In recent weeks, Honolulu planners and lawmakers have debated how to loosen development rules in apartment and mixed-use districts to address the city’s housing shortage. The urgency is real: rents remain high, homeownership feels increasingly out of reach and new housing is slow to arrive.
This moment feels familiar: Honolulu has repeatedly moved quickly on housing reform, only to see those efforts delayed, narrowed or undone in court. Not because housing isn’t needed, but because the city keeps tripping over the same procedural mistakes.
If Honolulu wants housing reform that actually lasts, it needs to confront an uncomfortable truth: many of the city’s housing failures are not about the goals it chooses, but about how those goals are implemented. This is not an ideological critique. It is an institutional one…