Affordable Housing Working Group
The shortage of affordable housing on Oahu is a long-standing, complex issue that the City and County of Honolulu has faced for decades, and the lack of housing impacts us as a community.
The Affordable Housing Working Group, under the leadership of Executive Director Denise Iseri-Matsubara, fosters cross-sector collaboration among city departments to drive housing projects to completion and change the internal mindset from being a regulator to being a facilitator when it comes to housing development.
To accomplish this goal, the Affordable Housing Working Group identifies and executes strategies that promote and increase the housing supply on Oahu. These strategies include: strategic acquisitions; reviving and enhancing the City’s housing finance programs; process improvements aimed at accelerating review and approval procedures; capitalizing on TOD partnerships; and regulatory reform to ensure policies are actually generating more housing.
“Our goal is to identify infrastructure capacity, cost and schedule constraints which will allow the city and the state to forecast projects based on the scalable development of affordable housing. In other words, we want to show that when you commit to infrastructure first, that affordable housing can and will follow.” – Rick Blangiardi, Mayor