 And welcome to Power Up Hawaii, where Hawaii comes together to walk towards a clean, renewable, and just energy future. I'm your host, Raya Salter. I'm an energy attorney, clean energy advocate, and community outreach specialist. I'm also the principal attorney of Imagine Power LLC. Power Up Hawaii is about a clean, renewable, and just energy future. To us here on the show, that means talking to all of the players who need to be engaged in the conversation, including those who may not be traditionally involved in the energy policy area. As we are well aware, we pay the highest energy rates in the country due to the need to import oil to burn. These high energy costs affect everyone in ways big and small. In particular, these high energy costs impact poor and low income people. High energy costs are a big part of Hawaii's high cost of living and have big impact on housing affordability. The numbers are staggering, and they may surprise you. According to research done in this area by Fisher, Sheehan, and Colton, home energy is a crippling financial burden for low income people in Hawaii. Hawaii households with incomes of below 50% of the federal poverty level pay 40% of their annual income simply on home energy bills, 40%. Home energy on affordability, however, is not only the province of the very poor. Those with incomes between 150% and 185% of poverty level take up 10% of income on energy. Hawaii households with incomes between 185% and 200% of the federal poverty level have energy bills equal to 8% of income. Of course, our housing costs are extremely high to begin with even before you take energy into account. I don't know anyone who isn't looking for more affordable housing, and affordable housing is in extremely short supply. This is a huge factor in why Hawaii has the nation's highest per capita rate of homelessness. There's also a reason why many people live in tight living quarters or leave Hawaii altogether. Now it makes all the sense in the world that people who have extra space on their properties seek to turn those spaces into dwellings, typically called accessory dwelling units or ADUs. This could be a dwelling for a relative or to establish a new income stream. Either way, it's an opportunity to bring more needed affordable and energy efficient housing to Hawaii. Now as anyone who has ever tried to develop an accessory dwelling unit knows, it is not easy to build additional dwellings on your property and also adhere to the legal codes and standards. Today we will speak with Aileen Lakaden of Hawaii Apple Seed Center for Law and Economic Justice. Hawaii Apple Seed Center, Hawaii Apple Seed is a non-profit law firm created to advocate on behalf of low income individuals and families in Hawaii on civil legal issues of statewide importance and to compliment the assistance provided by existing legal services in the state. They work on issues of housing poverty and health among other things. Now Aileen leads Hawaii Apple Seed's work on ADUs. For studying industrial and systems engineering at Virginia Tech, Aileen served as an AmeriCorps VISTA with Hawaii Apple Seed. She hopes to apply her engineering background in innovative ways to carry out Hawaii Apple Seed's mission and leave a lasting impact in the communities that she serves. Welcome Aileen. Thank you so much for having me on your show today. Thank you so much Aileen for joining us. So first I know I gave some introduction about it, but if you could tell us a little bit more about Hawaii Apple Seed and the work that Hawaii Apple Seed does in the state. So a lot of what we do is research, policy development, coalition building and advocacy on key issues vital to economic self-sufficiency for Hawaii's residents. What we focus on are economic justice, housing, hunger, education and healthcare. And a lot of what I do is in research, education and advocacy. Well that's excellent and I think that's why I'm so excited to have here because it makes sense that the folks who are really looking to see that people in Hawaii can afford food, can afford healthcare, can afford housing are involved in this energy conversation particularly when you think about the amount of money that people, especially low income people spend on energy, right? So why don't you go ahead and tell us more about yourself and some of the work that you do with Hawaii Apple Seed? So I'm originally from New Jersey. I was born and raised there and I ended up going to engineering school in Virginia. And then I decided to come out and volunteer with Hawaii Apple Seed as an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer and AmeriCorps VISTA places volunteers at organizations that fight against poverty across America. I decided to do that, try to use my engineering background in a different way to try to give back to the community right out of college. So when I came on, I came on as their ADU project coordinator and what I did was kind of develop resources such as manual kind of outlining the A to Z about ADUs in the city and county of Honolulu because they were just recently legalized here. So no one really knows what they are still even though it's been a year and a half since the law passed. So I did that and held a few workshops in the community to educate the public and continue to do so. Excellent. Well, since we may as well, since you brought up the legality, we may as well talk a little bit about that. If you could maybe give us some background on sort of what were the, what was the state of, well actually maybe you can even back up and tell us a little bit