Hawaii’s farmers and ranchers need easier pathways to build more employee housing on their land, according to policy analyst Jonathan Helton, author of a new policy brief released by the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii.
Doing so, Helton said during a radio interview this past Sunday with host Johnny Miro of H. Hawaii Media, would take some pressure off of the rest of Hawaii’s housing market and also help support the state’s ailing agriculture industry.
“What this report did is, it tried to look at, here are the state and county rules that are already in place for building homes on agricultural land,” Helton explained. “And then it asked the question: Do these rules work? And if they don’t work, how can we make them better?”
In general, he noted, “when you look at each county’s rules, you find when there are fewer barriers to building a home, more homes get built. … [In] the counties that had either fewer rules or a more predictable process, there was more housing approved.”
The policy brief makes three important recommendations that would enable farmers and ranchers to build more housing on their land:
>> Expand the number of small homes for farmworkers — referred to as “cluster housing” — that are permitted on agricultural parcels.
>> Allow more accessory dwelling units or guest cottages on ag land.
>> Redefine what is considered a farm dwelling.
The first two would be enacted at the county level. The third would require action at the state Legislature.
Helton emphasized that any new housing must be for legitimate agricultural purposes, benefitting either for-profit or subsistence farm and ranch operations, because “There’s a desire to keep the country country.”
Those concerns would be addressed by placing what Helton called “guardrails” on any proposal that goes forward.
To hear Helton’s entire 23-minute interview with Miro, click on the image below. A complete transcript follows.
1-11-26 Jonathan Helton on Johnny Miro
Johnny Miro: Happy to have you along on this Sunday morning. I’m Johnny Miro. It’s time for our H. Hawaii Media family of radio stations public access programming, available on our five Oahu radio stations, four stations on Maui and five stations on the island of Kauai — HawaiiStream.fm and Live365, another way to pick us up.
And my guest this morning is Jonathan Helton, a policy analyst at the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, who just authored a very important policy brief for Grassroot about how producing more housing for farm and ranch workers could also help boost Hawaii’s agriculture production. All right.
The new report, which you can download from the Grassroot Institute’s website, is titled “How to facilitate more housing for Hawaii farm and ranch workers.” Making it easier to build agriculture workforce housing would help alleviate Hawaii’s housing crisis and boost agriculture. All right.
The report examines Hawaii’s many state and county rules that have hindered the production of much-needed housing for the people who produce our food for both local and out-of-state consumption.
Very important topic here. And we welcome Jonathan Helton from Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. Good morning, Jonathan.
Jonathan Helton: Good morning, Johnny. Thank you for having me on.
Miro: Very important topic and glad you touched it, and you’ve released this report. Encourage people to check it out at the website: grassrootinstitute.org. All right. First question, you’ve released this report on how to make it easier, Jonathan, for, you know, to build housing for farm and ranch workers. Why did you focus on them specifically?
Helton: First of all, everybody needs housing, right? And it’s also really expensive right now. So Grassroot in the past several years has done a lot of research on how to make it easier to build housing in Hawaii, whether that’s changing where we allow housing to be built, or just even making it easier to get a building permit.
So the goal of this report, though, was to look at farm and ranch workers. The reason why is the state has a goal of boosting local food production so we don’t have to import as much from the mainland.
And so there’s also the other side of that where if you are a farmer and you need to get your produce harvested, you have to have labor. And if the labor can’t afford the housing, then you are up a creek.
And so what this report did is, it looked at, it tried to look at, here are the state and county rules that are already in place for building homes on agricultural land. And then it asked the question: Do these rules work? And if they don’t work, how can we make them better?
Miro: All right, Jonathan. Has the state Legislature done anything that you can recall in the past to make it easier for farmers and ranchers to build employee housing? Doesn’t sound like they have in the past. It’s why you brought this forward, I take it.
Helton: Yes, that’s correct. They, the Legislature did try something back 15, almost 20 years ago.
Miro: Twenty years ago.
Helton: Back in 2008, they said if you have land that is designated as Important Agricultural Land — which is a really technical term, it basically means if your land is really high productivity land, you can put it into this special classification, and you get some benefits as a result of doing that.
So, one of the benefits that they said you would get if you put your land into this classification was that you would get different rules on how to build farm and ranch worker housing.
Unfortunately, these rules did not work. There have been several bills that have attempted to reform this since that was passed in 2008. None of those bills have been approved yet, but it’s very clear from the research that some of the state agencies have done that this hasn’t worked. You haven’t gotten a lot more on farm housing built because of this incentive.
