A market driven housing shortage?
When housing in Hawaii is talked about it's usually presented in simple terms. We have high prices because we don't build enough housing. And we don't build enough housing because of governmental regulation, particularly zoning.
But while much ink has been spilled on our housing shortage, its link to restrictive zoning is usually made by equivocating production with zoned capacity. It's concluded that developers can't build enough, because they aren't.
We wanted to make the link explicit, so we took a look at how many homes we could be built under Honolulu's existing zoning.
The results don't jibe with the narrative. Honolulu, without changing a whit of zoning, could build 72k-173k more units.

A lot of this housing is exactly the sort of low-cost missing middle housing we need. Tens of thousands of lots have been eligible to be redeveloped to duplexes since at least the 1980's. Tens of thousands more could support an ADU. Hundreds of lots in apartment zone districts sit vacant or under utilized.
Now a lot of this construction would take some time to get going. And not all of it is ever likely to get built, if for no other reason than that not everyone wants an ADU. But most of those options have been legal for decades. Meaning that if developers were going to start building the legal by right, "missing middle" duplexes they probably would have.
What's more, a lot of capacity is already fully approved and just waiting for developers to build it. For instance, between active projects and vacant (but already zoned) lots Honolulu has over around 30k units of approved housing.
If developers just finished the projects they've already started, Honolulu would build 115% of the housing we need. Yet they plan on building less than half of what Honolulu needs over the next decade.
Yet despite that fact, we keep focusing on increasing the amount of zoning.
Huge amounts of political capital have been spent increasing the amount of available zoning. The fight to double ADU capacity via SB3202 was unusually heated. It was also a bit like tripling the zoning for computer-chip manufacturing plants in Hawaii. No one is building either of them here.
As surprising as our estimate may be, we didn't even bother include the approved TOD rezoning in it. TOD makes over 20,000 acres eligible for dense apartment housing on O'ahu alone. Extrapolating from a state report on TOD eligibility, we can expect at least 380,000 more units of housing with zoning approval. Much of the requite zoning changes are already approved.
It’s not like upzoning is a bad thing. But if upzoning isn’t leading to an increased rate of housing production, what are we doing it for?
Our problem isn't that zoning prevents us from building housing. It's that we aren't building housing. That's a shift in focus policy makers need to call out.
Why aren't developers building enough housing? Well, you can read the discussion paper if you're curious.