about housing affordability in Hawaii and what the state of ADUs was before the law changed, what happened and what you guys helped do with a lot of other folks to make that law and make that law change for folks who may not know the story. So back in the 80s, the state legislature actually made it a requirement for all of the counties to have some sort of law allowing second dwelling units on single family properties to create additional housing. And those were called Ohana units, if you might have heard that term before. But then later on, the legislature gave that power to the counties themselves and each of the counties made their own specific rules. So the city and county of Honolulu actually made it so that Ohana units are only for family members only. So a lot of those Ohana units that were built in the 80s that were rented out were continued to be rented out but illegally people weren't paying taxes on those illegal units causing a lot of problems between neighbors and just causing problems in the housing community. And I can imagine if everyone's got different standards, there's got to be a lot of confusion right amongst the building community and amongst the property owners, amongst everybody. Right. And we thought that it doesn't really make sense that you limit it to family only. If you can rent these out to anybody responsibly, then that's a great idea to create additional housing units much needed. Let me ask, do you know why that restriction was there? Why that restriction was put there to family only? I am not sure. There was a little bit of a specific question and you did say back in the 80s, which was a while ago. I can speculate that various powers that be wanted to ease up the restrictions and enable folks to have more people live on these properties legally but didn't want to create a cottage industry and rental. Right. It involves actually enforcing those rules if you have to put rules in so they just didn't allow it I guess. But now they have changed their minds in recent years. Back in 2013 we released a report showing innovative ways to create additional housing units, which included accessory dwelling units and micro units, which existed here on Oahu before but they kind of all got phased out and now we're trying to bring them back because those are ways we can easily create more housing units in the limited space that we have. That's exactly right. So tell us a bit more about, when you say they changed their mind, it was like it was family only and then tell us a little bit about this, the newer ADU law. Was that 2014 or 2015? Tell me a little about it. So after we released our report in 2013 we released a policy brief specific to accessory dwelling units 2014-2015, worked with the local city government officials and the local construction industry to kind of put together a bill, bill 20, which passed in September of 2015. Got it. With much support from the mayor and the city council. Fantastic. So what about this bill 20 and what its provisions were and the changes that it made? So it allowed Oahuana units, it changed the Oahuana unit bill to include detached units because Oahuana units were also required before to be attached to a single family house but now it required them to be detached and give people more options. In addition to that it created legalized ADUs so now people can build actual rental units attached or detached on their properties. So they're limited in size of course but they are just like any apartment you would rent but even nicer because you're in a single family neighborhood in a single family home pretty much. So go ahead and let's dig in and talk a little bit about these ADUs because I think they're pretty exciting because there's this opportunity now if you can build this stand alone unit on your property to do something that's kind of neat and cool. And you wrote the manual so go ahead and tell us a bit about these ADUs. So for the city and county of Honolulu they're limited in size to 400 square feet if your lot is under 5,000 square feet in size and then up to 800 square feet if your lot is over 5,000 square feet. So they're pretty small but definitely big enough for at least two bedrooms if you go up to 800 square feet which is great for families who don't want to raise their kids in an apartment complex they want that single family neighborhood feel and it's definitely good for homeowners here it doesn't require any government subsidy. Right because people are looking to do this. Right, yeah. Everyone's looking to do this. Right, it's such a great opportunity to invest in your property and build up your property's value by creating a rental unit and they can be really really nice they can be as simple as you want it to be it could be attached detached it could be a garage conversion or a carport conversion it could be your basement. There's so many different options you could take. And who might typically live in this type of unit this could be a family number it could be somebody renting it could be anyone you feel. Right, right. So traditionally people will rent it to family or just anyone you know using the traditional model like Craigslist or you know Apartment Finder but there are a lot of students who are looking for housing in good neighborhoods and a lot of people are looking to age in place and stay in their houses. That's exactly correct. So they want to either move into their ADU and rent out their big house if their kids have moved out and it's just them on their own or rent it to a caretaker if they need extra help at home. Well