‘We need to grow those voices’ that support building more homes

from Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, November 12, 2025

The following commentary is an abridged version of remarks presented on Oct. 15, 2025, by Hawaii state Rep. Luke Evslin, chair of the House Housing Committee, during the “Building common ground” housing conference sponsored by Grassroot Institute of Hawaii and the Hawaiʻi Appleseed Center for Law & Economic Justice.

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I really subscribe to this theory that puts housing at the center of every crisis we face.

It’s certainly the driver of the fact that we have the highest rates of homelessness in the country. 

The cost of housing has gone up about tenfold since 1980. Only one in five residents in Hawaii can afford the median-cost home in Hawaii. 

Everybody I know is working two or three jobs just to afford their home. And when you’re working two or three jobs, … that takes an incredible stress and toll on families and leads to social issues.

You can’t be a teacher and afford a home in Hawaii. You can’t start a business if you can’t afford your rent. Etc., etc., etc. So this is devastating, which we all know. 

Why are homes increasing in value? Because we’re building less of them. The data is really clear. 

The Hawaii Housing Planning Study shows we need 78,000 homes by 2027. It’s anticipating that we’re going to build 13,000 homes in that time period. 

So it’s saying the gap is going to be [65,000]. And so by not building enough homes, older homes cannot filter into the affordable market.

The primary creator of affordable housing in the United States is not created through a complicated series of tax credits or government subsidies that enable us to sell new homes for less than the cost of construction. 

The primary creator of low-income housing is actually old homes that filter into the affordable housing market. In the exact same way, that, like, if you are buying a car and you want to buy a cheap car, we don’t have this complicated series of tax credits to subsidize new cars. 

Old cars depreciate in value. The only time that that wouldn’t happen is if we stopped importing new cars into Hawaii — which happened during COVID. We stopped bringing in new cars, [and] the price of old cars went through the roof in ways that we all recognized was devastating.

It was really bad, and this is what happens every single day in our housing market. 

[For example], UHERO [the Economic Research Organization at the University of Hawai‘i] showed, using real-world data, a condo development in Kakaako. A condo [there] sells for $1.4 million. [UHERO] could track who moves into that condo and where they moved out of. You can look four sales down the road, and that condo opened up an $850,000 home in Ewa Beach, right?

So that’s the process of filtering, and it shows us two things, this research. 

One, that filtering is occurring in Hawaii, but it’s not occurring to the extent that we would want it to. You would want to see that home entering into an affordable range, which we could see if we had more housing supply. 

The preponderance of the evidence shows that restricting supply increases housing prices, and that adding supply would help to make housing more affordable. 

So why aren’t we building enough homes? 

As UHERO says, one of the factors is that government regulation has limited the ability of the housing market to create the units necessary to meet demand. 

UHERO was able to show that Hawaii has essentially the most regulated housing market by far in the country.

So why is land use in Hawaii so regulated? I would actually argue that it’s regulated for good reason. In 1961, the very first Hawaii State Legislature passed our groundbreaking dual state and local zoning code. 

And they did this to try and solve for a problem that they were facing in the ’60s, which was the rampant development of agricultural land in disconnected subdivisions.

And when you’re developing land in this manner, we’re consuming ag land. We’re making it harder for farmers to farm because you’re increasing the price of ag land when houses are competing with crops. 

But it’s also a massive infrastructure burden and a massive infrastructure cost to the next generation when you’re building disconnected roadways and water systems and wastewater, etc. 

So all of these problems were occurring. The Legislature tried to solve for them with our dual state and local zoning code. 

And what the intention was, was to make it easy to develop housing within the urban state land-use district and preserve and protect agriculture and conservation zone lands.

That’s the twin tenets of our state land-use law and what our entire state land-use regime is based off of.

And … we created the [state] Land Use Commission, which created four land-use districts in Hawaii. 

>> The conservation district: 48% of land in Hawaii. 

>> The agricultural district. 

>> And then there’s the urban state land-use district [4% of land in Hawaii]. 

[In] the urban district, they drew a circle around every existing town in Hawaii, called it the urban district, and then gave all zoning authority to the counties. 

That’s when every county developed its own CZO [county zoning ordinance] or land-use ordinance, which regulated really strictly use and setbacks and heights and densities and floor-area ratios, etc., within the urban state land-use district. 

1961 was the heyday of single-family zoning in America. And what the counties did, essentially, was adopt single-family zoning, like, everywhere in Hawaii — large-lot subdivisions, only single-family uses.

