Three Years Later: How Much of Lahaina Has Actually Been Rebuilt?
Nearly 600 rebuilt homes. Zero rebuilt commercial buildings on Front Street. A recovery worth being honest about.
By Lahaina Lee · Aloha Group Maui · September 2026
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September 2026: What You Need to Know • The County reports nearly 600 homes rebuilt and occupied. But 313 of the completed homes are multifamily units, and county officials confirm 200 of those are from one pre-fire project, Kaiāulu O Kūkuʻia, not burned homes rebuilt. Strip those out and the real rebuild count is nearer 400. • Zero commercial buildings destroyed on Front Street have been rebuilt. The street reopened to traffic on Aug. 1, but a reopened road is not a rebuilt town. • A permit is progress. It is not always a building. The number that matters is what is finished, occupied, and open today. • Tourism is up and slow at the same time. July arrivals and spending rose year over year, while the average number of visitors on-island each day fell about 10%. Shorter stays, a K-shaped economy. • Bill 88's next wave is moving. On Aug. 27 a Council committee voted 5-4 to tie the next round of rezoning eligibility to sea-level-rise exposure. Being named is still not being rezoned. • FEMA's minimum rent for families still in Direct Housing rises to 50% of Fair Market Rent on Sept. 1. • Some rebuilt homes still cannot get mail. The Postal Service is treating rebuilt neighborhoods as new developments and pushing cluster mailboxes, and the Mayor has asked USPS to restore door delivery. You can pass final inspection and still not get your ma |
Aloha, this is Lahaina Lee with the September edition of the Maui Real Estate Advisor.
Three years after the fire, we are hearing some big numbers about Lahaina's recovery. The County's own three-year update puts it at nearly 600 homes rebuilt and occupied, with about 400 more under construction. That is progress. Real progress, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
But I have been spending a lot of time inside those numbers lately, and I keep coming back to a simpler question.
How much of Lahaina has actually been rebuilt?
Not how many permits have been applied for. Not how many have been issued. Not how many units appear on a dashboard. What is physically there today, finished and occupied and open? That is the number that matters, and it is the one this edition is about.
Recovery by the Numbers
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Metric |
Figure |
As of |
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Homes rebuilt and occupied (single-family + multifamily) |
~600 |
Aug 7, 2026 |
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Of those, completed multifamily units |
313 |
Aug 5, 2026 |
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Kaiāulu o Kupuohi (burned, then rebuilt) |
89 |
Reopened Jun 2026 |
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Kaiāulu O Kūkuʻia (pre-fire, never burned) |
200 |
Opened Oct 2025 |
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Homes under construction |
~400 |
Aug 7, 2026 |
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Households still in interim housing, islandwide |
~1,137 |
Aug 2026 |
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Structures lost in the 2023 fire |
~2,200 |
Aug 8, 2023 |
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Commercial buildings rebuilt on Front Street |
0 |
Sept 2026 |
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Visitor arrivals, July, year over year |
+5.6% |
Jul 2026 |
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Visitor spending, July, year over year |
+5.7% |
Jul 2026 |
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Average visitors on-island per day, July, YoY |
–10.6% |
Jul 2026 |
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FEMA Direct Housing minimum rent |
50% of FMR |
Sept 1, 2026 |
Sources: County of Maui three-year recovery update (Aug. 7, 2026) and Rebuild Dashboard; Hawaiʻi DBEDT July visitor statistics; FEMA Direct Housing fact sheet. Figures are snapshots and move week to week.
601 Homes. But What Does That Number Count?
Let me start with the good news, because it is real. Drive through Lahaina and you can see houses going up. Families are coming home. There is no question that residential rebuilding has gained momentum, and the completion count has climbed hard over the past year.
The dashboard now shows roughly 601 completed homes, and the County's three-year update frames it as nearly 600 rebuilt and occupied. Good. But be careful with “homes,” because these are not 600 single-family houses. It is a mixture of single-family homes and multifamily, or apartment, units. The dashboard's own footnote says so: the residential count includes single-family and multifamily units, and a single permit may cover more than one dwelling unit. That is not wrong. We need both kinds of housing. It just means we have to understand what we are counting before we let one big number stand in for a whole town, because a 60-unit condo building and 60 families rebuilding on their own lots are very different pictures of recovery.
Here is where the number gets interesting, because we now know what is inside it. The County's own dashboard splits the completed homes into single-family and multifamily. In its early-August three-year breakdown, of 577 completed homes, 313 were multifamily units, and the total has kept climbing toward 600 since. And those 313 multifamily units are largely two big complexes.
One is Kaiāulu o Kupuohi, an 89-unit workforce community that opened in late 2022, burned to the ground in the fire, and has since been rebuilt and reopened, fully occupied, about half returning residents and half fire survivors. That one genuinely counts. It was lost on August 8, and it came back.