we are about to go to a short break and then we will be back with Eileen Lakadan from Hawaii Appleseed talking about accessory building units. Hello this is Martin Despingh I want to get you get excited about my new show which is Humane Architecture for Hawaii and Beyond. We're going to broadcast on Tuesdays 5 p.m. here on Think Tech Hawaii. Hi this is Jane Sugimura I'm the co-host for Condo Insider and we're on Think Tech Hawaii every Thursday at 3 o'clock and we're here to talk about condominium living and issues that affect condominium residents and owners and I hope you'll join us every week on Thursday. Aloha. Aloha I'm Carl Campania host of Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers. I hope you join us over the next several weeks as we take a deep dive into biofuels in Hawaii and explore the alternative fuels supply chain necessary for the local and global transition towards transportation fuel sustainability. Join us as we have good conversations with our farmers, our producers, our conversion technologies, our investors and our legislators as we try to achieve our transportation sustainability goals. See you soon. Hello and welcome back to Power Up Hawaii. I'm your host, Raya Solter. We're here today talking with Eileen McAden from Hawaii, Hawaii Appleseed and we're talking about accessory dwelling units, housing affordability and also we'll talk a bit about energy efficiency. So thank you again so much for being here Eileen. So we've been talking about these ADUs, we've been talking about their benefits and how it is really desirable for anyone who's got a property to have that option to be able to develop it and get some extra income or have a family member live with them while not living with them. But what are some of the drawbacks and some of the pushback that has come for them against these ADUs and from what corners does this opposition come from? Some people have complained that it'll overcrowd neighborhoods that are already overcrowded but the thing is some of these neighborhoods can't actually take on additional housing units so wherever a neighborhood is too cramped they're not going to be allowed but it's kind of necessary for us to utilize some of these underutilized spaces in our urban neighborhoods and create additional dwelling units if people are willing to do it. I think other drawbacks are the additional financial investment. Construction is the most expensive in the country here so that's the thing people need to actually have the money up front to do it. ADUs can cost from maybe 20,000 to 60,000 just for the supplies alone. So it could be two to three times that including the labor. That's tremendous cost. Right. Well we're talking about the cost of housing or the cost in the designs of these units. Hey, I know that you guys have worked with various folks, architects and others in the building community to really work on some cool stuff for ADUs. Could you tell us a little bit about that? We did have one architect, Architects Hawaii, who developed a model for us to provide free to the public to show actually how cool an ADU could be for models designed specifically for a property in Hawaii and how cool it could look on the yard, how energy efficient it could be designed. They came up with a really awesome model for us for a single person. It has everything you need. It's an efficiency, bed rolls down, tiny micro kitchen, but it has a lot of outdoor space. It has a lanai, good airflow, energy efficient appliances and everything. So you can live in a very comfortable space. You've got some pictures, and then there's so many different. This looks like a really kind of traditional, almost sort of like log-gavany style of house that is extremely attractive and takes advantage of all that outdoor space. And I'll ask, something that's interesting is when you think about these accessory units, you also think about utility service and electricity and the energy, and we talked about the energy costs. So I would think that there's probably a lot of potential not only for they to be energy efficient, but to utilize solar or other components, or there's the potential for that. Is that correct? Yeah, absolutely. Especially with all those PV battery systems coming out, it would be so easy to power the entire ADU on a PV battery system alone, because it's such a small unit. Solar water heater, it can take everything a normal single-family home can take on. And that is so interesting, because now I think energy efficiency and renewable energy are probably, can potentially anyway, be a big part of that investment decision when you're thinking about the energy costs. Because I don't know, I think I thought if many of us have the dream of living in Hawaii in a small sort of simple ADU-type space somewhere, and we've all looked at those kits you can buy for like $8,000 or $9,000 and get some cool like Hindu temple-type space or whatever. And I'm here now with these, we're talking about much larger investment. It would seem, and actually I won't ask you directly about this, because it may or may not be your province, but then if you're not going to have it be off the grid, then you're going to have to talk to the utility company about extending the main and extending service out to that ADU. Is that something that you're familiar with? It may not be your area. I know that people have the option, people come to me all the time asking, do I have to have a separate utility, or do I not, can I include it with the house, how do I bill it separately, but you have the option, it's