Monster homes and the density we refuse to build.

In March 2022, the City issued a building permit for a single-family dwelling on Hanai Loop in Kamehameha Heights. As neighbors and lawmakers later documented, the plans described fourteen bedrooms and nine bathrooms, where six bathrooms were permitted, with walls set close to the property line and parking plainly inadequate for the number of people the structure was designed to hold.¹

A joint inquiry from my predecessor in this seat and Councilmember Tyler Dos Santos-Tam prompted the Department of Planning and Permitting to re-examine its file.² On review, the department determined that the floor-area ratio had been misstated,³ and that the project exceeded limits on bathrooms, side yards, and parking as well.⁴ The permit was revoked — the fourth revocation under the monster homes ordinance. The department acknowledged that the project had passed through its review process undetected.⁵ The plans had been certified by a private third-party reviewer before the City examined them closely.⁶

I recount this not to relitigate a single address, but because the sequence is instructive. The safeguards functioned only after two elected officials intervened. A regulatory system that depends on the attention of legislators is not a regulatory system. It is a series of exceptions.

I want to set out two propositions that are often treated as opposed, and which I believe are inseparable.

The first is that Oʻahu requires greater density in its urban core. Rail is arriving in town. Water and sewer capacity exist here in a way they do not on the leeward coast or the North Shore. Every housing unit we decline to build in the urban core is a unit built instead on agricultural land, or built informally without inspection, or not built at all — and the last of these appears eventually in our schools and our parks as families without housing.

The second is that monster homes are a genuine harm, and those who profit from them should not. The objection is not to size. It is to misrepresentation. A monster home is a structure permitted as one thing and operated as another: a dozen or more rooms let out without a second means of egress, without fire separation, without parking, and without legal protection for the tenants inside, who are frequently immigrant families and low-wage workers paying market rent for a dwelling that does not legally exist.

These propositions are connected, and the connection is the heart of the matter. Monster homes are the form density takes when lawful density is unavailable. The demand for multiple households on a small lot is a function of our land prices and will not diminish. When the urban core is zoned for detached single-family dwellings, and when a permit for a genuine apartment building takes a year to obtain, one avenue remains open: the ministerial single-family permit that the department is obliged to approve when the paperwork appears in order. Capital responds rationally to the incentives we establish. We have established the wrong ones, and we have produced the least desirable version of the thing we sought to prevent.

The missing middle

There is a name for what Oʻahu does not build.

In 2010 the architect Daniel Parolek coined the term missing middle housing to describe the range of building types that sit between a detached single-family house and a mid-rise apartment block: duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes, courtyard apartments, bungalow courts, townhouses, live-work units. House-scale buildings holding multiple homes, in a walkable neighborhood.⁷ They are called missing because they have been effectively illegal to build in almost every corner of almost every American city since the mid-1940s.⁸

The mechanism is not a single prohibition. It is an accumulation. Parolek describes zoning that permits single-family homes and perhaps a duplex, then jumps straight to buildings of fifty-five feet with nothing permitted in between; setbacks and parking minimums that make the middle types physically impossible even where they are nominally allowed. He cites one city where a sixty-foot lot carried a twenty-five-foot side setback, leaving a ten-foot strip to build in.⁹ Researchers at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies identify a second barrier: a financing system built to serve either single-family homes or large multifamily projects, which leaves middle-scale buildings in a void where small builders cannot readily raise capital.¹⁰

I would ask anyone skeptical of density to consider what they actually admire. The cities people save to visit — Paris, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, the low-rise districts of Tokyo — are built overwhelmingly at four to seven storeys, in continuous street walls, with shops at the ground floor and homes above. That is not a high-rise form, and it is not a suburban one. It is the middle. It produces the streets people photograph and the neighborhoods they describe as feeling alive.

We have that form here already, built before the code forbade it. The older walk-ups of Kalihi and Pālama, the plantation-era cottages set several to a parcel, the two-storey buildings with a store below and rooms above — these were ordinary construction within living memory. Most of them could not be built today on the lots they occupy.

Why we drive everywhere

The reason carries an unlikely name.

In 1926 the Supreme Court decided Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty, upholding the zoning ordinance of a farming village east of Cleveland as a valid exercise of the police power.¹¹ The Euclid ordinance sorted land into districts by class of use — residential, commercial, industrial — and the Court found the scheme neither arbitrary nor unreasonable.¹² The decision gave American zoning its constitutional footing, and it gave the dominant model its name. Euclidean zoning means zoning by the separation of uses. The village supplied the pun, and the pun stuck.

The alternative — non-Euclidean zoning, most often a form-based code — regulates what a building does to the street: its height, its frontage, how it meets the sidewalk. It leaves what happens inside comparatively open. A Euclidean code asks what a building is for. A form-based code asks what it does to the place around it.

Separation of uses has a consequence that is simple to state and difficult to undo. If homes sit in one district, shops in a second, and workplaces in a third, then every ordinary errand crosses a district boundary. Walking is not defeated by distance. It is defeated by law — by a code that has placed the milk a zoning district away from the refrigerator. Add a minimum parking requirement to every use and each destination is pushed further from the next by its own asphalt. Car dependency is not a preference our households discovered. It is the built result of a rule we adopted.

Hawaiʻi then layered a second system on the first. Act 187 of 1961 created the only statewide land use classification in the country, sorting every parcel in the State into urban, rural, agricultural, or conservation districts.¹³ It was enacted against real abuses — scattered subdivision, the conversion of prime agricultural land, short-term gain at long-term public cost.¹⁴ The counties zone within the urban district, and on Oʻahu that instrument is the Land Use Ordinance.

Which brings me to the stores.