The other is Kaiāulu O Kūkuʻia, and this is the one to watch. Its 200 units are an affordable project that broke ground in July 2022, more than a year before the fire, on a site that had already been cleared. It took wind damage, not fire. The County itself classifies it as a new build, not a rebuild of homes destroyed on August 8.
Those 200 apartments are real housing, and God knows Maui needs them. I am glad they are there. But they are not 200 Lahaina homes that burned down and were rebuilt.
Take those 200 units out, and the roughly 600 completed homes become closer to 400.
Again, this is not a gotcha. It is a definition. If we are going to measure the recovery, let's make sure we are measuring the recovery.
This is the same habit I wrote about in July's special report: we have gotten comfortable calling things done that are not quite done.
Front Street Is Open. Commercial Reconstruction Is Zero.
Front Street reopened to vehicular traffic on Aug. 1, from Pāpalaua to Shaw, with no regularly restricted hours. That is a milestone, and it felt like one. The road is open. The seawall and sidewalk work is done. The railings are up. The trees are planted.
But three years after the fire, how many of the commercial buildings destroyed on Front Street have been rebuilt?
Zero. Not very few. None.
That does not mean nothing is happening. Owners are grinding through plans, historic review, shoreline rules and permits. But there is an enormous difference between working toward rebuilding and having a building. The County itself has called permitting in the Lahaina historic districts among the most heavily regulated processes in the state. That is a description of the problem, and it is exactly why I am skeptical of using permits as the measure of recovery.
I have taken pushback on this. Readers and listeners tell me, Front Street is open, the harbor is open, why are you whining about Front Street when homes have to come first. I agree that homes come first. But hold this next part in your head at the same time: many of the people who want to come home to Lahaina worked at those Front Street and Lahaina businesses. They cannot fully come back until the places they worked can build back too. A town is not only where people sleep. It is where they earn a living.
A Permit Is Progress. It Is Not Always a Building.
The dashboard has categories for commercial permits being processed, issued and completed. We have been digging into the underlying MAPPS permitting system, and a commercial permit does not necessarily mean a destroyed commercial building has been reconstructed. The system can sweep in repairs, alterations and other commercial work that has nothing to do with a burned building coming back.
So here is my rule for this edition, and it is the whole edition in one line:
A permit is progress. It does not necessarily mean a building.
Maybe what we really need is a simpler recovery scorecard, three numbers anyone can understand:
- How many homes are finished and occupied?
- How many destroyed commercial buildings have actually been rebuilt and reopened?
- How many projects have construction physically underway today?
Those are numbers I can explain to a client without a footnote. Everything else is bookkeeping.
Tourism Is Up. So Why Does Maui Feel Slow?
We are seeing the same gap between the headline and the feel in the tourism numbers. July looks good at first glance. Maui had more visitors than a year ago, and visitor spending was up too. But look one line down.
Maui Tourism: July, Three-Year View
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Metric |
July 2019 |
July 2025 |
July 2026 |
2026 vs 2019 |
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Visitor arrivals |
307,834 |
234,805 |
247,857 |
–19.5% |
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Visitor spending |
$506.0M |
$510.9M |
$539.9M |
+6.7% |
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Avg visitors on-island per day |
76,557 |
57,288 |
51,223 |
–33.1% |
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The takeaway. Spending is up in dollars but down in value. Adjusted for inflation, where $1 in 2019 is worth about $1.31 in 2026, July's $539.9M is roughly $412M in 2019 dollars, about 18% below 2019. Maui is pulling more nominal dollars from far fewer people on-island each day, the signature of shorter stays. For any business that lives on room nights, meals, activities, rental cars and shopping days, that feels nothing like a headline of arrivals up 5.6%. |
Sources: Hawaiʻi DBEDT preliminary visitor statistics (July 2019, 2025, 2026). Inflation adjustment uses BLS CPI-U, about +31% from July 2019 to 2026. To equal 2019 spending in real terms, July 2026 spending would need to be roughly $663M.
The average number of visitors actually on Maui on any given day was down more than 10% from a year ago, and about a third below 2019. Visitors are coming. They are just not staying as long. And that matches what I am seeing on the ground.
Four friends recently flew in for a condo board meeting, on four different flights, and every one of them told me their plane was half full or less. Now, four flights are not a tourism study, and I would never publish them as one. But empty seats are not imaginary either. Then we drive to Merriman's in Kapalua and the cars are stacked six deep for the valet, the place is packed, and Wailea and Whalers Village look busy too.
How can both be true? This is Maui's K-shaped economy in front of us, the same split I flagged in June. The upper arm, the high-end resorts and restaurants, is alive and well. The lower arm, the businesses that depend on volume and on the Lahaina visitor economy, is starving, and low rates are not filling the gap. Both things are true at once.
