Could A New Housing Cooperative Help Create Affordable Homes?
For the last year and a half, Chase Hasegawa and a few of his neighbors at the Courtyards at Waipouli have been trying to preserve their Kaua‘i apartment complex as a much-needed source of workforce housing. The tenants have been working with a Honolulu nonprofit with the hope of buying the property and turning it into an affordable housing cooperative.
If their Waipouli Housing Cooperative is successfully established, it would be the first affordable housing cooperative to be created on Kaua‘i and the first in decades for the state.
But the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands (DHHL) is planning to acquire the property for Native Hawaiian beneficiaries soon.