For decades, bulldozers would simply flatten the houses of lifelong residents of Gay & Robinson’s historic plantation cottages after they died. 

Behind the demolition of hundreds of homes was a Kauaʻi County land use policy barring home renovations and rebuilds on agricultural land. Due to age and flimsy construction, all but the most basic repairs were effectively outlawed, dooming the chance to preserve these century-old neighborhoods that, long after the demise of the sugar industry, continue to provide some of the island’s most affordable housing rentals.

“We were stuck in the mud,” Gay & Robinson Vice President Howard Greene said. “We had no right legally to rebuild a single house, not even when the walls were falling in.”

Recently, the demolitions have stopped. A series of new zoning codes adopted by Kauaʻi County planners for the first time allows the private landowners of West Kauaʻi’s last remaining plantation villages to restore rundown cottages and expand the camps with new homes.

Heritage camps once destined to fade out of existence may even serve as a model for future affordable housing development elsewhere on the island.

Kauaʻi Planning Director Kaʻaina Hull said the county’s new plantation camp zoning code has the potential to become a template for a new affordable style of development. Many of the camps’ elemental design features, such as narrow roads and houses built close to the street with only 13 feet of spacing between homes, offer present-day developers a cost-control template. 

“It has the potential to be a model to create communities that our own zoning regulations and subdivision code now prohibit because the roads are too narrow, the houses are built really close to the street — all of these unique things that we currently outlaw but that make the camps so special,” Hull said.

The county’s new code has modernized some of these features to address safety issues, however. Instead of 13 feet of spacing between homes, for example, new homes in the camp must be built 30 feet apart.

A shortage of affordable homes is a statewide issue perpetuated in part by a glaring gap between average wages and housing costs. The plantation camp-style of development, if adopted statewide, could help bridge this gap by creating communities where more Hawaiʻi families can afford to live.

It costs roughly $400,000 to build a new 900-square-foot plantation house under the plantation code developed by the county, according to Greene.

Gay & Robinson charges $300 to $400 in monthly rent for these new houses — a low return on investment that he said the Robinson family that runs the company is willing to accept. Cheap housing has long been a carrot to attract and retain loyal agricultural employees.

“These plantation communities were all built economically,” Greene said. “They don’t have 40-feet wide roads with 10-foot sidewalks because that just creates more pavement, more pipeline, more lines of infrastructure, and that’s how these modern day housing developments become unaffordable. So you can take this 100-year-old design concept and maybe use it to create an ordinance that a developer could come in and use to build new housing that’s actually affordable.”

The county has codified into law many aspects of West Kauaʻi’s unique plantation village architecture and design, a style that, in addition to slashing development costs, promotes slower traffic and a strong social fabric.

“The camps cultivate community in a way that our modern development styles don’t,” Kaua‘i Rep. Luke Evslin, chairman of the House Housing Committee, said.

In the plantation heyday during the early to mid-1900s, there were roughly 1,000 cottages across 10 camps on what is currently Gay & Robinson land. Today, on four still-active camps, there are approximately 350 plantation camp houses left. 

New zoning rules that aim to perpetuate the plantation villages apply to three of Gay & Robinson’s four camps: Kaumakani Village, Kaumakani Avenue and Pākalā Camp. Gay & Robinson is working to win county approval to extend the same construction privileges to Kaʻawanui Camp, also known as Camp Six. 

The code also applies to Numila Camp owned by Brue Baukol Capital Partners, a Denver-based real estate investment firm that manages 18,550 acres of Kauaʻi land, including the South Shore luxury resort community Kukui‘ula.

At public meetings the company has expressed interest in preserving and expanding the camp for employees of the businesses that operate on its lands amid an islandwide workforce housing crisis. A median-priced home now costs $1.2 million.

Gay & Robinson has so far rebuilt 11 plantation cottages that had become unlivable and erected two new houses that did not previously exist following the enactment of an ordinance that allows new construction within or near the historic footprint of the camps.

‘We’re At A Juncture’

Now the company must decide how deeply it’s willing to invest.

Even with modest rents, as well as some tenants who live in the camps for free, Gay & Robinson’s housing venture turns a small profit, according to Greene.

Low rent remains a significant perk of employment on the company’s farms and ranches. But building new houses one or two at a time, as the company has so far done, offers little payoff. It would take millions of dollars to capitalize on any significant housing growth.

“We’re at a juncture here where we’re trying to navigate this opportunity that has been laid before us,” Greene said. “Do we keep fixing and maintaining the camp, or do we actually do some expansion? The family’s at a critical decision point. We’re kind of in a holding pattern where we’re still wrapping our heads around what we can do and what we can afford to do with this.”

Gay & Robinson has about 50 employees. The company’s workers, as well as employees of its lessees, comprise more than half the tenants across four camps. A growing minority of the renters are what Greene calls “outsiders” — nurses, firefighters and other professionals without any employment or familial connection to Gay & Robinson lands.

There are about a dozen names on a Gay & Robinson waitlist for plantation camp homes that have very little turnover. Tenants typically live in the houses until they die, Greene said. The camps include homes built more than a century ago.

“Our property is sort of the breadbasket of all the islands with the good farmland and sunshine and water that we have, but we need to maintain this workforce housing to keep the property functioning,” Greene said. “The Robinsons intend to keep the property for the long haul.”

‘A Vital Benefit’

Aloun Farms, one of Hawai‘i’s most prolific fruit and vegetable producers, launched a West Kauaʻi arm of its Central Oʻahu-based farm company in 2022 to take advantage of Gay & Robinson’s widely available and relatively inexpensive leased lands — and employee housing.

Abutting the company’s watermelon fields at Kaumakani Village, Aloun Farms rents several three-bedroom homes, including four that were recently rebuilt from the ground up.

About two dozen Aloun Farms workers either live at the camp or stay there during routine trips from Oʻahu, Alec Sou, president and general manager of Aloun Farms, said.

“It’s a vital benefit to sustaining good employees,” Sou said of the camp housing.

In a parallel preservation effort, the county on Monday took steps to make the camps more resilient to fire risk with the passage of an ordinance that tasks county zoning inspectors with enforcing a ban on landscaping within 5 feet of a residence and a prohibition on invasive, fire-prone shrubs and grasses, among other restrictions. 

The law was partly inspired by fast-moving flames that forced residents of Kaumakani Village to evacuate in July 2024, deepening anxieties about the danger posed by wildfire in this arid part of the island.

“Hawaiʻi’s Changing Economy” is supported by a grant from the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation as part of its work to build equity for all through the CHANGE Framework.