Lahilahi Heen has lived for decades in a three-bedroom house surrounded by a carefully groomed garden in the lush Hawaiian Shores subdivision in Lower Puna. It’s also downslope from Hawaii’s most active volcano.
Her house sits outside Pahoa Village in an area that was threatened by a lava flow from Kilauea volcano in 2014. The lava never reached her neighborhood, but the danger is ever-present and she now faces a new risk.
The price of her homeowner’s insurance soared from $1,500 in 2022 to $5,000 the next year. Heen couldn’t afford that, she said, so she took a risk. She scraped together $30,000 in mostly borrowed money to pay off her mortgage, so she could go without insurance.
“It was super, super stressful. I learned new swear words,” she said, recalling that decision.
Heen is one of thousands of Big Island residents coping with a dire shortage of inexpensive insurance in sprawling subdivisions built generations ago in the two most hazardous lava zones.
Those areas offer some of the most affordable housing in Hawaii. The median home price in Pahoa — the largest town in Puna — is about $360,000. But private insurers have almost entirely abandoned Lava Zones 1 and 2 because they were deemed too risky