Hurricane Karina plots its course, while a third of fire-affected households in Maui still don't have permanent housing.
Hurricane Karina strengthened Monday into a powerful Category 4 storm in the Pacific Ocean, alongside Tropical Storm Lowell expected to reach hurricane strength by Wednesday.
While still very uncertain, the potential for Lowell and Karina to reach the vicinity of the state by Labor Day weekend is increasing, according to the National Weather Service area forecast discussion for Hawaii.
This latest news of extreme weather plaguing the isaldn comes as new research from the University of Hawai’i Economic Research Organization (UHERO) shows that three years after the devastating wildfires in Maui, HI, a third of affected households are still without permanent housing.
And just days after the three-year anniversary of the fires, Hawai’i dealt with additional flooding and damage from Tropical Storm Lala—a grim reminder that disaster is often not far over the horizon for area residents.
Daniela Bond-Smith, a research economist at UHERO and one of the report's authors, has spent the past two years tracking the local recovery from the 2023 fires. She says her data tells a mixed story.
"It's a very uneven recovery. We have households, families who have been able to find a footing and move on with their lives," Bond-Smith says. "But for a lot of people at the same time, that's not the case."
An aerial view of the still-recovering Lahaina neighborhood and the historic banyan tree, which was planted in 1873 and burned in the 2023 wildfire. (Mario Tama/Getty Images) Understanding the scope of the damage
In August 2023, a series of devastating wildfires ripped through Maui. The neighborhood of Lahaina, one of Hawaii’s most important cultural centers, took the worst of it—there were over 100 confirmed deaths, thousands of destroyed homes, and billions in damages.
The recovery from one of the deadliest fires in American history has been slow and complicated. Beyond the immense physical toll of removing debris and rebuilding structures, residents had to deal with the psychological trauma of the event, compounded by a drawn-out financial compensation process.
In the immediate aftermath, there was also a data gap, which meant uncertainty about how the recovery was faring.
"We realized pretty quickly that there was a big gap in data and access to information, because there was very little available," says Bond-Smith. "Public government data wasn't shared. FEMA data wasn't shared, and we were literally asking questions like, 'Where are people?' 'How many people are in temporary housing?'"
UHERO put together a short survey to minimize the burden on participants and has been collecting data on the recovery each year since.
The recovery as it stands today
According to UHERO's research, about two-thirds of fire-affected households now live in permanent housing, up from just over half of households the year before.
Some of the growth comes from families returning to or rebuilding their pre-fire homes—that share has climbed from 36% to 45% over the past year and a half. The share in a brand-new permanent home, by contrast, has stayed roughly flat, a reflection of how slowly reconstruction is moving: As of July 2026, 315 homes were still under construction in the fire-affected areas, according to Maui County's own tracking.
In addition, those in temporary arrangements are experiencing more stability: The share of respondents at the same address for more than a year has tripled.
But no matter how you look at it, there has been a stark change in homeownership in Maui: 54% of respondents were homeowners before the fires, and that number is down to 42.4% today. More respondents have become renters, and an increased percentage are living with family or friends or are unhoused (5.3%, up from 3.9% before the fires).
Road crews work to clear debris to restore road access for residents in Pahala, Hawaii, on Aug. 18, 2026 after Hurricane Lala. (Jill K. Briggs / AFP via Getty Images) What stands in the way of permanence?
Beyond specific red tape, Bond-Smith points to challenges that were already baked into Maui's economy and geography long before the fires. The island's tourism-dependent job market still hasn't recovered, poverty has risen since the disaster, and even where housing exists, it isn't always somewhere people can actually get to.
"You can't necessarily live in Central Maui and work in West Maui," she says. "It is not practical, at least not in the medium and longer term."
On top of those broader pressures, more specific obstacles are also standing in the way, experts say—among them permitting delays and insurance shortfalls.
David Gilliland, founder of local non-profit The Paulele Hale Association, says that of the 2,746 housing units lost in Maui County, only 25% of replacement homes had permits issued to rebuild. Another 546 remain "in permitting."
"The County has significantly shortened its expedited permit-review time, which is encouraging," Gilliland says. "But three years into the recovery, there is still a considerable distance between having a plan to rebuild and getting a family back into a finished home."
Insurance poses another issue, Gilliland says.
"When replacement-cost assumptions haven't kept pace with Maui's actual labor and material costs, families can face six-figure funding gaps," he says. "For some owners, particularly those already carrying mortgages, that can ultimately make selling the property more realistic than rebuilding."
It all comes back to supply
Permitting, insurance, dwindling aid—these all trace back to one root problem: supply. Maui's housing market was already tight and expensive before the fires, and the disaster destroyed stock in one of the island's more affordable areas.
"The fires destroyed part of that housing stock in an area of Maui that was relatively affordable compared to others," Bond-Smith says. "The general tightness of the market, ultimately driven by limited supply, is obviously something that's kind of hard to fix in the short term."
And the safety net that's helped families hold on while that supply problem plays out is thinning. The UHERO report says that financial assistance is the most frequently reported need, affecting about 29% of fire-affected people in 2026—down from 32% a year earlier, but still the top unmet need on the island. FEMA assistance, community organization resources, and even help from family and friends are all falling year over year.
And should another disaster strike—as Tropical Storm Lala did just days after the fires' anniversary—that same web of assistance, already thinning, may not be there to catch people a second time.