DHHL awards 200 East Hawaii homestead lots in historic ceremony

Hundreds of acres south of Hilo airport moved into the homestead pipeline Saturday, when the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands awarded 200 residential lots in Pana‘ewa to Native Hawaiian beneficiaries. It was the first East Hawaii residential lot award ceremony in more than 20 years, with Governor Josh Green and DHHL Director Kali Watson in attendance as families waited to learn whether decades on the Hawaiian Home Lands list would finally end.

The awards cover the first half of a planned 400-lot homestead on about 334 acres along Elama Road, next to the Hilo Drag Strip. DHHL says the remaining 200 lots are scheduled for award in August, but the ceremony itself was a lease award, not a finished subdivision handoff. The agency describes the Pana‘ewa awards as non-parceled, undivided-interest project leases, meaning beneficiaries were placed into a future development structure rather than into immediately completed individual lots.

That distinction matters for housing supply on the Big Island. DHHL’s project materials put the Pana‘ewa buildout on a 2026 to 2031 schedule, and say the environmental study and master plan for the residential lots and community center are still in progress. The agency said the awards went to applicants on the Hawai‘i Islandwide Residential Wait List with application dates up to Dec. 11, 2024, which shows how long the queue has been stretched and how much work still remains before families can build and move in.

The financing picture is just as important. In February 2025, DHHL said it needed an additional $75 million to produce an initial 300-lot Pana‘ewa phase, and estimated that producing 1,000 homesteads would cost $250 million. The 200 awards in Hilo move the project forward, but they also underline the gap between a ceremonial lease and the roads, water, utilities and construction support needed before a family can actually occupy a home.

Pana‘ewa has been moving in stages. In August 2023, DHHL awarded 15 subsistence-agricultural lots in the same area under the Pana‘ewa Lot 185 project, a half-acre concept that allowed Native Hawaiians to live and farm on the same parcel. The new residential awards extend that long-delayed work into a much larger neighborhood plan.

The ceremony also carried the weight of the broader Hawaiian home lands system. DHHL says it oversees nearly 10,000 active homestead leases across 58 developments on six islands and serves about 29,000-plus Native Hawaiians. Under the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920, about 200,000 acres were set aside for Native Hawaiian homesteads, and Pana‘ewa now stands as one of the clearest examples on Hawai‘i Island of that century-old promise beginning to turn into actual homes.