Miro: OK. What about the counties? What’s been their approach as to facilitating more farmworker housing?
Helton: Glad you asked. This is where the bulk of the report is.
Normally when people think about zoning, they first of all fall asleep or want to change the topic because it’s not very interesting.
The second thing they do is they think that it’s usually up to the county governments. And that’s true. But, keep in mind that zoning laws are allowed to be created by the county governments because of the state.
So the state passes a law that says, “Hey, counties, you can create zoning districts.” And then they can put guardrails on that.
So the state has put a guardrail on county agriculture districts, and it basically says, “Hey, in agriculture districts, counties can allow single-family homes, and they can allow certain other types of housing, such as employee housing.”
But what it doesn’t do is it doesn’t offer exact guidelines. So it’s up to the counties to decide, “Hey, how many single-family dwellings do we want to allow on a piece of land that is zoned agriculture? Do we want to allow employee housing? If so, what are the rules we want to set for that?” So it gets really complicated from there.
So, to start with Honolulu. Honolulu rewrote its zoning code back at the end of 2024. And under these new rules, you are allowed to build two farm dwellings per lot. A farm dwelling is a really fancy word for a home.
So you’re allowed to build two farm dwellings per lot, and you are also allowed to build farmworker housing.
But this farmworker housing is subject to a bunch of rules about where you can build it, what it has to look like, how many square feet it can be.
And since this was a new addition to the zoning code that passed at the end of [2024], we haven’t seen anybody use it yet.
It looks like, on paper, that this — that getting a permit for a farmworker housing unit in Honolulu will actually be pretty hard, which might be one of the reasons we haven’t seen anyone use it yet.
But we’ll be very interested to see what happens when the first farm or ranch comes in and applies and says, “Hey, we’d like to build four housing units on our property under this program. What do we have to do?”
Miro: So you’re saying that none of this has taken place on the island of Oahu yet in the City and County of Honolulu since they passed …
Helton: Not that we’ve seen, no.
Miro: Wow. OK. What about some of the other counties? Do you have any information on those?
Helton: Yes. Let’s look at the Big Island first. Let’s look at Hawai‘i County.
Miro: OK.
Helton: Their rules for building homes on agricultural land are a little bit more lax. They, they’re a little bit more, they have a little bit more freedom to build. So, essentially, you are allowed to build one single-family home — one farm dwelling — on a piece of land that is zoned agriculture. And then if you want to build additional dwellings, all you have to do is you have to go into the county, you have to file some paperwork that basically says, “Hey, I would like to build an additional dwelling, and here is what I am going to use it for related to my farm.”
So you would say, “Hey, I am hoping to invest in raising some more cattle on this piece of property. I need to build this home so that maybe I have an employee who would work part-time to help me take care of these cattle.” And then the planning department there would say, “OK. This looks legit. We’re going to let you build it.”
In the past decade, we’ve seen quite a few of these permits approved. So somewhere between 175 and 200 have been approved. So it’s relatively simple. It doesn’t require going before a planning commission or a county council and, you know, asking for a vote and having people testify on your housing permit. It’s a relatively simple process.
Miro: Have structures been erected? You mentioned the approvals. Has anything physically been built at this particular time?
Helton: As far as I know, yes.
Miro: OK.
Helton: I think Hawai‘i County has had that rule in place for quite a while.
Miro: OK.
Helton: So I just looked at the last 10 years. So I think a lot of them have been built. Now, ou know, there’s a whole other side of this conversation with unpermitted dwelling units where people build without permits. I didn’t look at that, and that’s because I couldn’t get any data because people didn’t file their permits.
So if there’s not permit data out there, there’s really no way for me, or in a lot of cases, the county, to know who’s actually building without permits, so. But again, it’s really a whole other conversation.
Miro: OK. Choose either Kaua‘i County or Maui County next.
Helton: All right. Let’s go to Maui next, and we’ll finish with Kauai. So on Maui, it’s very similar to the rules for Honolulu. So you can build two farm dwellings per lot, and you can also have the option of building employee housing.
Now, Maui County has had its employee housing rules in place for quite a bit longer than Honolulu has, and so you have actually seen some people come in and use this.
And so I want to say over the past 10 years, you’ve had — I can get you the exact number — I think you’ve had about a dozen permits that have come in over the past 10, 15 years where someone says, “Hey, you know, I am actually doing farming. I need housing for my employees. Here’s what I’d like to build.”
The permit there seems to be a little bit more straightforward than the permit here in Honolulu. We have seen people get through that process. It basically requires that you either, as a farmer, make a certain amount of money from farm sales per year, or that you are certified with the Maui Department of Water, and that you are paying the farm rate for water.
