Honolulu struggles to find a remedy for abandoned homes taken over by squatters

An excavator sat atop a mound of trash on Pensacola Street that used to be a house and began the process of hauling it away Thursday, much to the relief of neighbors who have complained for years about the eyesore.

The operator of the excavator wore a ventilator and a hazmat suit to protect against lead paint in the debris. A worker trained a hose on the mound to keep down dust. Observers covered their noses to stifle the acrid smell, probably from the burnt remains of the structure.

The city hired contractor R.H.S. Lee to clear the remnants of the Pensacola “hoarder house” — actually, two houses — as it pursues eminent domain to take possession from the owner. The ultimate plan is to use the lot for affordable housing.

It looked to be the final chapter in a long saga involving multiple fires, an ever-growing mountain of trash and several requests from the neighborhood board for the city to take action.

But the house is far from the only derelict property to trigger concerns. Neighborhood boards across Oahu are fielding complaints about homeless people using abandoned properties. Some say the city should act faster to address these sites before they become a blight.

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City officials, meanwhile, say their hands are pretty much tied beyond issuing fines and placing liens on the properties. Their legislative attempts to speed up the foreclosure process have stalled. Right now the only option is to seize abandoned properties in court, which takes a lot of time and taxpayer money, said Honolulu Managing Director Michael Formby.

“Even though there’s a lot of these lots, and we would like to help the communities resolve these situations, it’s really a resource capacity constraint on us to get it done,” Formby said.

The city would prefer not to take these properties away from the owners, said Curtis Lum, the Department of Planning and Permitting spokesman.

“But we will if the continued inaction by the owner poses a serious health and safety issue to the public,” he said. “This was the case with the Pensacola property.”

A Symbol Of The Problem

To neighbors, Rollin Yee’s rat-infested property on Pensacola Street is a prime example of a hoarder house whose condemnation was long overdue. Yee racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for ignoring the city’s calls to clean up his 5,000-square-foot property. But the city still did not seize it, said former Makiki Neighborhood Board Chair Ian Ross. The board passed several resolutions asking the Honolulu City Council to condemn the home.

A Circuit Judge deemed the property unsafe in 2018, said Ross. Yee then abandoned his property and homeless people began using it, which neighbors say led to it catching fire two times in less than a year in 2020, said former Makiki Neighborhood Board member Christopher Tipton.

“It was like a tinderbox of trash,” he said.

Anne Pulfrey, a 73-year-old Makiki resident, was not surprised when the house went up in flames for the second time back in 2020.

For years the property accumulated trash in its overgrown yard. Defunct cars, rusted microwaves, sofas, water coolers, mattresses and rotting produce piled up. Sometimes passersby would toss their trash into the lot.

“People used it as a dump because it looked like one,” she said. “The owner probably liked it.”

After years of community uproar about the hazardous eyesore, the City Council finally adopted a resolution to seize the property using eminent domain earlier this year. The legal process to acquire the lot should take two years, said council member Calvin Say, who represents Makiki. In the meantime, a court order gave the city control of the property, allowing it to tackle the mess.

People are pleased that the hoarder home is finally gone, but some wonder why it took so long.

“When you delay action for that long, the problems always multiply,” Ross said. “There really is a problem with abandoned homes, squatters and fires.”

Makiki has many abandoned lots, said Nathanial Char, who recently succeeded Ross as chair of the neighborhood board. He points to a building on Liholiho street that homeless people have moved into.

“It already got hollowed out by a fire last year,” he said. “A news crew arrived at the scene and you can see homeless people brazenly walk under the police tape as it’s still on fire.”

Makiki isn’t the only neighborhood dealing with the fallout from unkempt lots. About a 30-minute drive away in Wahiawa, community members have been raising the alarm about a property on Avocado Street.

Wahiawa Village Neighborhood Board treasurer Michele Umaki said the house is used by homeless people from the Wahiawa Freshwater State Recreation Area. The city has pressed the owner to clean up his space but any change has been incremental.

“They take one step forward in cleaning it up,” she said. “And just as quickly, two steps back.”

Oahu’s Vacant Property Epidemic

Ellen Godbey Carson is a former president of the Institute for Human Services, a nonprofit that provides services to homeless people and advocates for changes to the networks serving them. She lives near the Pensacola house as well as another abandoned property on Kinau Street that went up in flames after squatters moved inside in 2019.

Carson says even when abandoned properties pose obvious safety risks, the city fails to do anything.

“My only conclusion is it just never rises to a priority,” she said.

Her suggestion is to set up a group within the Honolulu Corporation Counsel’s office to identify properties that hit a certain threshold of unpaid taxes and violate the city’s housing code. Then the city could start the foreclosure process by at least filing the papers, which would give the property owner an additional incentive to resolve the situation.

“Yes, it takes a while,” she said. “And if you don’t start it, it’s going to take even longer.”

Challenges To Getting Anything Done

Honolulu is hardly the only city where high housing costs have driven people to shelter in unsafe, abandoned buildings. A fire in 2023 killed 77 people living in a derelict building in Johannesburg, South Africa, where experts say a housing crisis has led to people moving into abandoned properties.

In Seattle, where fires in abandoned buildings have surged in recent years, the mayor submitted emergency legislation in April to amend the Seattle fire code and allow fire department officials to order the demolition of unsafe vacant buildings. The idea is to demolish structures before homeless people move inside.

For Honolulu, the easiest route is to buy abandoned properties before they become a blight, Formby said. But the owners often don’t want to talk.

“We prefer they negotiate with us,” Formby said. “It would be a lot easier if we could just negotiate a fair value and pay them in agreement and take it over and do what we have to do.”

He said abandoned properties like the Pensacola home often rack up so many fines that they exceed the value of the property itself.

To bypass the lengthy foreclosure process, the City and County of Honolulu has tried to pass a bill in the Legislature several times that would allow counties to foreclose on certain abandoned properties without going to court — what’s known as nonjudicial foreclosure.

Formby said he was caught off-guard by the pushback.

“We felt it would speed up the process for the neighboring property owners and it would reduce the cost of condemnation,” he said. “It would be a win-win for everybody.”

Opponents of the bill worried that it would give counties too much power to seize people’s homes. Choon James, who unsuccessfully ran against Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi this year, was a fierce opponent of the bill. She said there wasn’t enough communication about what the new law would do.

“The County’s role ought to be helping property owners correct their violations and be in compliance and not be too eager to seize private properties,” she wrote in her testimony.

Formby says this is all a misunderstanding.

The law would only apply in specific situations where property owners rack up huge fines. It would not apply to low-level fines. For instance, someone who was illegally operating a short-term rental and was hit with a $1,000 fine would not have their property taken.

“We had specifically limited the use of the nonjudicial foreclosure to abandoned lot type cases,” he said. “It’s very frustrating.”

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This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.