‘There it is — 340 Komo Mai resurrected.”
Bo Monteiro stood at the address of the house destroyed by wildfire along with most of Lahaina two years ago, amazed by the finished copy of the first home he had ever owned.
On July 31, the single dad got five shiny silver keys to his new house. He was welcomed back by next-door neighbor Kim Ball, who had just received the keys to his own rebuilt home a week earlier and was with his wife, Cindy, moving in a few possessions while their dog, Lucy, rambled about.
“Best neighbor ever,” Ball said to Monteiro, a hotel massage therapist who in 2018 bought what was then a newly built house on Komo Mai Street.
Monteiro had just lauded Ball for being a great neighbor, too, and one he hadn’t seen much of over the past two years.
“Oh, man, love this guy,” Monteiro said of Ball, a former Lahainaluna High School wrestling coach. “Absolutely love this guy.”
Monteiro and Ball are two of about eight Komo Mai Street property owners whose destroyed homes were rebuilt before the two-year mark of the Aug. 8, 2023, wildfire that killed 102 people and burned down 5,527 residences including rental apartments.
Throughout Lahaina, 50 homes have been rebuilt to date and 280 are under construction, according to Maui County.
These combined 330 homes are among 465 properties where building permits have been issued, while another 339 permit applications are being processed.
All together, 804 pending or completed permits — almost entirely for residential structures and some for multiple residences — represent 52% of 1,538 lots cleared of fire debris.
John Smith, Maui County Office of Recovery administrator, said during a July 2 community meeting that permit approvals were averaging two or three per week. “That’s phenomenal,” he told the audience.
On a recent day in Lahaina’s Wahikuli subdivision, about a mile from Komo Mai Street, staccato blasts from nail guns and hammering rang out over a landscape that includes over a half-dozen homes rising on one street, surrounded by many more under construction on neighboring blocks.
Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that fire-displaced Lahaina residents moving back to the West Maui town are the county’s foremost measurement of success.
During two years of community meetings since the disaster, Bissen recalled the overwhelming desire expressed by displaced Lahaina residents to reunite with their neighbors.
“That was so telling. So that’s how we’re measuring success on Maui,” he said.
Various efforts have driven such reunifications, which haven’t been limited to those who had good insurance policies or a strong financial capacity to rebuild.
Avenues of return
Kate Mouery, an elementary school counselor with two daughters, on July 25 received the keys to a factory-built temporary home that the Federal Emergency Management Agency procured and delivered to her residential lot in Wahikuli.
The two-bedroom, one-bath house is positioned so the family can live there while a new house gets built to replace the one Mouery lost on the same site.
“It’s been a really beautiful thing,” she said. “It’s providing housing security for my girls and I while we’re trying to figure out what to do about our rebuild.”
Mouery applied for the FEMA home last fall when the agency announced the program, and it arrived within a week of the expiration of homeowner’s insurance benefit covering rent.
The rental home in Wailuku had cost $7,000 a month, a grossly inflated sum resulting from islandwide rent spikes partly driven by FEMA paying vacation rental rates to property owners who agreed to house fire survivors instead of visitors.
For her new temporary residence, Mouery pays an affordable monthly rent aligned with her income.
“It’s just all-around been a tremendous relief,” she said, “and allowed me to bring my children back to their home, their aina, and be where they are supposed to be.”
Five other residential lot owners in Lahaina who applied and met feasibility requirements also have received temporary FEMA homes to live in while they build new houses.
In another Lahaina neighborhood, Carol Santos in late June moved into a new home largely built by volunteers for Samaritan’s Purse.
Santos, a descendent of Maui sugar plantation workers who manages reservations for a hotel in Napili, grew up in Kahua Camp, a former Pioneer Mill plantation village where her family lost three homes to the Aug. 8, 2023, wildfire. The old plantation homes had no insurance, leaving little prospect for Santos along with an adult daughter with two children and an adult son with one child to replace what they lost.
“There was no way, no way in the world could I put a house on this lot,” Santos said from the dining table in her new three-bedroom residence she shares with her son and grandson. “I honestly did not know what I was going to do, how I was going to help my family.”
Santos credits prayers and faith in God for the help from Samaritan’s Purse, an evangelical Christian nonprofit that offers humanitarian aid to people regardless of their spiritual beliefs and helped many Lahaina fire survivors with immediate needs after the disaster.
Volunteers and contractors working with the organization have so far built six new homes in Lahaina and plan to complete 42.
Homebuilding horizon
Two big sources of funding are expected to drive a lot more residential rebuilding ahead.
One is a $4 billion fire litigation settlement to be paid out over four years primarily by Hawaiian Electric, the state and major Lahaina landowner Kamehameha Schools. Initial distributions could begin by year’s end or early 2026.
The other source is the county’s $1.6 billion federal disaster recovery grant mostly dedicated to restore housing and improve infrastructure.
Starting Monday, low- and moderate-income households can begin applying to replace lost homes through three initial county programs using $391.5 million in grant funds.
Two programs will provide qualified property owners who lost their primary residence up to $400,000 to rebuild a single-family home or get reimbursed for already begun or completed reconstruction in instances where insurance proceeds and other recoveries didn’t fully cover losses.
