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For much of the last year, the seven members of the Dadez family have been squeezed into a government-sponsored three-bedroom condo at the Honua Kai Resort in West Maui. 

But these days, they have a yard. Plenty of bedrooms. And a kitchen.

Two weeks ago, the federal government moved them into a five-bedroom home in Napili. The house marks a new phase in the Dadez family’s slogging recovery. Living in the house on Lower Honoapiilani Road is a milestone on the long road home.

“Am I happy?” Randy Dadez says. “Yes, because I see my family happy — happy in a real home.”

The property is one of many that are part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s long-term lease program, an effort to move displaced families out of hotels and into neighborhoods.

Earlier this month, FEMA ended its program that paid for fire victims to live in some of the resort hotels that line the West Maui coast. It was the program that kept the Dadez family housed since the Aug. 8 fire that swept through Lahaina.

Before FEMA found them the more spacious Napili house, the agency moved the Dadezes into side-by-side studio units at the Royal Lahaina Resort. That was in late June.

“My wife, the kids, they’re depressed,” Randy explained shortly after he and his family traded the three-bedroom condo with a kitchen for the twin studios with no set-up for cooking food. “But we’re still happy to have a roof over our heads.”

It was a difficult transition for the Dadezes, and they are glad it turned out to be short-lived.

But now Randy has a new worry: The lease on the Napili house will end in February.

Where will his family go then? 

Lahaina, where 13,000 people lived before the Aug. 8 fire killed at least 102 people and displaced thousands of survivors, was primarily a town of renters. With much of the town’s residential real estate burned down and, elsewhere on the island, a worsening affordable housing crisis that long predates last summer’s fires, families like the Dadezes who lost their homes are finding it difficult to move on from the government-sponsored housing. 

To continue to qualify for FEMA’s long-term lease program, Randy must be able to prove that he’s looking for his own place to rent. Yet virtually every property that’s advertised, he says, comes at a price that’s thousands of dollars beyond his budget.

Before the fire, he was paying $2,400 a month, including utilities, to rent the two-bedroom ohana unit on Kaniau Road that burned down.

Rents that low no longer exist, and that was hardly cheap before.

“I hear they’re going to build housing in Lahaina, so that’s good,” Randy said. “But how long will that take?”

The state and federal government are building two adjacent temporary group housing projects mauka of the the Wahikuli neighborhood in north Lahaina. Officials have broken ground but the projects are still months away from completion.

Randy recently joined a county waitlist for affordable housing. But to meet the family income requirements, he and his wife and two youngest children would need to separate from his two working-age daughters, he said.

That’s not something he’s inclined to do at a time of such upheaval for everyone in the family who’s trying in their own way to move on from the many setbacks brought about by the fire.

Although the Napili house represents a long-awaited milestone in the Dadezes’ recovery, Randy can’t help but worry about the difficult prospects of achieving long-term housing security for his family on his own, without help from the government.

February isn’t so far away, he said.

“It’s that feeling of you don’t have a choice — someone else is making the choices for you,” Randy said. “We live with that. It makes you wish you were rich or had a rich friend. Because you can’t get a house unless you’re rich. It feels sort of helpless like that.”

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