01-18-2024, 07:47 AM
It’s a long article, with photos, charts, etc. I’ll post more when I can
PUNA, Hawaii—In 2018, a large volcanic eruption spewed lava, rock and ash into the middle of a subdivision here, gobbling up more than 700 homes and displacing thousands of residents in a slow-motion disaster. Today, it is Hawaii’s fastest-growing region.
Land in an active lava zone, it turns out, is relatively cheap. Lured by a shot at attainable homeownership in paradise, island dwellers and mainland transplants alike have been flocking to this area in the shadow of Kilauea, driving up prices in the Puna District. Still, the area remains one of the last affordable refuges on the cheapest island in Hawaii, America’s most expensive state.
“In terms of the last bastion of affordability, Puna is it,” said Jared C. Gates, a Realtor who was raised on Oahu and came to the Big Island for college in the 1990s. He purchased his first home in 2005, a modest fixer-upper in Puna, on his salary as a waiter.
Over the past few years, he has been getting more business in Leilani Estates, the neighborhood where the 2018 eruption began.
None of the homes that were inundated by lava have been rebuilt. Many homeowners have sold their properties to neighbors or the county in a federally funded buyback program, but that land remains vacant for now. The land has been so transformed that it is hard for remaining owners to know even where their property begins and ends.
Among Gates’s listings that day was a three-bedroom, two-bath home with lush landscaping, two blocks from the mile-wide lava field where heat and steam still radiate from vents in the petrified landscape. “It’s a beaut,” he said. “It will sell.”
Three weeks later it did, for $325,000, cash.
The story of how serene-looking slices of suburbia came to inhabit an active volcanic rift zone is well-known here. In the 1960s, land speculators—aided by a new county government hungry for tax revenue—bought thousands of acres and carved it into lots of an acre or more that were snapped up by investors.
PUNA, Hawaii—In 2018, a large volcanic eruption spewed lava, rock and ash into the middle of a subdivision here, gobbling up more than 700 homes and displacing thousands of residents in a slow-motion disaster. Today, it is Hawaii’s fastest-growing region.
Land in an active lava zone, it turns out, is relatively cheap. Lured by a shot at attainable homeownership in paradise, island dwellers and mainland transplants alike have been flocking to this area in the shadow of Kilauea, driving up prices in the Puna District. Still, the area remains one of the last affordable refuges on the cheapest island in Hawaii, America’s most expensive state.
“In terms of the last bastion of affordability, Puna is it,” said Jared C. Gates, a Realtor who was raised on Oahu and came to the Big Island for college in the 1990s. He purchased his first home in 2005, a modest fixer-upper in Puna, on his salary as a waiter.
Over the past few years, he has been getting more business in Leilani Estates, the neighborhood where the 2018 eruption began.
None of the homes that were inundated by lava have been rebuilt. Many homeowners have sold their properties to neighbors or the county in a federally funded buyback program, but that land remains vacant for now. The land has been so transformed that it is hard for remaining owners to know even where their property begins and ends.
Among Gates’s listings that day was a three-bedroom, two-bath home with lush landscaping, two blocks from the mile-wide lava field where heat and steam still radiate from vents in the petrified landscape. “It’s a beaut,” he said. “It will sell.”
Three weeks later it did, for $325,000, cash.
The story of how serene-looking slices of suburbia came to inhabit an active volcanic rift zone is well-known here. In the 1960s, land speculators—aided by a new county government hungry for tax revenue—bought thousands of acres and carved it into lots of an acre or more that were snapped up by investors.