Housing & policy
Affordable housing rules, vouchers, kauhale, Housing First and the state and city policies behind them.
- Housing First in Honolulu: what it is and what a decade of evaluations found
Housing First offers people experiencing chronic homelessness a home without preconditions, then services. How the City and County of Honolulu adopted it in 2014, what University of Hawaiʻi evaluations found about retention, health and arrests, and the debates around it.
- Kauhale explained: Hawaiʻi's tiny-home villages for people leaving the street
What the State's kauhale villages are, how many beds exist, who lives in them, how long people stay and where they go next, based on the State's January 2026 report to the Legislature.
- Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers on Oʻahu: how they work and why the wait is long
How Housing Choice Vouchers work in Honolulu, who runs them, what tenants pay, the 2025 waitlist lottery that drew about 17,000 applications for 3,000 places, and Hawaiʻi's 2023 ban on refusing tenants because of a voucher.
- The governor's housing emergency proclamations: what they did and what the court decided
From July 2023, Gov. Josh Green used emergency powers to speed affordable housing by suspending state laws. How the proclamations and the Build Beyond Barriers Working Group worked, why the group was dissolved, and what the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court ruled in 2025.
- What "affordable" means in Honolulu: area median income, income limits and rent caps
In Honolulu, an "affordable" rental can cost more than $2,700 a month. How area median income (AMI) is set, the City's 2026 income limits and maximum rents, and why affordable housing often misses the lowest-income households.