Walk residential Kalihi and you will still pass small groceries wedged between houses. Under the Land Use Ordinance those are legal nonconforming uses: lawfully built, no longer permitted.¹⁵ The category is a one-way door. A nonconforming use abandoned for twelve months cannot be resumed, and a structure destroyed beyond roughly half its value generally cannot be rebuilt to the old use.¹⁶ The same pattern ran through the country. Existing corner stores were grandfathered, and when one closed — the owner retired, or died — no one could lawfully open another in that spot.¹⁷

The inventory of neighborhood commerce can therefore only shrink. Every mom-and-pop store we still have is a survivor of a rule that forbids its replacement. We did not lose them to the big-box store alone. We made their successors illegal, and then found it remarkable that our kūpuna must be driven somewhere to buy rice.

Worth arguing about: small commerce in residential Kalihi

Let me put a proposal on the table without pretending it is finished.

Allow small-scale commercial use by right in residential districts, bounded carefully: a hard floor-area cap in the range of 1,500 square feet, corner lots first, no drive-throughs, no formula retail, limits on hours and delivery windows — and no minimum parking requirement, since the parking requirement is what killed the form to begin with. A store you can walk to does not need a lot you have to drive to.

Alongside it, legalize the missing middle where the infrastructure already exists: two to four homes on a residential lot within walking distance of transit, at house scale, reviewed on form rather than on use.

The objections deserve a hearing, because they are not foolish. Neighbors will raise traffic and parking spillover, and on our narrow streets that is a serious question. There is a speculation risk: legalize commerce on corner lots and corner lots get bid up. And legalization builds nothing by itself — a right to build is not a building, particularly given the financing gap that middle-scale projects already face.

What I would say in reply is that we are already living with the alternative, and it is not neutral. The present rule has produced a district where a child cannot walk to buy anything, where every household needs a car it may not be able to afford, and where the only lawful way to add homes to a residential lot is to pretend that fourteen bedrooms are one house.

Enforcement capacity

The record on enforcement deserves a candid accounting.

The 2019 audit by the Office of the City Auditor was severe. It found that the department was not organized to identify at-risk properties and relied largely on complaints raised after construction had begun; that permitting, inspection, and enforcement functions operated separately from one another; that the department’s permit data system was, after two decades of use, difficult to the point of impracticality; and that community concerns received less attention than those raised by elected representatives, which were resolved more quickly.¹⁸

The 2025 follow-up audit found meaningful improvement. Seven recommendations were completed, two resolved, five remained in process, and one was dropped, and the department now identifies and halts suspect projects during review rather than after framing.¹⁹ That progress is real and should be acknowledged. But the practice of prioritizing complaints received through the Mayor’s office persisted six years after it was first identified.²⁰ Communities that lack ready access to that channel are entitled to notice the difference.

The penalty structure warrants similar candor. For many years, the civil penalty for an illegal structure was $250 per day, subject to a $2,000 cap.²¹ Councilmember Dos Santos-Tam has observed that the returns on these projects considerably exceed that ceiling,²¹ and testimony before the Council estimated that a single illegal building could generate $10,000 per month in room rent.²² A penalty of that magnitude does not deter conduct. It is absorbed as a cost of doing business.

The Council has acted. Bill 44, adopted unanimously in February 2024, attaches substantial consequences to a conviction for falsifying a permit application: a two-year moratorium on permit applications, increased permit and plan-review fees, a temporary certificate of occupancy permitting continued inspection, and civil fines of up to $3,000 together with $3,000 for each day a violation continues.²³ The measure also forecloses the use of a third party to evade these penalties.²¹ The department separately sought, through Bill 52, a substantial increase in the underlying fines.²¹

Two limitations should be understood. Bill 44’s county penalties are triggered only by a criminal conviction for unsworn falsification under state law^{23 24} — a prosecutorial decision rather than an administrative one. And the demolition provision that many in the community sought was removed before passage.²³

Enforcement authority, properly understood, is not principally a matter of higher fine ceilings. It is inspectors and their training. It is data systems that permit pattern recognition. It is accountability for the third-party professionals who certify these plans. And it is the capacity to address repeat participants rather than individual structures one at a time.

Where state authority applies

The counties write the zoning code. The State writes the licensing law, the enabling authority for civil penalties, the landlord-tenant code, and the appropriations. Five measures follow from that division of responsibility.

Professional licensing consequences. Where a licensed architect, engineer, contractor, or third-party plan reviewer certifies calculations known to be false, that should be grounds for suspension or revocation before the Professional and Vocational Licensing Division at DCCA. A licensing board need not await a criminal conviction, and should not.

Disgorgement in place of daily fines. Rent collected from a dwelling unit that was never lawfully created should not be retained. The remedy should reach the revenue. The Residential Landlord-Tenant Code should be amended in the same measure so that tenants — who bear no responsibility for the violation — are not displaced as a consequence of their landlord’s conduct.

Infrastructure paired with upzoning. I will support increased density in Kalihi. I will not support it as an unfunded obligation placed on infrastructure built for a smaller city. Zoning capacity and infrastructure capacity must be authorized together.

A public permit record. Every application, every floor-area-ratio calculation, and the reviewer of record for each, published in machine-readable form. The Hanai Loop violations were identified because two people examined a file. That capacity should be general rather than exceptional.

A right of first refusal for community land trusts and housing cooperatives on multi-unit properties within transit zones, so that the density we authorize serves residents durably rather than passing directly into speculative ownership.

Kalihi has carried a considerable share of this island’s infrastructure and its burdens — the freeway, the industrial corridor, the correctional facility, the traffic. We do not ask to be exempted from growth; this district was built by it. We ask that growth be lawful, inspected, safe for those who live within it, and held as close to home as we can arrange.