Aloha to Airbnb

On December 15, 2025, Mayor Richard Bissen signed Bill 9 into law as Ordinance 5909. The Maui County Council had passed it 5–3 on final reading. The measure’s core is simple: it ends transient vacation-rental use in the county’s apartment-zoned (A-1 and A-2) districts and sets a date when the hosting has to stop. In West Maui, that date is January 1, 2029. Everywhere else in the county, it is January 1, 2031.

The scale is what makes it national news. As of May 2024, about 6,208 units on the county’s “Minatoya list” were operating as short-term rentals. Bill 9 does not tax them or cap them. It rezones them out of the tourist business and tells their owners to find a long-term tenant, sell, or move in.

To understand the fight, start with the exemption it closes. For roughly two decades, condos in apartment zones were allowed to rent to visitors under a legal opinion — the “Minatoya” exemption — that grandfathered them into short-term use the zoning code otherwise reserved for hotels. The list of those units grew into a shadow hotel district scattered across residential buildings. Bill 9 repeals the exemption outright.

For an owner, the stakes are concrete. Many bought a Kihei or Lahaina condo as retirement income, priced the nightly rate into a mortgage, and have run it legally for years. The bill does not compensate them; it changes what the property is allowed to be. The other side is just as tangible: those same buildings sit in zones the code always called residential, and Maui has among the tightest housing markets in the country. The council decided the zoning label should mean what it says.

The story did not end with Bill 9. In June 2026, the same council passed Bill 88 by 7–2 and sent it to Mayor Bissen — who had championed Bill 9 and backed this one too. Bill 88 creates new H-3 and H-4 hotel-zoning districts and offers roughly 4,500 grandfathered units at about 104 properties an opt-in path to keep renting to visitors.

Critics called it a retreat, the phase-out losing its nerve within months. The council’s defense was triage: the properties that qualify are the ones that most resemble hotels already — purpose-built for visitors, poorly suited to long-term tenants — and moving them into an honest hotel zone lets the residential buildings go back to being residential. The reprieve is real, but it is a fraction of the 6,208on the clock. The path was contested inside the county’s own process: Maui’s planning commissions recommended against the new hotel zoning, and the council committee advanced it 6–1 over that objection before the 7–2 floor vote.

Both sides argue in figures, and the figures are projections, not tallies of what has already happened. Opponents point to a UHERO-type estimate that phasing out the rentals could cost the island roughly $900 million a year in visitor spending — about 15% — along with some 1,900 jobs and about $60 million a year in property-tax revenue by 2029. These are forecasts, and forecasts of a market reacting to a law that has not fully taken effect carry wide error bars.

Housing advocates answer with a different figure: between 85% and 94% of the affected short-term-rental owners are off-island. In that framing, much of the lost visitor spending is income leaving Maui anyway, and the units are homes held out of a market where the people who clean the condos struggle to rent one. Neither number settles the question. The revenue is real and so is the shortage; the council weighed a housing shortage it could see against an economic loss it could only forecast, and chose the housing.

All of this lands two years after the August 2023 Lahaina fire, which destroyed much of Lahaina and pushed West Maui’s housing shortage from chronic to acute. That is why West Maui sits on the earlier January 1, 2029 clock while the rest of the county has until January 1, 2031. The disaster reframed a long zoning argument as a question about where displaced residents would live.

What Maui is attempting has no clean precedent: unwinding a tourist-rental market the size of a mid-range hotel chain by rezoning it, one apartment district at a time. Whether owners convert, sell, sue, or wait out the clock is the story of the next four years. You can follow it in the council’s own record through Hamlet’s archive of Maui County sessions, where the votes, the testimony, and the amendments are logged meeting by meeting.