Short-term Aloha
Transient vacation rentals, long a quiet part of the Maui tourism industry, are a noisy new
Michael Stein
Illustrations by Guy Junker
To hear a former Kïhei resident tell it, vacation rentals were one reason she left Maui four years ago. “People have a right to live in residential areas and not be imposed on by vacationers coming and going and making a racket, who are plain inconsiderate of people who have to get up and go to work.”
A current owner of a bed-and-breakfast, however, has quite a different impression of her guests. “They’re people who come here and want to be in the community during their visit, spend money locally and help keep areas like Ha‘iku country.”
Noisy or nurturing? A cottage industry that’s a source of jobs for local people or a drain on affordable housing that drives them off the island? Such arguments about transient, or short-term, vacation rentals (TVRs) have raged for years, but they’ve now been kicked up several notches as the County has simultaneously cracked down on nonpermitted TVRs and proposed a package of ordinances that in many areas will severely restrict them. Those who view these accommodations as a threat to their way of life have won the support of the mayor; those whose livelihoods depend on TVRs have taken the issue to the courts.
Over the past few years TVRs and bed-and-breakfasts have proliferated. Some are “‘ohanas,” auxiliary dwellings intended only as long-term rentals for one’s extended ‘ohana, or family—and thus outright illegal as TVRs. Then there are units in areas zoned for apartments, businesses and resorts, which allow TVRs.
“The vast majority of the 18,000-plus TVRs in Maui County are legal,” says Joseph Alueta, administrative planning officer with the county’s Department of Planning, who helped draft and review the legislation regulating nonpermitted TVRs. Before 1991, he explains, only an apartment/condominium’s bylaws determined whether a unit could be rented out short-term, regardless of where the building was located. When the law changed, those older buildings were grandfathered. “So if your condo was built prior to 1991, and its bylaws allowed TVRs, you could buy a unit there tomorrow and rent it legally as a TVR,” says Alueta. “If the bylaws forbid short-term rentals, you couldn’t. If your condo was built after 1991, and it’s not located in a hotel or resort district, short-term rental is illegal, no matter what the bylaws say.”
Finally, there are multiunit homes in agricultural, rural and residential areas. It’s these bucolic hideaways around which most of the controversy swirls. Everyone concedes that the permitting process that has faced TVR and B&B owners in communities like Pa‘ia, Ha‘iku and other places Upcountry has been a years-long ordeal of jumping through bureaucratic hoops, with television-reality-show odds of a successful conclusion. According to Dr. David Dantes, president of the Maui Vacation Rental Association (MVRA), over the last six years, only eight out of eighty TVR applicants have obtained a permit. Review by fifteen different agencies, three or four public hearings before approval is granted . . . the red tape created a backlog that both the Apana and Arakawa administrations wanted cleared up, but no bills successfully passed the council.
Meanwhile enforcement of the existing regulations was deferred, except when complaints triggered Notices of Violation. As recently as March 17, 2007, when yet another bill was filed away, it seemed the laissez-faire attitude would continue. Instead Mayor Charmaine Tavares and the planning department declared a grace period until January 1 of this year, during which all establishments without permits, whether their owners had never applied or were simply caught in the logjam, would be forced to “phase out operations.”
