Gov. Green Addresses Housing Leaders at Affordable Housing Summit

Governor Josh Green, M.D., delivered the keynote address at the first-ever Novogradac Affordable Housing Summit in Waikīkī on Nov. 14.

More than 200 of the most influential leaders in the affordable housing arena – developers, lenders, bankers, Wall Street investors, housing advocates and state and county officials – attended the summit to address the most pressing challenge facing working-class families in Hawai‘i today: the housing crisis.

“This convening is so important. We need more people and more investment in affordable housing in Hawai‘i to preserve housing opportunities for our local people,” Governor Green said, in his videotaped address. “I appreciate your commitment to providing affordable rentals for our most vulnerable ‘ohana members.”

During the summit, Hawai‘i Public Housing Authority Executive Director Hakim Ouansafi outlined the state’s $6.6 billion Ka Lei Momi redevelopment effort, which will deliver more than 10,000 new low-income and affordable housing units statewide at Hawai‘i’s nine public housing projects over the next 10 to 15 years. This is one of the largest public housing authority initiatives in the country.

Department of Hawaiian Home Lands (DHHL) Director Kali Watson also gave updates on the DHHL’s efforts to build more than 7,000 homes and houselots over the next decade. Act 279, which the state Legislature approved two years ago, appropriated $600 million to help reduce the department’s waitlist of 29,000 Native Hawaiian applicants and to substantially improve the lives of thousands of kānaka maoli.

The governor’s housing team also publicly launched the “Hawai‘i Affordable Housing Pipeline Dashboard” which tracks hundreds of projects in the development pipeline since the start of the Green Administration. You can find it online at https://hale.hawaii.gov/affordable-housing-pipeline-dashboard/.

The pipeline has identified more than 60,000 affordable housing units to be delivered over the next decade and over 14,000 of these units are estimated to come online by 2026.

Because the pipeline tracks these projects along the seven stages of development, it gives greater insight into when the projects will be completed and what hurdles they face. It will also provide housing officials with the analytic tools to provide further reforms to refine the affordable housing development process so that we can deliver more housing – with fewer delays for struggling local families who need it the most.