And from my real estate chair, that leaves one more question. If the high-end visitor is clearly here, where are the luxury home buyers? I am still looking for them.
Bill 88: Who Gets Through the Door?
Then there is Bill 88, now Ordinance 6008. We have covered the history enough that I will not walk you through it again. If you want the full seven-step version, read On a List Is Not Rezoned from August. The short version: Bill 88 built the containers, the new H-3 and H-4 hotel districts. It did not put the individual properties in them.
The first group of apartment-zoned condos, Resolutions 26-110 and 26-111, cleared the Council in July and went on to the Planning Commission. What I am watching now is the next wave: Resolutions 26-129 and 26-130. And this month it moved.
On Aug. 27, after closing two and a half days of testimony, the Housing and Land Use Committee voted 5-4 to adopt sea-level-rise exposure as the test for which properties in this wave can be recommended for hotel zoning, tying eligibility to how deeply a property sits inside the county's Sea Level Rise Exposure Area. If that sounds familiar, it should. In July's special report I wrote that the criteria for the next wave were already being signaled as affordability and sea-level-rise exposure. Now sea-level-rise exposure is the criterion, adopted by a single vote. Taken together, the four measures would move somewhere around 2,500 units, more than a third of the roughly 7,000 units affected by Bill 9, onto a path toward hotel zoning.
Here is why I keep hammering the language. If you own one of these condos, you may be hearing that your building is on the list. Maybe. But be precise:
- Being proposed is not being approved.
- Being approved for referral is not being rezoned.
- Being referred to the Planning Commission does not make your property H-3 or H-4 today.
Bill 88 opened a door. Now we are finding out who gets through it, and on what terms. If your building sits on the shoreline, read that 5-4 vote twice, because the test that lets some buildings in is the same test that could keep yours out. That is what I will be tracking through the next Council and Planning Commission meetings. Status is changing week to week, so verify your building against the current resolution, not a neighbor's Facebook post.
Are We Rebuilding Lahaina, or Just Rebuilding Houses?
This is the question underneath all of it. For three years we have measured recovery mostly through construction: permits issued, homes started, homes completed. That is understandable. We lost most of a town and you have to start somewhere. But a town is not just houses. It is where people work, eat, shop, send their kids to school, and pick up their mail.
And that last one is not a figure of speech. Families who have finally rebuilt are finding that the Postal Service now treats their rebuilt neighborhoods as new developments, which means centralized cluster mailboxes instead of the home delivery they had before the fire. On Sept. 2, Mayor Bissen wrote to the Postmaster General asking USPS to restore direct home delivery, arguing that returning families should not lose an essential service simply because they were forced to rebuild. Council Member Tamara Paltin says residents have already had mortgage documents and other mail sent back because carriers will not deliver to the house, and that the loss falls hardest on kūpuna and anyone who gets medication by mail. The County adds the practical trap: these rebuilt neighborhoods were never designed for cluster boxes, with no easements or common areas to site them, so people are told to use centralized boxes that may not even be permitted to exist. On top of that, USPS has proposed permanently closing the fire-damaged Lahaina Downtown Post Office on Papalaua Street, a move the Mayor, Rep. Jill Tokuda and Paltin all oppose.
This is the whole point in miniature. You can pass final inspection and still not be able to get your mortgage statement delivered to the door. A house you cannot receive mail at is a completed permit. It is not yet a working town.
Other families are still in temporary housing while the assistance winds down. About 1,137 households remain in interim housing across a half-dozen programs, and beginning Sept. 1, FEMA raised the minimum rent for households in Direct Housing from 25% to 50% of Maui's Fair Market Rent, part of the wind-down toward the program's February 2027 end. The clock is not just running on Bill 9. It is running on people.
And housing recovery is a bigger, messier category than any single completion number lets on. Take Kīlohana, the 167-unit modular project FEMA built in Lahaina for survivors. In late August, FEMA cleared the way to donate those units to Maui County at no cost, through the state, with the stated intent of turning them into permanent housing. That is genuinely good news. But the County's own recovery administrator was candid that the final location and configuration are not set, and that for now the plan is to use them in the interim while the larger multifamily projects get built. Real units, real people housed, and still a plan with a question mark where the word permanent is supposed to be. That is the whole theme of this edition in a single project: counted as housing, not yet settled as a home.
Meanwhile the commercial heart of Lahaina is nowhere near back. Rebuilding homes, however you count them, without rebuilding the places where people work does not rebuild a town. Before the fire, Lahaina was an ecosystem: people lived there, worked there, and visitors came, and businesses supported other businesses. You knew the guy at the hardware store and the woman behind the counter at the coffee shop. That is a town.