As UHERO has shown, only 0.3% of the land in all of Hawaii as of 2023 was zoned for multifamily use. So when you have 4% of the land, very little that’s zoned for multifamily. It filled up with single-family homes, and there was nowhere else to go, and we stopped building homes, basically. 

The problem that I think we are facing is how do we add 78,000 homes without consuming agricultural land and without adding this massive debt bomb to future generations through infrastructure costs? 

The first step is just recognizing we need 78,000 homes, and every decision that we make should be framed around how do we get to these 78,000 homes?

So my answer, or the answer that’s enshrined in state law and in most general plans across the state, is make it easy to build housing within the urban state land-use district, and continue to try and preserve and protect agricultural and conservation zone land. …

So there’s a whole list of policies … and … I want to highlight one here: Reduce the number of TVRs [transient vacation rentals]. … Maybe not get rid of all the TVRs, but we certainly have to reduce the number of TVRs, because … whether you build the unit or you get a resident in that unit, it’s still a unit. So reducing the number of TVRs is some component of the solution. 

In 2024, I became Housing Committee chair. It was actually my first full year in the Legislature. And we introduced this whole slate of essentially zoning-reform bills. 

And I thought two things: One, I thought none of them were going to pass, because nothing passes on its first time in the Legislature. And two, I thought none of it was going to be all that controversial. 

[I’m] from Kauai. ADUs [accessory dwelling units] are very popular in Kauai. I had [run] two, three consecutive Council campaigns, really just trying to make it easier to build ADUs. And everybody loves it.

On Oahu, ADUs are pretty restricted. I thought everybody’s going to love this. I was super wrong on both fronts. 

The bills passed for reasons I’ll get to in a second. And they were also incredibly controversial. Certain segments of the community, especially on Oahu, got really concerned about this. 

The Honolulu City Council had a resolution opposing the ADU bill, saying that it would lead to disease vectors and slums. That was the actual language in the resolution. 

This is, like, the worst language of the 1920s, when zoning codes were literally meant to keep brown and black people out of neighborhoods.

They [the Honolulu City Council members], to their credit, amended the resolution and removed that language. But still, there was pushback from certain segments against all of this. 

[But] the bills ended up passing in the Legislature by, like, a two-vote margin. Probably the slimmest margin of any bill in living memory. But they ended up passing. They got watered down but we passed a lot of it.

[In] 2025, I wanted to make sure that I still had friends in the Legislature and wasn’t continuing to just drop bombs every single year. So I focused less on county preemption, which was really the issue that we’re facing, and much more on trying to remove state regulatory barriers. 

So, instead of pushing the counties to allow ADUs, etc., etc., I focused on what are some of the state barriers and how can we remove those? So we did.

>> Eliminating school impact fees.

>> SHPD [State Historic Preservation Division] reform.

>> More units on a single septic.

>> Lots of funding for mixed-income housing.

>> Trying to push the counties to increase floor-area ratio and allow ministerial permitting in TOD [transit-oriented development] areas, etc., etc. 

The last two were my counterparts in the Senate.

>> Prohibits the councils from increasing costs on 201H projects.

>> A 60-day shot clock [for permit approval].

There’s still so much that we need to do.

>> Continue to try and push on ways to reform the 201H process; 201H-38, we allow for bypassing of all state and county rules essentially, as long as you are producing some public benefit through the project. 

>> Inclusionary-zoning reform.

>> Infrastructure funding.

>> Minimal lot size reform. We need to allow people to build on smaller lots.

>> Parking reform. I honestly don’t think we should be requiring anybody to add parking if they [don’t] want to. Let the developer figure it out. 

>> Building code reform. I’m borrowing this phrase but, in a lot of ways, zoning reform is a gateway drug to building code reform. 

Lastly, I want to say all of this will be controversial and none of it is going to be easy to pass. 

The reason that we [were] able to pass, surprisingly, all of this stuff in 2024 was that we had this diverse coalition of stakeholders, including those that are sitting on either side of me [Ted Kefalas, director of strategic campaigns for the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, and Arjuna Heim, director of research and housing policy for the Hawai‘i Appleseed Center for Law & Economic Justice], who are from different sides of [the] ideological spectrum, who really coalesced around housing. 

We have this growing network of voices who have been able to really get a lot of positive testimony out there. 

But we need to sort of grow those voices. And you guys are all advocates and stakeholders. 

The goal is to make sure that any time we have a pro-housing bill get heard in the committee, that thing should [have] overwhelming supportive testimony, which is the opposite of what we’ve all experienced traditionally. 

We need to sort of flip the script on that and vice versa. When there’s councils out there who are trying to block housing, then there needs to be clear voices in opposition to that.