Maui one year later

The other post on FEMA emergency fund being out of money gave me the idea to write this.

I live in Maui and responded to the disaster as I had just left my last job and was taking a brief break.

The response was a colossal mess. That’s well documented. I wrote about this then, can probably find in my post history if interested.

What few people outside of here probably realize is the money. It wasn’t a problem of not spending enough money. I see all the anecdotes on X… Hawaiians only got a few hundred bucks, etc. The real problem is too much money was spent. FEMA started offering to sign leases to people with homes to place Lahaina families. A 4 BR home fetched over $11k monthly, far above even the insane prices here. Why? Because they offered long term housing at the short term rate. The deal was out of this world. A family would be placed, you’d get a one year lease, then FEMA would fix anything that’s broken after the year is up (so basically, a risk free rental). In fact a guy that lives two houses down did that, and is now spending the year in West Virginia where he’s from.

As you’re probably guessing, this created a secondary housing crisis, where people not impacted by the fire were booted out of their rentals, not renewed, etc and then priced out of finding a new place. There was supposedly an eviction moratorium, but easy for a landlord to dial up being a pain in the renter’s rear end and driving them out.

There were a lot of pop up villages with local volunteer help, outside donor help, etc. Ie the modular homes that were donated from places like Hungary, etc. Since I had just quit my job and was financially well off enough to not have to look, I helped out church with a project. Permitting was a nightmare, it usually is out here, and little was done to streamline regulations. Because there was so little coordination at the local government level (infighting to worry about who gets the credit, etc), projects didn’t really tackle the need well. I advocated for ours that we forget the modular homes and build normal homes on foundation for our church project so that it addresses the housing shortage in general. Turned out this was the right move. There’s another project that stated earlier than ours and had massive funding, but it’s now sitting 85% finished with only a few residents in there and looks like complete garbage. Once FEMA started giving landlords these lucrative leases, the work on these pop up villages just stopped. Now they’re scattered in a few places on the island incomplete, money wasted and almost no one being assisted.

Were fortunate, we own our home. so didn’t have to deal with it.

Didn’t help the Hawaiians pushed messaging following the fires to discourage tourists. I don’t blame the tourists for now not wanting to come. Few here really realize how dependent we are on tourism (and military). They look at direct economic impact but fail to realize almost any other job, seemingly far removed from tourism, is made possible due to secondary and tertiary demand created by tourism first putting money in circulation.

Overall I still love it here, ended up in Hawaii due to the military and stuck around some. You’d be surprised how easy it is to find good churches, Trump fans, homeschool advocates, gun owners, etc. But, really questioning the viability of staying long term. I’m thinking about Sweet Home Alabama more and more now