A Year After a Devastating Fire, Lahaina Is Ready to Rebuild. But How?

Across nine generations, Archie Kalepa’s family has seen the waterfront in Lahaina, a town on the island of Maui, undergo repeated transformation.

Once the home of the Hawaiian Kingdom’s royalty, Lahaina’s shores over the centuries became a stop for whalers plundering the seas, for missionaries spreading the Christian gospel, for plantation owners who opened canneries to prepare their bounty of pineapples for export. More recently, tourists packed high-end galleries and shoreline restaurants that offered sunset meals of ahi tuna and taro.

Relics of each of those layers of history were turned to ash a year ago, when an Aug. 8 inferno roared through Lahaina, killing at least 102 people. Now, as the task of rebuilding begins, Kalepa, a community leader who has organized fire-recovery efforts, is siding with many of those who see a chance to prioritize the town’s deeper history over the economic interests that have dominated for decades.

That would mean doing what for many has seemed unthinkable until now: transforming the famous waterfront by peeling back history, removing some of the gift shops, restaurants and beachwear boutiques that, before the fire, perched above the shoreline.

“All this has got to go,” Kalepa said as he looked over the building foundations, still jutting up from the beach and ocean.

Faced with a breadth of devastation and a depth of history unlike any other modern American community razed by wildfire, officials over the past year have strained to rehouse thousands of people, stabilize livelihoods and remove hundreds of millions of pounds of debris so that many lots sit like blank slates, topped with layers of fresh gravel.

Now, they are turning to the thornier question of what rebuilding should look like. On the table are proposals to revamp neighborhoods, move thousands of people to new areas, pull properties along the shoreline back from rising sea levels and restore former wetlands. At the heart of the debate is a fundamental question: In a community shaped by so many different eras of history, which history should guide the future?

Perhaps nowhere is the discussion more fraught than along the city’s famed Front Street. Long ago, it was where King Kamehameha I built a palace and established a capital, an area more recently populated by shops and restaurants.

In rebuilding, some are calling for a greater emphasis on the Indigenous past by restoring Hawaiian street names and turning the heart of Front Street into a walking boulevard. Famed seafood restaurant Kimo’s, a modern landmark, would be gone or relocated.

But in other corners, there is deep wariness to a rollback from the waterfront. Kaleo Schneider and her family own a Front Street building along the water that before the fire housed several businesses, including Honolulu Cookie Co. and a pineapple-themed gift shop. The property has been in the family for more than 110 years.

Schneider, a Native Hawaiian who lives on the island of Oahu, said her family’s ownership of the building dated back to her great-grandparents. Many of the property owners along Front Street have similar ties to the area, she said, and she is adamant that they are an integral part of the community’s history.

“I’ve heard discussion about moving Lahaina. But then it’s not Lahaina, is it?” Schneider said. “Lahaina is on the water. The charm is on the water.”

Over the years, there have been other efforts to restore more of Lahaina’s native history, including the buildings from the Hawaiian Kingdom, particularly on the former inland island of Moku’ula, where King Kamehameha III had a private residence in the middle of a freshwater fish pond.

After the rise of plantations and their increasing demand for water, the fish pond turned into a stagnant swamp, and in the early 1900s, Lahaina businesspeople initiated a project to fill it and turn it into a baseball park, a facility that has since been abandoned, according to a book about the site written by late anthropologist P. Christiaan Klieger.

Such burials of native history have led Lahaina to lose its true identity, said Ke’eaumoku Kapu, who led the neighboring Na ‘Aikane o Maui Cultural and Research Center, which was destroyed in the fire. He said that proposals to restore Moku’ula and alter street names, along with further emphasis on the island’s cultural history, could help restore some of that identity.

“It’s a good opportunity right now to do things right,” he said.

To some residents, he said, even the city’s famed banyan tree, charred by the fire, may need to go. Although many support keeping the tree as a symbol of the community’s resilience and hope, Kapu said it is also a remnant of the island’s colonial past.

Stevan Walden, another resident, is looking to rebuild his home next to the Moku’ula property. He would welcome the historical restoration, he said, if the project was well implemented and maintained. But he worries that it could once again fall into neglect and become a breeding ground for mosquitoes at a time when health officials have been warning about cases of dengue fever.

He also fears that plans to establish the property next door as part of a “cultural corridor” could lead to a broader effort to draw in other properties.

Gov. Josh Green said officials plan to announce in the coming days that the state and county are ready to approve plans to make the Moku’ula property available for restoration.

“It has priority for the people of Lahaina, and it has priority for me,” Green said in an interview. He said most of the restoration would occur on state and county land, but added that he would later look at property trades for possible further expansion.

There is no doubt that Lahaina will undergo change, Green said. Some of the neighborhoods burned were too dense, he said, with unpermitted second or third homes added on, and streets that were so crowded with vehicles that it hampered escape efforts.

“There are gigantic rebuilding questions,” he said.

Green said up to one-third of Lahaina residents may have to rebuild somewhere other than where they previously lived. State and school district officials are hoping to make an additional 1,000 acres of publicly owned land on the hillside above town available to relocating property owners, he said.

On the contentious question of whether the businesses on the Front Street waterfront will be allowed to return, Green said that will be up to the Lahaina community to decide. It may be too important for the community’s recovery, psychologically, to do anything other than rebuild the town as it previously was, he said. But he added that he would support at least some changes in the face of rising sea levels.

“From a common-sense standpoint, we should pull back just a little bit because what we build there is likely to be vulnerable,” he said.

In recent months, the county has begun hosting meetings for residents and business owners to talk about their neighborhoods and the rebuilding process. The county has said it plans to produce a long-term recovery plan by the end of the year. Mayor Richard Bissen of Maui County declined interview requests about the plans.

Angus McKelvey, a state senator who represents a part of Maui that includes Lahaina, said people have been preoccupied by issues of housing and jobs, as well as the lingering trauma from the tragedy, and the more fundamental issue of what Lahaina ought to look like has taken a back seat. “It’s a long slog,” he said. “That’s why this conversation should have been happening sooner.”

McKelvey said it was important to recognize not only the Indigenous past, but the other overlapping eras of Lahaina’s rich history — the time of the whalers, the missionaries, the sugar cane and pineapple plantations, and the immigrant labor force they attracted.

“The way I look at it is, if you look at Lahaina from the mountain to the ocean, you could basically have a walk through time,” he said.

Maui has worked in recent years to modernize its shoreline management rules to handle effects of climate change and to better protect delicate coastal ecosystems. Many old structures would not meet those codes if they were constructed today, especially in places such as Front Street.

Local officials have provided minimal guidance on what the requirements will be for rebuilding along the shoreline. A statement from the county said each parcel “is a special case.”

That uncertainty has left many property owners waiting for answers. At the Lahaina Jodo Mission, a Buddhist mission founded in 1912 whose key buildings were destroyed in the fire, Yayoi Hara, the daughter of the minister, said her family was still trying to determine how to proceed.

The mission is looking to rebuild not only its burned out temple and three-story pagoda, but a series of residences that were steps away from the shore. With part of their property along the beach already confronted with erosion in the past, Hara said, mission leaders are prepared to lead the community by example, and adjust their waterfront to better prepare for the future.

But the county’s message that each property will be handled on a case-by-case basis has left them worried about whether the rebuilding will be fair, she said, and they are still looking for clarity after a year of waiting.

“We understand that there are hard decisions that need to be made,” Hara said. “And the longer you prolong the decisions to be made or to even have the conversation, the more angry people are going to be.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .