Hawaii County Tells Homeowner His 38-Year-Old House Is Actually Illegal

Happy Tax Day (if any tax day can be happy) and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This week’s stories include:

• Single-stair reform takes a big step forward in Austin, Texas.
• Parking reform advances in Washington.

But first, our lead item on a permitting story from hell that shows just how thin America’s property rights protections can be.

---

Hawaii Homeowner Goes Through Permit Hell After County Tells Him His Decades-Old Home Is Illegal

When Shahzaad Ausman purchased a small seaside home in Captain Cook, Hawaii, in 2021, he had every reason to believe that it was a perfectly legal dwelling.

The home was first built in 1987 and the original owner had lived in it for years without incident.

The second owner Ausman was purchasing the home from had recently obtained a remodeling permit in 2020 to make repairs and alterations.

As part of his due diligence during the purchasing process, Ausman had confirmed with the county that the remodeling permit was valid for five years. An agent and appraiser working for Ausman also confirmed with the county there weren’t any outstanding permit issues with the home.

“Three people checked with the county that everything was good on the permit and everything was good,” Ausman tells Reason.

With those assurances from the county, Ausman purchased the property and continued with partially completed remodeling work.

But, as local Hawaiian media has reported, the county’s assurances proved to offer Ausman little protection from the bureaucratic nightmare that was soon to follow.

The Nightmare Begins

At the time that Ausman purchased the home, Hawaii County was in the process of setting up a new Electronic Permitting and Information Center (EPIC) to track building permits. Soon after the EPIC system was to go live, all permits that had been open for more than five years would be declared null and void.

Property owners would have a grace period to renew their permits before June 1, 2022. After that, they’d have to start the permitting process from scratch.

On that June deadline, a full 40,000 permits were nixed by the county.

Since the permit Ausman inherited from the previous owner was good through 2025, he didn’t think he had anything to worry about.

In early 2022, after already spending $138,000 on remodeling work on the house, Ausman called the county to get a final inspection on some of the completed work. But no one from the county responded.

Finally, in July 2022, a county official told Ausman over the phone that, contra past assurances, his permit had expired. But not the 2020 permit.

Rather, the county was now telling Ausman that the original 1987 building permit for his home had expired on the June 1, 2022, deadline.

The county asserted that even though a building permit had been issued for the 1987 home, there was no record of a final inspection having been completed. Therefore, it was the county’s position that the permit was never finalized and thus was canceled along with the 40,000 permits that were axed as part of the EPIC overhaul.

According to the county, Ausman’s entire home was illegal. He could not continue his remodeling work or even occupy the home without the risk of daily fines.

In an October 2022 letter to Ausman, the county also said that he would have to remove the remodeling work he’d already completed and apply for a completely new building permit.

Setbacks

Getting a new building permit was also easier said than done.

When the original owner of Ausman’s home constructed the dwelling in 1987, he was able to build it 27 feet from the shoreline.

Since then, Hawaii’s state and local coastal development regulations have been amended to require development be setback 40 feet from the shoreline.

As Ausman explained in a December 2024 interview with the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii’s Joe Kent, his home’s 27-foot proximity to the shoreline would likely prevent him from obtaining a required “special management area” permit from the state.

If he wanted to get a new permit, he’d have to move it back to the new 40-foot limit.

Doing so however would then require him to rebuild the home to the current building code standards, which are much more stringent than the standards that were in effect in 1987.

That, he tells Reason, would mean “basically changing every stick and every nail in the house.” In effect, he would have to demolish his home completely and start over.

In that October 2022 letter, the county had given Ausman 90 days to apply for a new permit.

Instead, given the amount of money he’d already sunk into the house and the expense posed by a complete rebuild, he decided to appeal the county’s revocation of his permit.

Ausman’s appeal would be heard by the Hawaii County Board of Appeals. Ausman would have to convince this body staffed by county officials, over the objections of county counsel, that the county had made a mistake.

In May 2023, the county Board of Appeals decided that the county hadn’t made a mistake. Rather, it told Ausman he had made a mistake by relying on the county’s assurances that his home was legal. He’d need to start the permitting process over again.

His administrative options exhausted, Ausman filed a lawsuit against the county in Hawaii’s 3rd Circuit District Court.

