When I first met @StarAdvertiser's Rob Perez in January, we talked about his ambitious goal: Use data no one else had looked at to uncover new findings about failures of a program meant to help low income Hawaiians reclaim their ancestral lands. Here’s what we’ve found. THREAD
Controversies and court cases had plagued the Hawaiian Homes program for years. Created by a federal law a century ago, there are only 10k current homesteaders, while the waitlist has grown to nearly 29k.
Our reporting uncovered previously unknown ways the program had fallen short. The overarching theme of it all was that low income Hawaiians were unable to reclaim their ancestral lands because of the way the program had been administered in recent decades.
The federal law that created the program made no mention of how rich Hawaiians had to be to receive a homestead lease. But because of a variety of factors, there’s a de facto barrier to entry: can you afford a $200k or $300k mortgage?
The state chose to focus on master-planned subdivisions in recent decades. Their rationale was that it would help produce more homes more quickly for a waitlist that was expanding at an alarming rate.
For those who could afford it, the homesteads could be a great deal. You’d pay roughly half what you would pay for a home off trust land. But, as the department soon found out, it simply wasn’t an option for lower income folks near the top of the waitlist.
That’s where the data came in. Using the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands internal databases, we were able to see what the effect of these practices were. propublica.org/article/draft-…
We found 60% of residential homestead leases awarded on Oahu in the past 25 years went to Census tracts with median household incomes greater than $75,000.
The department would often have to go thousands deep on its waitlist to find people willing and able to accept a lease and the mortgage that came with it.
Meanwhile, we found more than 2k people who had died on the waitlist without ever receiving a homestead lease. That’s almost certainly an undercount because the department only records the death of a waitlister when they receive a death certificate, usually from a family member.
And the initial motivation of the subdivision strategy -- to build more homes to move people off the waitlist most quickly -- hasn’t worked out either.
It would take the department an additional 182 years to provide everyone on the waitlist with a residential lot, based on its rate of production in the past 25 years. 
And in recent years, following budget constraints, the department has struggled to produce homesteads. In three of the past five years, awards actually fell into the single digits.
The department says the subdivision model was meant to appease the top choice of waitlisters: single-family homes. And it says it’s working more affordable options into its offerings. The main constraint: funding.
Read more about how we analyzed the department’s data to uncover these findings here. propublica.org/article/how-we…
This project was part of @ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network and is a great example of the amazing work we can do with the local newsrooms. Special thanks to Rob for his incredible work on this project and for being a great collaborator & @mjmishak for his edits
Stay tuned folks, plenty more to come!
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