So three years on, maybe the question is not how many permits have been issued. Maybe it is this.
How much of Lahaina have we actually rebuilt?
The answer is not zero. There is real progress. Hundreds of families are rebuilding. Infrastructure is coming back. Front Street is open, and there are projects underway that give me reason to be optimistic. But we have reached the point where we have to distinguish between rebuilding buildings and rebuilding Lahaina. They are not the same thing.
A rebuilt town occupied by different people is not a recovery. It is a replacement. The only test that finally counts is whether the people who made Lahaina Lahaina are able to come home. Everything else is just construction.
From the greatest island on earth, this is Lahaina Lee saying aloha.
Have questions about how Bill 9 or Bill 88 affects a specific property? Reach out directly. I answer every message.
Lee Potts · Aloha Group Maui · Lee@AlohaPotts.com · AlohaGroupMaui.com
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many homes have actually been rebuilt in Lahaina?
As of the County's three-year update on Aug. 7, 2026, roughly 600 homes have been rebuilt and occupied, with about 400 more under construction. Read that carefully: it is a mixture of single-family homes and multifamily, or apartment, units, not 600 families back in rebuilt houses. Per the County's own dashboard breakdown in early August, of 577 completed homes, 313 were multifamily. Some of those are genuine fire rebuilds, like the 89-unit Kaiāulu o Kupuohi, which burned and was rebuilt. But 200 are a single pre-fire development, Kaiāulu O Kūkuʻia, which was never burned by the fire and is classified as a new build rather than a rebuild of homes lost on August 8. Strip those 200 out and the completed count is nearer 400 than 600. The plainer figures to watch are how many homes are finished and occupied, how many destroyed commercial buildings have reopened, and how many projects are physically under construction today.
Front Street reopened. Does that mean businesses are back?
Not yet. Front Street reopened to vehicular traffic on Aug. 1, 2026, from Pāpalaua to Shaw, and that is a genuine milestone. But zero of the commercial buildings destroyed on Front Street have been rebuilt. A reopened road, new railings and the interim ʻUlu o Lele marketplace are preconditions for commercial recovery, not commercial recovery itself.
What is happening with Bill 88 rezoning right now?
Bill 88 (Ordinance 6008) created the H-3 and H-4 hotel districts but rezoned no property. The first wave, Resolutions 26-110 and 26-111, advanced to the Planning Commission in July. The second wave, Resolutions 26-129 and 26-130, is in committee, and on Aug. 27 the committee voted 5-4 to base eligibility on sea-level-rise exposure. Being named in a resolution is not the same as being rezoned. Verify your building against the current version of the resolution.
My building is on a list. Is it rezoned?
No. Being proposed is not being approved, being approved for referral is not being rezoned, and being referred to the Planning Commission does not change your zoning today. Your existing apartment-district zoning, and Bill 9's phase-out clock, stay in effect until a separate rezoning ordinance actually takes effect. For the full step-by-step, see On a List Is Not Rezoned.
How is Maui tourism doing in 2026?
Split. In July, visitor arrivals and spending were both up year over year, but the average number of visitors on-island each day was down more than 10% from a year ago and about a third below 2019. Higher spenders on shorter stays lift revenue at premium properties without lifting the whole market. It is a K-shaped economy, and which side of the K a property sits on matters more than any headline number.
What is changing with FEMA housing assistance?
FEMA temporary housing assistance runs through Feb. 28, 2027. As of Sept. 1, 2026, the minimum rent for households still in Direct Housing rose from 25% to 50% of the HUD Fair Market Rent for Maui County. Families who cannot or do not wish to pay the new amount can appeal or must move out, which adds pressure at the same moment the rebuild is still incomplete.
Why are some rebuilt Lahaina homes not getting mail delivered?
Because the Postal Service is treating rebuilt neighborhoods as new developments, which under USPS policy get centralized cluster mailboxes rather than door delivery. On Sept. 2, 2026, Mayor Bissen wrote to the Postmaster General asking USPS to restore direct home delivery for returning families, and Council Member Tamara Paltin has said residents have had mortgage documents and other mail returned. The County notes these neighborhoods were not designed to site cluster boxes. Separately, USPS has proposed permanently closing the fire-damaged Lahaina Downtown Post Office, which local and federal officials oppose. A decision on the downtown station is expected within about 210 days.
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About Lahaina Lee & The Maui Real Estate Advisor Lahaina Lee is a licensed real estate broker on Maui and the publisher of the Maui Real Estate Advisor, a monthly report covering the Lahaina rebuild, short-term rental regulation, luxury and condo trends, and Maui's broader economy. Lee lost his own home at ʻĀina Nalu in the August 2023 fire. Contact: Lee@AlohaPotts.com · AlohaGroupMaui.com |