So there’s a couple of requirements that you have to meet. And then there are some rules on what the housing can look like. So you can’t just build a mansion and then call it an employee housing unit.
But there has been some success under Maui County’s rules.
Miro: OK. And it seems like that’s the first time you’ve really brought it up that they might think people would take advantage of some land and try to build a regular structure on there, not really utilize it for farm housing. Is that, kind of, what Maui is trying to prevent? That’s what it seemed like you were saying.
Helton: Yes. There has been a big concern that people are taking land that is zoned as agriculture, and they’re building a mansion on it, and they’re not really doing any agriculture.
Miro: Well, that’s not a good thing. [chuckles]
Helton: No, each of the counties has tried to think about, “Well, how do we encourage people to actually, you know, farm or run livestock on their property?”
And there’s been varying levels of success for some of these farmworker housing specific programs, like Maui’s, if you want to come in and get a permit for a farmworker unit, then you have to actually use that for, you know, your employees who are working on your farm or maybe working on a neighboring farm as a condition of getting that permit.
Miro: Understood. All right. Let’s head on over to the Garden Isle. The island of Kauai.
Helton: Yes. The Garden Island. So Kauai has actually done a lot on this front. So back in, back around 2010, Kauai created a process for people to come in and apply for a farmworker housing unit.
So on Kauai, you can build three types of dwellings under their zoning code on agricultural land. So the first is a farm dwelling, which again, pretty much just a single-family home on a piece of property that is zoned agriculture.
You can also build a guest home, which even though it’s called a guest home, it’s not like an Airbnb. In fact, you can’t use guest homes for Airbnbs on Kauai, generally speaking.
But what you can use them for is, if you have a single-family dwelling, you’re allowed to build a guest home nearby it, and if you owned a piece of property, you could use that as a rental or as housing for your employees who work on your farm.
Or you could just rent it out to somebody who is not related to your farm. There is no requirement that a guest home be used to house agricultural workers.
There is, however, a requirement for the third kind of housing that you are allowed to build in ag zones on Kauai, and that’s farmworker housing. So there are, there’s actually a lot of requirements you have to meet.
There’s only been four permits ever approved for farmworker housing on Kauai under this program. Probably partially because there are so many requirements that you have to meet.
First of all, you have to make a certain amount of money as a farmer in order to qualify. You have to use certain construction methods. You have to go before the planning commission and get a vote and approval from them. You have to agree not to charge your farmworker, or not to charge your farm employees rent or electricity.
So there’s all these conditions that are in place for you to get a permit to build housing specifically for your employees. And as I said, since 2010, only four of these permits have been approved. So I don’t know that I would consider that super successful.
You’ve actually seen a whole lot more guest homes, which have a lot more flexibility, be built. And those have only been legal on agricultural lands for about the past year and a half.
So, you know, on Kauai, and I think generally when you look at each county’s rules, you find when there are fewer barriers to building a home, more homes get built. Which is, across the board, that’s a true statement. And not just on agricultural lands, but really looking anywhere, when there’s less regulation, there’s more home building.
But since this report was specifically focused on agricultural housing, it was interesting to notice that the counties that had either fewer rules or a more predictable process, there was more housing approved.
Miro: And which counties stood out as having the least restrictions?
Helton: I think the two would be Hawaiʻi County and Maui County. I think those two, if you are somebody who is a legitimate farmer and you want to build housing that you’re going to rent out to your employees — maybe they will live there full time, maybe they will just be seasonal employees who need to come in during picking season and pick a crop like coffee — those two counties are, have, I think, the most straightforward rules for building that housing.
Miro: Jonathan Helton from Grassroot Institute of Hawaii. And the topic is just to make it easier for more housing for Hawaii farm or ranch workers. And a couple more questions for Jonathan. So ultimately, what does the report recommend?
Helton: The report recommends three things, and these three things are all targeted at how do we make it easier for legitimate farmers who are wanting to build housing to build that housing?
So the first one is to allow something that we’re going to call cluster housing. I don’t have a better term for it. But it’s basically, if you are a farmer who has the financial resources to build housing on your land for your employees, this proposal would say you are allowed to do that.
Maybe you’re allowed to build five units, maybe six units. We’re working, I think we’re working to see what the exact details of that are going to be. But this is based on a bill that has been introduced for the last several legislative sessions and has not passed yet. And so we’re hopeful this year it will pass. We’ve got the report out.
