In 2020, I had the opportunity to temporarily return home. Hawaiʻi’s high cost of living and limited career options took us away and the pandemic brought us back. My now-husband and I packed up our stuff, left our apartment in Seattle, Washington, and returned to Oʻahu. A 2% mortgage interest rate drove us, and many others, to look at purchasing a home.
On Oʻahu we looked at million-dollar condos and single-family homes, canvassing areas like Mānoa where many historic home plaques dot the yards. It made me curious: how did these homes earn such a distinction? Who made that determination? And what does it say about the land it sits on?
What is a historic home?
To be considered a “historic home,” a house must be at least 50 years old and be considered significant under certain criteria. Interested homeowners can apply for the distinction through the Hawaiʻi Historic Places Review Board.
If approved, homeowners receive a county property tax credit or exemption. Sometimes, this distinction also gives them access to certain grant funds for maintenance or rehabilitation of the historic structure. Once a home is designated for preservation, the homeowner must maintain an accessible viewpoint for the public and install a plaque approved by the State Historic Preservation Division.
SHPD is the entity responsible for implementation of Hawaiʻi’s historic preservation program and oversees the review board (10 governor-appointed members). The board reviews applications and votes on which properties should be added to the register.
SHPD also makes recommendations regarding protection and documentation of all historic properties, including how to respond to the discovery of iwi kūpuna. Compared to SHPD, HHPRB is not well-known, yet it plays a critical role in determining what parts of Hawaiʻi’s past are preserved.
While homeowners can apply for historic home designation on their own, many hire an architectural historian to complete their applications. Historians research the architectural significance of a home and its former owners and residents. They’re familiar with the nuances of the criteria and can steer a homeowner to a successful application.
Mānoa, according to the applications
Mānoa is overrepresented when compared to other Oʻahu neighborhoods. Of the 405 homes on the historichawaii.org website, 163 were in Mānoa.
As I reviewed the applications, I paid particular attention to who prepared the application, when it was submitted, justification of the home’s importance, what history it helped to preserve, and any Native Hawaiian historical or cultural relevance.
After reviewing the 163 applications from Mānoa, I determined the following:
- 52 applications were prepared by the same individual, including applications with two or more preparers
- 30 of the homes were built or financed by people whose wealth or income originated from the Big 5 sugar companies
- Nine homes belonged to people directly involved in the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy
- Just 11 applications included mentions of pre-contact Hawaiian history, culture, and language
- Just four homes housed Native Hawaiian people
Overall, the applications capture a specific history of Mānoa’s transformation from loʻi kalo, to a cattle ranch, to a growing middle-class suburb. Aside from the 11 applications that included pre-contact Hawaiian history and culture, the other applications that mentioned “Hawaiian” histories were uniformly post-contact and tied to the people who built, or inhabited, those homes.
One thing is certain: very few occupants of these homes were Native Hawaiian.
A history of erasure
Native Hawaiians were systemically dispossessed from their lands through the foreign private property system introduced via the Māhele. This was compounded by the subsequent loss of self- governance. Ordinary Hawaiians had little agency to effectively advocate for their cultural practices and traditional land uses.
To this day, while the former homes of Hawaiʻi’s foreign oligarchs are designated “historic”– and while their current homeowners benefit from the tax credits and grants this designation makes available to them – the state of Hawaiʻi has allowed historic Native Hawaiian structures to deteriorate due to neglect, such as Queen Liliʻuokalani’s retreat in Maunawili, Oʻahu, and Kaniakapūpū, King Kamehameha III’s summer palace in Nuʻuanu Valley.
Through historic homes, period architecture and the histories of those with money and economic privilege are preserved. But that “history” begins with the construction of the structure – it does not include the history of the land itself, its original inhabitants, or the wahi pana within which it exists.
Without due diligence, an application for inclusion on the “historic homes” list may well ignore or misrepresent Hawaiian history. Without the necessary nuance, how can such “historic” designations preserve the stories and histories of the Indigenous inhabitants?
Even with constitutional rights and laws in place that reasonably protect Hawaiian cultural practices, systematic erasure persists when the documented history is divorced from the land it sits upon and the people who lived there first.
Interestingly, the language used in many historic home applications omit the violence of the Hawaiian Kingdom’s overthrow. It overlooks the economic and social advantages provided to foreigners in establishing their residences. Phrases like “post-monarchy” and “annexation-minded” erase the resistance of Hawaiian people to this takeover and oversimplifies a complex and fraught time in Hawaiʻi’s history.
Moving forward
Hawaiʻi’s original colonizers built their grand homes on stolen land, while Native Hawaiians continue to fight for recognition. Kiaʻi protest the disruption of iwi kūpuna, sacred spaces and wahi pana as contemporary landowners pursue construction and profit.
The designation and preservation of homes and other structures in Hawaiʻi must be reimagined to offset the undercurrent of settler colonialism in Hawaiʻi’s existing historic home preservation process.
For example, wahi pana are celebrated sites with remarkable stories that live on within them. Names are lovingly bestowed to their geographical and natural features: the waters that flow there, the winds, the rains, the mountains, rock formations, and the flora unique to those places.
We lose these names when we rename and red-line neighborhoods to fit a zip code. We lose them when we define boundaries through the Tax Map Key system. We lose them when we stop sharing their stories.
The Hawaiʻi Register of Historic Places should consider historic designation applications for wahi pana. And Native Hawaiians should not have to adhere to bureaucratic requirements to gain HRHP protections for cultural resources and historic places.
It is possible for historic preservation to preserve one lens of history without sacrificing another. Hawaiʻi can’t change how past historic preservation decisions were made, but the state can ensure that a more holistic approach is adopted moving forward – one that doesn’t just preserve the history of colonizers.
It’s vital to include Hawaiian culture in the historic preservation evaluation process. And perhaps it is time for an alternate pathway that encourages and fosters proactive preservation of wahi pana alongside this system built around development.
This article is reprinted with permission from Maxx Ramos, “Who decides what is historic?," OHA's Ka Wai Ola newspaper, December 2025, Vol. 42 No. 12. Read more at kawaiola.news.
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