2011 Housing Planning Study - State of Hawaii

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From 2003 through 2006, the County Planning data taken from authorized building permits. Departments authorized about 36,700 new Therefore, the housing stock estimates we are residential units. In the following four years, only using are partially defined by the permit counts. about 17,150 units were authorized9. Changes to Housing Stock Figure 4. State of Hawaii, Building Permits Characteristics Authorized, 1990-2010 12,000 We expect the unit mix produced each year to fluctuate with housing demand. Data based on 10,000 A the housing inventory developed for HHPS 2011 (Table 1) show changes to the housing stock for 8,000 periods covered by the last two HHPS reports. 6,000 Approximately the same number of housing units were added to Hawai'i's housing stock between 4,000 2007 and 2010 (24,645 units) as were added in the previous four years (22,166 units). However, 2,000 the units added in the last four years include —Added Units —Permits more rental and multi-family units. 0 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2olo The larger number of rental units included newly constructed rental units, units rented out Source: Hawaii Housing Model, 2011. Building permits because they could not be sold in a down taken from U.S. Census, added units calculated from housing stock annual estimates. market, and units transferred from the visitor industry when the visitor counts fell after 2007. Figure 4 shows that added units generally lag In years past, the number of newly constructed authorized permits by at least a year. In part, rental units would have been negligible. In the this is as expected, reflecting the time needed to past four years, however, the public sector was bring units to market. The finding is inconsistent able to add substantial numbers of affordable with the often-heard claims that supply lags multi-family rentals (see Table 37). demand by substantial margins in Hawaii. Of course, the nature of those claims refers not to The number of condominium units in the stock the lag between authorization and build-out, but remained fairly stable, increasing by about 25 the time required to get infrastructure built and percent in both periods. The number of new permits authorized. leasehold units, whether single-family or multi- family, dropped dramatically in the last four These data may underestimate the lag, however. years. With the exception of DHHL homes, new Housing stock estimates (and, therefore, the for sale units were almost exclusively fee simple. number of added units) are in part an artifact of methods used to produce the Census estimates. It appears that the U.S. Census Bureau, in developing annual housing unit estimates, uses 9 All four counties use some version of a Certificate of Completion (COC). Because those documents are not required for occupancy in residential structures, their number is generally considered to be an underestimate of actual production in any given year. The Tax Map Key (TMK) system, while beset with its own sources of error, is generally considered a more accurate source of annual production than is the sum of COCs issued over 12 months. Hawaii Housing Planning Study,2011 Page 6 ©SMS, Inc. November,2011