Property owners profiting as Maui residents are forced from their homes

Honolulu Civil Beat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on Hawaii. That’s one of the lessons I learned from this crisis.” State officials pointed to a sharp drop in eviction cases filed in court since the fire as evidence that the governor’s order is “doing what it was designed to do: stop unlawful evictions and keep families and survivors housed.” But tenants’ rights groups and lawyers said court cases, the only public paper trail of evictions, don’t show the complete picture. In February, six months after the fire, FEMA announced that it would reject properties if it learned tenants had been illegally forced out “so landlords could gain higher rents from the FEMA program.” Officials told Civil Beat and ProPublica that FEMA has found fewer than 10 cases in which a landlord wrongfully ended a lease in order to participate in the housing program. Those complaints and subsequent investigations, researchers wrote, indicate that the “behavior of some landlords may have changed leading to secondary displacement or increased costs for some renter households outside of the burn area.” One landlord, however, said it wasn’t until she was approached by a property management company working for FEMA that she decided to house wildfire survivors. “We have the emergency proclamation, but it doesn’t prevent anyone from evicting tenants and raising rent,” said Anne Barber, a Maui real estate broker who works with Garcia in her property management firm.