Early in the morning on Aug. 8, 2023, the Dadez family could see smoke about two and a half miles up the hill from their house in Lahaina, on the Hawaiian island of Maui. The combination of extreme winds, severe drought and the nearby dried-out fields of a former sugar cane plantation had created the perfect conditions for a fire. Still, the fire seemed far away. Then, around 9 that night, Marilou Dadez heard their neighbors running outside their house. Her husband, Randy, was about 10 miles away in Kapalua, where he worked as a shuttle bus driver at a resort, but she and their four children were at home. “The sky was orange,” says Rhaliyah, their 22-year-old daughter. “It was red. It was so scary.”

The five of them piled into their 2001 Honda with as many belongings as they could cram into a single suitcase. The Dadezes’ older daughter, Rianna, 24, who was just learning to drive, had to navigate the darkened roads as embers streaked past the windshield. The flames and the smoke were accompanied by what sounded like a war outside: gas tanks exploding, windows breaking, wind ripping roofs off homes, entire homes collapsing. They were fleeing what would end up as the deadliest wildfire in the United States in more than a century. The Lahaina fire burned 2,170 acres, destroyed more than 2,700 structures and killed at least 102 people. Some 12,000 people lost their homes overnight.

Less than a year later, 11,637 Hawaii residents were homeless, an 87 percent increase from before the fire, and the number of residents living in emergency shelters or in transitional places — ranging from FEMA-funded housing to friends’ garages — had tripled. Hawaii, and Maui in particular, had already been confronting a serious housing problem. The booming markets in vacation rentals and second homes and the rise of remote work had made Lahaina particularly attractive to wealthy mainlanders, which drove up housing costs and shrank affordable alternatives. “These two forces — a convergence of a climate crisis and a housing crisis — were at a breaking point at the same time when these fires hit,” says Kathryn Leifheit, an assistant professor at U.C.L.A. who studies the causes of homelessness, including climate disasters.

With FEMA scheduled to discontinue its funding for temporary housing assistance next February, many on Maui are scrambling to rebuild, while others simply won’t ever return. Those who are staying worry that the old Lahaina will be replaced by short-term rentals or single-family homes built by so-called disaster capitalists from the mainland or other countries, developers who can afford to wait however long it takes to rebuild. For the Dadez family, the past three years have been defined by displacement and trauma. They moved eight times after the disaster. This summer, they finally moved into their rebuilt home, which is just north of Front Street, Lahaina’s once-thriving historical center. The street has a new sidewalk, benches, trash cans, streetlights and shoreline railing. But only a dozen or so commercial projects have filed the paperwork needed to start building on what used to be the heart of Front Street. A single business has officially reopened — a food truck.