“Market prices for this new housing are likely to far exceed the already high prices that existed in Lahaina before the fire. For renters, the old housing stock that was destroyed provided opportunities for reasonable rents,”

I think this is the issue. Poor folks live in older buildings. Can't rebuild new old, run-down cheap neighborhoods.

Lahaina was a very old town with a lot of patchwork residences, back alley holes-in-the-wall, and grandfathered building code violations, all products of being a very remote land with limited access to materials and which didnt adopt the standard international building code until 2012. Lots of rental properties were backyard ohanas and platation-style and mid-century housing that had been subdivided and added onto, often without permits (because permitting is prohibitively expensive and takes months if not years to get approval on...this is a unique place that simply doesnt work like mainlanders think it does).

Not only can a lot of those residences not return because technically they never existed to begin with, but modern building codes would not allow them to be created again. The current market rate to build far exceeds the cost paid in the past.