Late last month, the court ruled firmly in Ausman’s favor.

Judge Wendy M. DeWeese found that Ausman had reasonably relied on the county’s assurances that all his permits were up-to-date when he began his remodeling work.

The county’s subsequent decision to revoke his permits was “clearly erroneous,” it said.

The decision entitles Ausman to proceed with the work on his home he began four years ago. All he needs to move forward is for the court to enter its judgment.

Pending Appeal

Still, Ausman is not quite out of the woods yet.

The county has 30 days to appeal DeWeese’s decision after the judgment is officially entered.

Ausman says that after the court’s decision, the county told him again that they would still issue him a notice of violation if he attempted to continue his remodeling work or reoccupy the house.

He speculates that the county is pressuring him to settle the case to stave off an appeal and all the legal process and expense that would entail.

He tells Reason he has little interest in reaching a settlement with the county now that he’s won in the district court. “I have very little faith in doing that for them,” he tells Reason. “I won. I don’t have any incentive” to settle.

---

Austin Passes Single-Stair Reform 

This past week, the City Council of Austin, Texas, voted 10–1 to update the city building code to allow apartment buildings up to five stories to be built with just one staircase.

Advocates argue single-stair reform enables mid-rise apartment buildings to fit on smaller lots. By wrapping apartments around a single stairway, floorplans can include more window-lit bedrooms as well.

The city’s reforms will make it easier to build “small sunlight-filled apartment buildings with large family-friendly units,” says Chris Gannon, an Austin-based architect and single-stair supporter.

As a recent report co-produced by the Center for Building in North America and Pew Charitable Trust documents, American building codes are uniquely restrictive of single-stair apartments. With the notable exception of New York City, Honolulu, and Seattle, most cities require apartment buildings taller than three stories to have two staircases.

This restriction is typically justified on fire safety grounds, but the Pew report found no evidence that single-stair buildings with sprinkler systems posed greater safety risks.

Austin’s reforms require that the landings in single-stair buildings include sprinkler systems. The city also prohibited electrical outlets on single-stair landings.

The single-stair reform “opens up smaller lots in existing multifamily zones” where apartment buildings are already allowed, says Ryan Puzycki, a member of Austin’s Zoning and Platting Commission. But “there are other things that we need to do to fully realize the benefits of this.”

Puzycki says that shrinking Austin’s 8,000-square-foot minimum lot size requirement for multifamily buildings, reducing impervious cover requirements, and upzoning low-density zones for small apartment buildings would see single-stair reform yield even more units.

---

Parking Reform Advances in Washington State

This past week, the Washington House of Representatives passed Senate Bill 5184, which caps the number of parking spaces local governments can require in new residential and commercial developments.

According to the Sightline Institute, which helped draft the bill, S.B. 5184 would allow local governments to require at most .5 parking spaces per multifamily unit (or one parking space per detached single-family home). Local governments could mandate that commercial businesses include at most one parking space per 1,000 square feet.

The bill passed the Senate in February. It was amended in the House, meaning that it will have to be taken up again by the Senate in order to pass the full Legislature.

---

Quick Links

• A recent study finds that Maui’s proposed conversion of hotels and short-term rentals to long-term housing would lower housing costs, as well as employment, economic activity, and tax revenue.
• Hell Gate reports that current New York City mayoral candidate and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo used ChatGPT to help write his housing plan.
• When boomtowns boomed

my map of “miracle decades”, when major cities grew by ~50% or more in 10 years or less https://t.co/lIQrZrt1ph pic.twitter.com/p58THou3wi

— Michael Andersen (@andersem) April 12, 2025

• The upzoning of commercial- and transit-adjacent neighborhoods in Sydney, Australia, is producing a real estate boom as developers scramble to snatch up newly buildable properties. The owners of historic homes in affected neighborhoods are demanding their properties be de-landmarked so they can cash out too.
• Yet another report finds that Los Angeles’ “mansion tax” is killing new apartment construction.

The post Hawaii County Tells Homeowner His 38-Year-Old House Is Actually Illegal appeared first on Reason.com.

Source: https://reason.com/2025/04/15/hawaii-county-tells-homeowner-his-38-year-old-house-is-actually-illegal/