At almost every legislative hearing, lawmakers say housing is their top priority. The cost of living is forcing families out. Our kids cannot afford to stay. Something has to change.

These concerns are legitimate. The gap between what a typical family earns and what a home costs has never been wider.

Renters, working families, Native Hawaiian households, and young people trying to enter the market all bear the weight of that gap.

The reforms most directly linked to lowering housing costs are well understood and readily available. They do not require new taxes or federal coordination. They require repealing rules that our own state and local governments created.

And yet, those reforms consistently stall. They get carved up in committee or die on third reading — often at the hands of the same legislators who just identified housing as their top concern.

Ideas showcases stories, opinion and analysis about Hawaiʻi, from the state’s sharpest thinkers, to stretch our collective thinking about a problem or an issue. Email news@civilbeat.org to submit an idea or an essay.

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The Hidden Tax In Every Parking Stall

Consider parking requirements. Most local codes force developers to build a set number of off-street parking spaces per residential unit, regardless of location, transit access, or actual demand.

Those requirements carry real costs. In urban Honolulu, podium parking adds more than $68,000 to the cost of a single affordable rental unit. That translates to roughly $410 per month in extra rent for a studio, whether the tenant owns a car or not.

The fix is relatively simple: stop requiring parking where the market does not justify it. This would not ban parking. It would simply end the mandate that every project subsidize car storage regardless of context.

Other jurisdictions have acted. Minneapolis and Buffalo eliminated citywide parking minimums without the chaos opponents predicted. California removed parking requirements for transit-adjacent development statewide.

In Hawaiʻi, legislation that acknowledges the problem, that cites the per-unit cost impact, has repeatedly failed. The evidence was clear. The political will was not.

Much ADU About Nothing

A similar pattern appears with accessory dwelling units and missing middle housing. Recent legislation expanded ADU permissions and signaled support for denser development.

But the lesson from states that succeeded is clear: statewide authorization must be paired with guardrails that limit local discretion.

California paired its ADU reform with binding rules: no parking requirements in many locations, no owner-occupancy mandates, strict permit timelines, and limited local design review. The result was a surge in ADU permits from under 5,000 in 2017 to over 23,000 in 2022.

States that left parking and design decisions to local politics saw weak, geographically uneven production— nowhere near the scale needed to move costs.

Hawaiʻi chose the latter architecture. Our laws say ADUs are legal statewide. But they hand counties the tools: infrastructure determinations, design guidelines, parking requirements, to reject projects one lot at a time. The gap between the promise and the operational reality is an intentional choice.

The same logic applies to missing middle housing. Auckland upzoned the entire city in 2016 and saw rents grow slower relative to peer cities. Minneapolis eliminated single-family zoning citywide in 2019. Oregon mandated missing middle permissions statewide the same year. In Hawaiʻi, we continue to functionally protect single-family-exclusive development across most of our urban residential land.

The Quiet Part

The political calculus here is familiar. Existing homeowners vote. Future residents, young renters, families priced out, workers who have already left — these groups do not yet exist as a constituency. Legislators who prioritize reelection will serve the first group. Legislators doing their job will serve both.

Every year parking mandates remain in place, every year missing middle housing remains illegal on most urban land, and every year ADU permitting remains exposed to local discretionary overrides, the cost of housing continues to outpace the incomes of the people who need it most.

That burden falls disproportionately on renters, younger households, and the workers whose departure legislators routinely lament from the same podium.

The reforms that would change this are not mysterious or experimental. They are operating in peer jurisdictions right now, producing measurable results.

What is missing is not knowledge, evidence, or available policy options. What is missing is honesty about whom these reforms actually threaten and why bills with broad public support keep dying for reasons that rarely get named.

We can do better. Other states have. The question is whether our leaders will stop talking about housing and start acting.