Maui wildfire victims fear land grab may threaten Hawaiian culture
By Andrew Hay and Liliana Salgado
KAANAPALI, Hawaii (Reuters) — Deborah Loeffler felt she couldn't lose much more after a wildfire destroyed the home in Maui, where five generations of her family have lived, and a son died the same day on the U.S. mainland.
Grieving and overwhelmed, Loeffler was soon beset by emails with unsolicited proposals she sell the Lahaina beachfront plot in Maui where her grandfather built their teal-green wooden home in the 1940s.
«It felt like we had vultures preying on us,» said Loeffler, 69, a retired flight attendant, sitting in the brown-carpeted hotel room in Maui to which she was evacuated, an untouched container of cooked powdered egg and cold potato by her bedside.
Her experience will be familiar to people in places such as Paradise, California or northern New Mexico, where buyers moved in to try to obtain distressed property after blazes in 2018 and 2022.
Loeffler fears a land grab on Maui would mean the loss of Hawaiian culture.
In Hawaii, the fire exacerbated a chronic shortage of affordable housing, potentially accelerating a drain of multi-generational families from the U.S. state looking for places they can afford to live. The population of Native Hawaiians in the state dropped below the number living on the U.S. mainland over the last decade, according to U.S. Census data.
Before Lahaina was destroyed by the most deadly U.S. wildfire in a century, its average home price was $1.1 million, three times the U.S. national average, according to the real estate site Zillow.
In Maui County, where around 75% the population is Asian, Hispanic, Native Hawaiian or of mixed race, the median household income is $88,000, just 24% above the U.S. average, according to census reports.
Affordabl
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