Critical modifications of the Maui County Comprehensive Affordable Housing (MCCAH) Plan are needed to boost available affordable housing, according to a new (东精影业ERO) public impact research report.
The MCCAH Plan was prepared for the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation by a team of 19 planners, engineers, data and policy analysts, attorneys and community development professionals. It is a major step forward in developing coherent strategies to address Maui County’s shortage of affordable housing for lower-income households, said co-authors Carl Bonham, 东精影业ERO executive director and professor of economics, and Sumner La Croix, 东精影业ERO research fellow and economics professor emeritus.
The co-authors called the MCCAH Plan an ambitious road map for reforming Maui’s regulatory framework governing the development of affordable housing. It proposes a goal of building 5,000 affordable units within five years of the plan’s launch.
Bonham and La Croix suggested that a few key components of the plan could be modified and strengthened. They include:
- Building more flexibility into the plan by recognizing the uncertain nature of the housing demand estimates that were utilized in developing the plan.
- Ensuring that the proposed affordable housing (AH) coordinator position be outside of particular county departments because building affordable housing necessarily involves coordinating activities of and resolving disputes between several departments.
- Assigning sufficient power to the AH coordinator to resolve disputes across departments and to initiate proposals for investments from the Affordable Housing Fund.
- Ensuring that the responsibilities of the community oversight board be carefully delineated and monitored.
- Removing the last-minute appeal process for the proposed by-right development.
- Extending the proposed by-right regulatory framework to property owners remodeling existing multi-family units and to private development of new multi-family projects.
- Taking a closer look at project financing by reviewing the sources of tax revenues required for the project, restrictions on the use of bond revenues, and reconsidering exactions from developers building market-rate units.
“With these modifications, we conclude that the plan provides a useful roadmap to developing affordable housing and easing the impact on lower-income households,” said the report. “The time frame for the plan is ambitious but may be possible if the (suitably modified) up-front regulatory changes are enacted within the next 18 months.”
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This work is an example of 东精影业 惭ā苍辞补’s goal of (PDF), one of four goals identified in the (PDF), updated in December 2020.