actually up to the homeowner on what you want to do with all the utilities. That is so interesting. I'd be interested to know what the experience of it, you know, someone doing an ADU has had with the utility and making those decisions, maybe we can do another show on that. So, yeah, we talked about the ADUs, we talked about the opportunities. Is there a place on the island where some of these new cool innovative designs or ADUs are sort of popping up? From what I've heard from the city, only about a hundred maybe actual ADU permits have been given out with at least more than 1,100 people applying initially with interest, but I think big areas, these are going up are probably Hawaii, where people have a little bit more space, and I know a lot of people on the windward side who are looking into getting prefab units done, where they don't have to pay a lot for labor. And I know when I used to work on the mainland for environmental organizations, and prefabricated housing was a really big deal and a really important issue in terms of advocacy. It's not the previous generation's prefab housing, there's just some great stuff made with all kinds of materials that can be reclaimed. It doesn't need to be sort of something plastic. Actually, perhaps now, your background isn't also in the built environment, yeah? A little bit. Or more engineering, okay, so I won't go ahead and ask you more built environment questions. So, what are some of the reasons why so many people showed interest, and so few people were able to actually get permits? I think it's just the hesitation because it's such a new thing to Oahu, that people want to see what other people are doing first. They want to see what they look like, they want to see them in their neighborhoods and they want to see them being successfully used and used in a responsible way. Right. And I think there will be continued interest, and as people kind of realize and save up for that initial investment, because it is a huge initial investment, they will actually go through with the project. Also, there's a lot of different companies that are offering ADU services, like any contractor can do the work for you, if you hire an architect to do the actual design. But more and more companies are popping up here and there, offering prefabricated units which tend to be cheaper, so that will entice the market a little bit more. Well, thank you for that. I know that you have written a handbook in A to Z. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that? Yes. So it's about 60 pages long and it kind of A to Z, so it's got to have some substance there. Yeah. So for people who are actually looking into building one of these things and don't know how to start at all, you can take this handbook and it goes from step one, what is an ADU? What can it look like? You can hold up the cover here. Here's the handbook. Yeah. And then the first steps, like going to the city, filling out an ADU pre-check form to make sure that your property is eligible to add an ADU to it, make sure utilities cover it, your road is wide enough, make sure you have wastewater capacity, things like that. And then about a month later, they'll tell you whether or not you can build one. And then at that point, it gives you options like you can look into construction professionals. We actually have a website in addition to our handbook. Oh, great. HawaiiADU.org. Oh, great. Where we have a list of construction professionals who have reached out to us wanting to share that they're doing ADUs on Oahu. I know there's a lot of local builders making tiny homes on Big Island. Yeah. That's a tiny home thing. That's very trendy. Yeah. It's pretty similar. It's pretty much an ADU, but ADUs can be a little bit bigger and more permanent. That's the only difference, really. And we're seeing more and more companies added to our list as the months go by. I'm sure by next year it'll double. But then back to the manual. It goes into financing different ways you can finance a home addition in general, how to properly hire a construction professional so you can trust who you're working with and trust them to build you the wonderful ADU that you're looking for. So it really kind of takes you from A to Z and sort of the beginner to help you. And this is available on the website? Yes. HawaiiAppleseedADU.org? HawaiiADU.org. Sorry. HawaiiADU.org. And we're about to close in a few minutes. What can somebody do if they want to get more information, get in touch with you guys, figure out if there's a way they can help with the ADU project or other projects that HawaiiAppleseed does? Well, I welcome anyone to contact me at HawaiiAppleseed. You can email me, Eileen, at hiappleseed.org, or come to our HawaiiADU website where we have all our resources available. We even have, in addition to the website and this manual, we have three open source plans available on our website that you can use, you can take to an architect and kind of make it your own and have it site specifically designed. Can I say, I think this is tremendous and I just also want to say it's such a contribution for VISTA volunteers, someone with a brand new engineering degree from Virginia Tech to decide to take basically a volunteer position to create these resources for low income folks in Hawaii and to help with housing affordability. I think it's just tremendous. Thank you so much, Eileen, for your work and for your being with us on the show today. And that just about wraps up another edition of Power Up Hawaii. Aloha, Mahalo, and see you next week, everybody.