The second thing the report mentions and recommends is allowing accessory dwelling units on agricultural lands. Accessory dwelling unit is a really fancy term for, like, a small backyard cottage.
So we’ve seen it on Kauai, where those guest homes are allowed, that several of them have gotten permitted over the past year and a half. And so we think it would be a great idea if counties would allow more guest homes on agricultural land, or if the state would require that the counties allow more guest homes.
And the third recommendation is really, kind of technical. But it is that the state should redefine what is considered a farm dwelling. So, to get into the weeds, if you are building a farm dwelling, which again we’ve said is pretty much just you have a piece of agricultural land, and you have a home on it. It’s pretty simple. But under the state law, if you’re going to build that, you have to be using that land that the home is built on for some sort of profit. So you have to be running some sort of commercial farming operation.
Now that’s well and good, except for some agricultural lots are really small — some are as small as 1 acre. There are a lot of those on Hawaiʻi Island. You only have 1 acre, and in a lot of cases you don’t have enough land to be running like a commercial farming operation.
So one of the suggested redefinitions that we have is that you would allow people who are doing subsistence agriculture, where maybe they have a big garden, maybe they are, maybe they’ve got some goats — they’re using their land for something, though — that that would be OK.
That you could use your land for something that’s maybe not profit. Maybe you can grow food for your family. You can grow food to give to your neighbors, to donate to a nonprofit. And that that would count as a type of agriculture so that you could build a farm dwelling on that property.
Miro: Yeah. It makes sense. All right. There’s got to be, I mean it seems like it’s not an easy road, so I imagine you’re expecting some pushback against the idea.
Helton: Yes. There’s always a concern about making the country more city. There is a desire to keep the country country. And personally, I feel that. You know, it is important to have rural areas.
And so there’s a concern that, hey, if we allow more housing, we’re just going to get more housing built on ag land, but not necessarily more agriculture. And that’s a legitimate concern.
So I think some of the guardrails that are going to be built into this cluster housing bill are going to try to ensure that the people who are using it are people who are actually doing farming.
Which makes sense because if you are actually doing farming and you have the resources to build housing for your employees, that’s probably housing you’re going to use for your employees. So this type of cluster housing is sort of aimed at helping out people who are, like, larger commercial operations.
The accessory dwelling unit proposal we have, you know, that’s hopefully encouraged to allow people who might have a smaller farm, maybe they can rent that accessory dwelling unit out to somebody who will help them part-time.
We’ve seen a lot of news stories about how farmers in Hawaii are getting older. And so for those farmers who are getting older, thinking about, “Hey, what is going to happen to my farm when I pass away?”
Having someone else come up and work under you and maybe live on the same farm in an additional dwelling and then learn to trade, that might be a way for some of these farmers to transition and some of these farms to actually remain in production.
And that might not happen in every single situation. But we think that giving Hawaii farmers more tools to address whatever housing needs they have is probably a good idea.
Miro: Yeah, they’re doing as much as they can for the teachers to retain them and have, you know, the teachers actually come to Hawaii. They’re giving them housing as much as they can right now. It’s the initial stages.
Helton: Exactly.
Miro: So we’ll see what they can do for, you know, bringing in more farmers because we want to push for local production of our produce. So, we’ll see what direction this goes.
But the Legislature gets rolling here in a few weeks or so. You’ve got some other things you’re working on, you can let folks know about. Maybe they can see your work at some of the publications like MauiNow.com and some of the other Neighbor Island publications and, of course, on GrassrootInstitute.org.
Helton: Yes, of course, GrassrootInstitute.org is the best place to find out what we’re working on. We’re going to have some other reports that will be released in the next couple of weeks, looking at some of our other housing priorities.
Maui Now, of course, was gracious enough to republish our news release on the report. And so, we’re hopeful that whether you’re a state, county lawmaker, just a concerned citizen, a farmer, a rancher yourself, that the report will help give you some tools.
And so we can work together collaboratively to make sure that we get the housing built that we need and we are actually making concrete steps toward getting more local food production. Because it’s a great goal to have, but we have to throw resources at it. And I think that this report is going to help move the needle in that direction.
Miro: And you always mention you’re willing for some input from some of the listeners, so can you get that email out to them once again?
Helton: Absolutely. My email is jhelton@grassrootinstitute.org. If you found this conversation interesting, I would love to hear from you and to talk with you about the report.
Miro: All right. Great work, Jonathan, and we’ll be in touch with you soon. And I wish you all the best with this. Thanks for chiming in once again. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday.
Helton: Yes, thank you. I appreciate it, Johnny.
