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Anyone who has made a sandcastle on the beach understands the ephemeral nature of building near the ocean. Nothing close to the edge of all that corrosive salt water and wave force and perpetual movement is meant to last forever. That’s part of the charm of sandcastles.

Money, feats of engineering and the American belief that nature can and should be conquered make the simple truth learned from childhood sandcastles easy to forget, but it’s foolish to think that time and tide can be resisted.

On Maui, in a part of the island that, 50 years ago, seemed remote and wild but now is a luxury destination, parts of the Kahana Sunset condominium complex are falling into the ocean. The owners want permission from the county to build, rebuild and strengthen sea walls to prevent the inevitable from happening, at least in their lifetimes.

On Oahu’s North Shore, houses are falling into the bay at Sunset Beach, and some homeowners feel completely justified using any means necessary to fight the inevitable.

Owners of Maui apartments that are used as short-term rentals, also called transient vacation rentals, for tourists rather than long-term housing options for local residents are fighting county efforts to repeal the exemption that currently allows them to operate their businesses in residential areas.

This last situation is different in that it is not ocean waves pulling at the structures, but instead the waves of frustration from an island community that has become overrun by the unchallenged dominance of tourism and by a housing crisis made more extreme by the Aug. 8 fires.

However, the underlying beliefs are the same: If I own a piece of Hawaii, I can do whatever I want with it and no neighborhood board, no government decision, no outcry from longtime residents being hurt by my actions, not even a damn act of nature can stop me from profiting from and fully enjoying my piece of paradise. My privilege must be maintained no matter what.

The first public testimony on the effort to phase out some 7,000 short-term rentals was heard on June 25 in an all-day meeting of the Maui Planning Commission. The topic drew so much attention, community members had to be ushered out of the County Building to watch a livestream of the proceedings out on the front lawn.

Nicki Tedesco, wearing a red shirt bearing the logo of , a community group that supports the measure, spoke after a number of STR owners had given testimony.

“I was not going to testify today in order to give the Lahaina community the platform for their voices, but I didn’t see a lot of them, so I asked, ‘Where is everybody?’ The answer was, ‘At work,’” Tedesco said. “They cannot take the day off from their multiple jobs. The reason that the individuals in opposition to this bill can be here, and they fill the room … is because they have the privilege and flexibility afforded to them because they have a side-business of TVRs.”

Vacation rental owners may have shown up in force, but housing data consultant Matt Jachowskiʻs presentation showed only 13% of all the STR units in question have owners with a Maui mailing address. That doesn’t mean that 13% live on Maui, only that they get mail there. Most of the owners had out-of-state addresses, with 36.1% having mailing addresses in California.

Deborah Mader of Kihei testified that she used to own short-term rentals and felt ashamed about that. 

“As owners, we knew 13 years ago there was pushback to vacation rentals, and we listened. The writing has been on the wall for over a decade, plenty of time to plan your exit,” Mader said. “Too many folks jumped on the bandwagon of making money from vacation rentals, didn’t take the time to seriously weigh the risks. Too many realtors sold the promise of quick, easy cash at the expense of our community.”

Many owners of STRs talked about building their retirement plans upon the income generated by their business of renting to tourists. Others said the people who clean and maintain their vacation rental units would be out of jobs and that the county would lose millions in tax revenues under the plan. These arguments are like the sand burritos used to keep the ocean from claiming a house built on the shore — reactionary and hardly foundational. 

“We are tired of the fear being spread about this, that and the other. The excuses of how it’s going to hurt the economy, take away jobs. All I hear is a tantrum to what foreigners have been thinking that they are entitled to for centuries,” said Shannon Iʻi, a member of Lahaina Strong who lost her family home in the August fires, who spoke in favor of the proposal.

Charles Nahale of Lahaina told the commission, “The STR is a symptom of a problem that has plagued Hawaii for over a hundred years. If we don’t do what is right for the people of this land, there will always be problems like this one. The form may be different, but the content will be the same, which is, the people of Hawaii will suffer.”

If Maui Mayor Richard Bissen is successful in turning the 7,000 vacation rentals in apartment zones into long-term housing, it would be a milestone akin to Chief Justice William S. Richardson’s ruling that kept all Hawaii beaches from being privately owned.

It would be the first wave in a sea change of sensibility, practicality and sustainability that is long overdue in Hawaii, where tourism has run amok for generations. 

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.