Gov. Josh Green issued an emergency proclamation on housing, seeking to strengthen the state’s ability to support affordable housing projects.
Every three years, the national and international building code councils issue updates that the state and counties are required to adopt. It’s meant to push states and municipalities to adjust to new materials, standards, and climate events that may have intensified.
The State Building Code Council has two years to review and amend these international and national codes to better fit Hawaiʻi’s needs.
The council has members from the county and state planning departments as well as industry associations representing architects, builders and structural engineers.
Once the state adopts its codes, the counties have another two years to make further adjustments.
However, the governor’s housing proclamation, issued last July, suspended the State Building Code Council. As a result, the 2021 international codes were adopted by the state last month without changes.
“The emergency proclamation eliminated a step that had created challenges in the building code planning process,” said Scott Glenn, the governor's senior advisor on housing.
“The suspension of the council provides for more consistency and stability in the construction of affordable housing," Glenn said.
The idea is to cut out the state council’s decision-making, which then trickles down to the counties to further amend.
Geena Thielen, the Building Industry Association of Hawaii’s chair of codes, agreed and supported the suspension of the State Building Code Council.
“The idea of two rounds of amendments is really impractical,” she said.
“And there's no way that, as an example, the Big Island wants Oʻahu's codes. They just have very different philosophies about them. So it seems to me like that really ought to be at the county level.”
But Reid Mizue, the president of the American Institute of Architects Hawaii, explained that having the state council is a crucial step to lessen the burden for counties navigating thousands of codes that may not be practical.
“Now the pressure is totally on the counties because the counties rely upon the State Building Code Council to receive the general amendments coming down from the international code,” Mizue said.
“They rely on those to trigger their own amendments. Now they just have to get the raw book and they have to make all the amendments themselves," he said.
In the counties' hands
Normally, there would be small tweaks by the time the amendments get to the counties.
Counties adjust the building code through bills, which are heavily commented on by the public and can be an elongated process.
For example, the Honolulu City Council just adopted 2018’s building codes this July. The Kauaʻi County Council is having a public hearing on the 2018 codes this Thursday.
Mizue has spoken with Maui County and Kauaʻi County councils, both of which have started to have issues with their code updates.
“It is a challenge to review the 2021 code updates without input from AIA and the structural engineers who have historically offered their recommendations for amendments,” wrote the Kauaʻi Department of Public Works in a statement.
Honolulu Department of Planning and Permitting Director Dawn Takeuchi Apuna had similar concerns. She explained that although Honolulu just adopted the 2018 code, it has been the county’s interim code since April 2023. The 2021 International Building Code, unamended by the State Building Code Council, is set to become Honolulu’s interim code in late October.
“When we can adopt the 2024 version is in question because of the governor’s emergency proclamation — which suspended the State Building Code Council’s ability to amend or update the state building codes,” she wrote in an email.
“We are uncertain as to how to proceed because there is no timeline specified in the proclamation.”
Counties also say that the code updates and training have put a massive burden on staff resources.
“Amending the building code every three years places a significant burden on staff, who must review, update and train on the latest version and must know which code to apply to applications,” Takeuchi Apuna wrote.
“The public outreach process, where DPP invites comments from various stakeholders on the proposed code amendments, is involved and time-consuming," she continued.
State building codes
It is not clear if the state’s construction projects will now need to adhere to the 2021 international codes it automatically adopted without updates. Mizue explained that by law, state construction is supposed to be built under the adopted state building codes.
“People who are working on state projects, using state funds or on state land, should be using the 2021 unamended, which is a problem ... to have it unamended,” Mizue said.
“There's a lot of things that the State Building Code Council removes.”
For example, the unamended code requires fire sprinklers in single-family homes, plumbing to be above the floodplain, and prohibits schools from installing gates in stairwells.
Mizue said that could mean that if the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands wanted to build a new housing development, it would need to install fire sprinklers in single-family homes.
It could also force a state beach park renovating its bathroom to have all the plumbing raised 5 feet above ground. In a different scenario, it would not allow the state Department of Education renovating a school to install gates that would lock access to upper floors, which it usually does for security when not in session.
These are codes the State Building Code Council would have likely removed.
The state usually tries to adhere to the city or county building codes, even though it technically is not required to. However, if Mizue’s concerns are founded, the state has one year until their projects must comply with the new code and could attempt to change it.
Updating the codes
The issue also raises the question of the impact changing codes could have on the price of housing construction.
BIA’s Thielen explained that changing building codes creates difficulties when trying to nail down the price of a project.
“By the time we get to the point that we have permanent ready drawings and we're going in for building permits now, the 2021 code is in place and all of our assumptions, everything is out the window,” Thielen said.
“All of the money we spent on the design, we've got to go back and we've got to update everything. And so from the builders perspective, it's a very big challenge to see the pace of change occurring so quickly.”
She explained that the changes can be costly and push people to not update their aging homes.
Thielen used an example of an international code change to window strength, which was rolled back in the Honolulu 2018 code. It would have increased the cost of building an average home by $35,000.
That’s why the BIA supported a bill to change the code adoption cycle to every six years, instead of the previous three. However, it failed in the Legislature last session.
It was opposed by the International Code Council and the AIA, as well as many other national and local stakeholders who had safety concerns regarding structures not built to the updated code.
Mizue maintains that in the long run, the code updates can save people money and help construction costs.
He explained that insurance rates could be lower on homes built with updated codes, new energy efficiency standards would decrease electric bills, and modern homes are more resilient.
“We don't see that code amendments necessarily increase construction costs tremendously,” he said.
“If a life cycle cost analysis was done on code amendments, everyone would find that a lot of the code changes help instead of hurt construction costs.”
Trey Gordner, a policy researcher with the University of Hawaiʻi's Economic Research Organization, explained that the costs associated with code updates are complicated.
One way to look at it would be to break housing projects into three segments: luxury, workforce and affordable.
For a luxury buyer, the code change costs for window upgrades or energy efficiency changes will be negligible. For workforce housing, it might alter some decisions of the designer to reduce an amenity on the project, but it would likely not impact the cost too much for the buyer.
However, for projects that are meant to serve lower-income residents, that’s where the margins for increased costs are thin.
“When it comes to the building codes, it won't impact the luxury developments at all. They'll continue to build as they've always built,” Gordner said.
“But the further down the [annual median income] that you're trying to provide housing for, the more significant that those sorts of rules can come to — whether or not you can make the project work at all — and that's my overall concern when it comes to housing affordability.”
Over the past couple of years, Gordner explained that the general philosophy around building codes has shifted from a minimum standard for builds to a form of public policy.
Agreeing on change
While Thielen and Mizue had differing opinions on how the building codes should be updated, they both agreed that change is needed.
Thielen wants to see codes adopted in staggered terms. Since there are seven code books that come out at a time, she wanted to see counties adopt the books in two phases — half the books every three years.
Meanwhile, Mizue wants to see more support added to the State Building Council, which has been a volunteer council with no funds or paid staff to support it.
“Not only this governor, but the previous governor never released funds to allow the State Building Code Council to operate properly,” he said. “There's a lot of logistical things that need to happen. There's a lot of administrative work that needs to be done because the code books are very thick.”
Counties have until 2026 to amend their codes or the unamended state code will be automatically adopted.
