A single condo tower in Ala Moana quietly sparked a housing chain reaction across Oʻahu, freeing up hundreds of homes as residents shuffled from one place to another. That is the headline finding of a new study from UHERO, which tracked household address histories to see how one new building reshaped the island’s housing market from the top down.
Researchers focused on The Central, a 43-story, 512-unit mixed-income high-rise completed in 2021. Using address-level microdata, they followed who moved into the building, where those households came from, and who filled the homes they left behind. The team identified 180 specific addresses that were vacated because people moved into The Central and, after scaling for data coverage, estimated that the project ultimately created more than 500 local vacancies over the three years after construction. The authors dub these knock-on effects “movement chains,” according to UHERO.
How the ripple worked
The units that opened up were not luxury condos mirroring The Central. They were mostly single-family homes with three or more bedrooms, and on average they were about 40% less expensive per square foot than the new units in the tower. Most of the households that moved stayed on Oʻahu, so the new vacancies spread through existing neighborhoods instead of being driven by a big influx of newcomers, as reported by UH News.
Co-author and UH economist Justin Tyndall said the study shows why policymakers should not fixate only on the price tags of new projects when deciding what to approve. “Production of all types of housing can contribute to greater affordability across all segments of the market,” he said, as quoted in UH News.
Market-rate versus income-restricted
The analysis also compared what happens when new homes are market-rate versus income-restricted. Market-rate units tended to create more total vacancies up and down the ladder, while income-restricted units produced fewer secondary vacancies that were more tightly clustered in lower-priced segments. That distinction matters for inclusionary zoning debates, because it shapes where affordability gains actually show up in the market, according to a working paper from UHERO.
Local policy context
The Central moved forward under the state’s expedited 201H approval program, which allows the Hawaii Housing Finance and Development Corporation to advance projects that include affordable units and, in some cases, sidestep certain county rules. The legal framework for that streamlined process is laid out in Chapter 201H of the Hawaii Revised Statutes; see Justia for the statutory details…