of blood pressure and weight gain, higher risk of heart disease, and increased risk of domestic abuse that impact both individual adults and families with children.
At the same time, the Furman Center notes that poorly designed just cause requirements risk discouraging future housing projects, increasing eviction costs that get passed on to all tenants, and narrowing the choices available to renters in the market. These are nuanced and legitimate policy design considerations, not arguments against just cause itself, and point toward the importance of thoughtful policy crafting and implementation, including appropriate exemptions for new construction and small owner-occupied properties.
Even with those guardrails in place, just cause addresses the terms of displacement, not the conditions that make displacement so devastating in the first place. The deeper question is what just cause eviction can actually accomplish in a market where tenants have nowhere else to go.
