Fire-affected households continue to face a housing crisis: Fire-impacted households typically pay less rent than they did before the wildfires for the same number of bedrooms or fewer. Excluding fully subsidized units, renters typically face more than a third higher rental costs for smaller or comparably sized housing.

About half of fire-impacted households now pay less rent than before the fires. Rental assistance has buffered at least some of the effects of income losses on people’s livelihoods.

For people who don’t receive full rental assistance, more than 40% are now paying higher rents than before the wildfires, even though they are on lower or similar incomes. The looming end of rental assistance risks further exacerbating the housing affordability crisis on Maui.

Housing stability has declined sharply in the aftermath of the fires. The proportion of fire-affected households living with family/friends or unhoused remains substantially higher than before the wildfires.

People have had to move between temporary housing less often since August 2024, with more than half of respondents having now lived at their current address for a year or longer. But further displacement remains a threat. About a third of respondents remain in temporary housing. Of those, about half% are staying with friends and family, are unhoused, or are living in temporary units without assistance.

Nearly 90% of residents from the Lahaina burn area had to leave their homes and almost half of them also remain displaced from West Maui.

Displacement has not only affected residents of West Maui and Kula but also those from other parts of the island. Nearly 40% of those who worked or owned businesses in West Maui or Kula, but lived elsewhere, have been displaced from their homes since the disaster and remain displaced.

At least 1 in 10 of the surveyed households live in crowded conditions.

Most people intend to stay or return to West Maui. Almost 1 in 5 households living outside of West Maui plan to move back within the next year. But these expectations may not align with the multi-year timeline to rebuild permanent housing or the availability of temporary housing units in the area.