What Hawaii law actually offers today

One provision, and it was not designed for this. HRS § 514B-47, “Removal from provisions of this chapter”:

• Eighty per cent of the units plus every lienholder may remove the property from condominium status by recorded instrument. Unanimous lienholder consent is the binding constraint — in a building where most units carry a mortgage, it means every mortgagee holds a veto.
• Alternatively, where “substantial damage or destruction has not been rebuilt, repaired, or restored within a reasonable time,” a unit owner or lienor may petition for partition and court-ordered sale.
• All unit owners together may remove the property by recorded instrument with all lienholders’ consent, converting ownership to tenancy in common.

Read those against the problem. The first requires a level of lender coordination that does not organise itself. The second requires a casualty — it is available to a building that burned or collapsed, not to one that is merely obsolete and facing a six-figure per-unit assessment.

A Hawaii building that should stop existing has no orderly way to decide that.

Why the argument has force right now

Three live situations point at the same hole from different directions.

Lahaina. Three years after the 2023 fire, one 189-unit association is reported to have insurance covering about a fifth of a rebuild estimated above $200 million, with no government programme available to condominium owners. Assessment or removal are the only levers, and on those numbers assessment is not a real option.

Kīhei. A South Maui association lost an entire oceanfront building to a March 2026 storm after losing four units to the previous year’s. Owners split between demolition-and-settlement and repairing the surviving building — a partial-loss posture chapter 514B does not mediate at all.

Insurance and lending. Buildings that cannot obtain 100%-of-replacement-cost coverage face a conventional-financing shutdown, which caps values and makes the assessment even harder to fund. That loop is what turns deferred maintenance into permanent decline.

The obvious objection, which the proposal has to answer

A supermajority renewal statute is a mechanism for forcing owners out of their homes. Florida’s experience with condominium terminations produced real hardship for owners who did not want to sell and were bought out at prices they disputed.

That is why the proposal pairs the supermajority with independent valuation, notice, disclosure and judicial review. Whether those protections are adequate is exactly the question a Hawaii bill would have to fight out — and Hawaii has an unusually high proportion of long-tenure, older, fixed-income condominium residents for whom “renewal” means displacement.

We take no position on whether such a statute should pass. We are describing what exists and what does not.

The tension with everything else happening on Maui

The second ask — additional floor area for qualifying older condominiums — runs directly into the fight over what redevelopment produces. On Maui, the Council has been rezoning apartment-district condominiums into new hotel districts while housing advocates argue the density should produce residences. A statewide floor-area bonus would land in the middle of that argument.

What a board facing this should do meanwhile

• Know your § 514B-47 arithmetic — how many units is eighty per cent, and how many lienholders would have to consent.
• Do not let a large assessment be the first time owners hear the numbers. The thirty-year plan disclosure required by § 514B-148 exists precisely so this is not a surprise.
• Distinguish the question you are actually facing. “Can we afford this repair?” and “should this building continue to exist?” are different questions, and Hawaii law is built to answer only the first.

What to watch

Whether a renewal bill is introduced in 2027. Nothing is pre-filed, and the Act 189 task force’s recommendations do not include one — its focus was enforcement, fining process and records. A renewal statute would need a different sponsor and a different argument.