The third program offers up to $600,000 for renters who were displaced by the fire to buy a single-family house.
In total, the county plans to funnel $904 million of its grant into housing, including $235 million to rebuild destroyed multifamily rental housing, $185 million to build new multifamily rental housing and $92.5 million to build 115 new single-family homes for first-time buyers with moderate incomes.
Most Lahaina residents displaced by the fire were renters. According to the county, 4,271 rental units and 1,256 owner-occupied homes were consumed by the Lahaina fire and smaller ones on the same day in Olinda and Kula in the Upcountry region.
So far, one destroyed rental complex, Kaiaulu o Kupuohi, with 89 units reserved for low-income households, is just about rebuilt. Its nonprofit owner, Ikaika Ohana, expects leasing to begin in September.
Waterfront revival
Infrastructure projects to be funded by $400 million of the grant include road improvements, new potable water source development, and the repair and extension of a seawall along the historic commercial section of Front Street where all buildings and over 800 businesses burned down.
No rebuilding of commercial Front Street properties is on the near horizon due to infrastructure improvement plans as well as more onerous and costly permitting requirements tied to historic district regulations and shoreline proximity. An issue also exists with the presence of Native Hawaiian cultural sites revealed on some properties now eyed for preservation by the county.
“It’s been a difficult process,” said G. Warren Freeland, whose great-grandfather built the Pioneer Inn hotel along the waterfront in 1901. “Everybody just wants to rebuild what was there before.”
Meanwhile, some life has returned to Lahaina’s historic waterfront. On May 24, the county opened two free parking lots and public access to the shoreline on both sides of the Lahaina Small Boat Harbor for noncommercial recreation.
On July 31 and Aug. 1, a surfing contest was held at the Lahaina Harbor break with about 140 mostly youth participants.
Aaron Paulk, a 44-year-old competitor, said returning to the popular break reestablished another bit of normalcy after surviving the fire and moving back into a rental unit just a week earlier in the partially destroyed Kahoma Village subdivision.
“The access to this area again is part of the healing process, honestly,” he said. “This place is such a spiritual part of our community.”
At the harbor, which also burned, public bathrooms are being repaired and limited commercial boat operations might resume by the end of the year to allow loading and unloading of passengers largely for tourism excursions, according to the county.
Adjacent to the harbor, Banyan Tree Park, where a giant historic banyan tree largely survived the fire, may also reopen around the same time.
The Lahaina Restoration Foundation installed 18 new sponsored park benches to replace 12 that were destroyed in addition to 21 that didn’t burn.
A tougher challenge for the foundation is to rebuild six historic buildings reduced to stone or coral block shells by the fire, and two buildings that burned to the ground.
The gutted buildings included the Old Lahaina Courthouse, a former seamen’s hospital, Old Lahaina Prison and the Baldwin Home. The courthouse building fronting the harbor was partly used as a visitor center, museum and art gallery. The Baldwin Home had been the oldest house on Maui, dating to 1834, and also operated as a museum.
The nonprofit foundation estimates restoration costs totaling $25 million, which is largely being funded by FEMA, the county’s federal grant and private donations. (To donate, visit lahainarestoration.org.)
Theo Morrison, foundation executive director, figures it could take a year to obtain permits and two years before some rebuilding starts. But she can’t reasonably estimate how long it will take to finish.
“It’s very daunting,” she said.
Not all rainbows
Bissen acknowledges the challenges and frustrations of some property owners wanting to rebuild faster, particularly on Front Street. But he said the county is working toward a complete recovery with respect for culture, an emphasis on returning displaced residents and making Lahaina more resilient.
The mayor expects most residential rebuilding to be completed or under way before the third anniversary of the disaster. That compares with an estimate he offered soon after the fire that it could take two to three years to just receive building permits, based on the catastrophic 2018 Paradise, Calif., wildfire.
Monteiro, standing outside his new home at 340 Komo Mai St., remembers that projection.
A lot of credit to Lahaina’s quicker rebuilding pace is given to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and its team of contractors that hauled away fire debris.
“They crushed it,” Monteiro said, to which his neighbor, Ball, added, “Those guys were amazing.”
Monteiro gave an extra shout-out to one USACE official who preserved a corner of his original driveway where Monteiro and his now-14-year-old son, Promitto, had each pressed one palm into wet concrete in 2018 before moving in the first time. Now, a second set of dated handprints with their names are imprinted in the otherwise rebuilt driveway.
Through their gratitude, Monteiro and Ball also feel guilt and pain that they are able to return to new homes while the opportunity has eluded so many other Lahaina residents, including friends and neighbors.
“There is the feeling of ‘how come I have and they don’t?’” Monteiro said. “There’s that, that pain.”
”Yeah,” added Ball. “It’s like I’m happy, but I don’t really have that joy. It’s not like when we first moved in.”
“It was rainbows and sunshine the first time,” Monteiro continued. “This time I thought I was gonna have rainbows and sunshine. It wasn’t. … It’s hard to feel the joy of that, especially when you know how many people are still out there struggling heavy.”
Source: The Garden Island