Two federal lawsuits filed in mid-2024 challenge Hawaii's practice of evicting residents from their homes based on ancestry requirements. The cases target the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, a state agency that restricts long-term homestead leases to people who can prove they have at least 50% Native Hawaiian blood. According to a legal analysis published by the Foundation for Economic Education, these rules force current tenants out of their apartments and deny housing to thousands of applicants based solely on their family lineage—a practice that would be illegal for any other government housing program in the country.

The agency's blood quantum standard stems from a 1920 federal law that defines a Native Hawaiian as someone descended from "not less than one-half part of the blood of the races inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands previous to 1778." This narrow definition has created a waitlist exceeding 30,000 applicants, with some people waiting more than four decades for a homestead lease. The problem intensified last year when the Department purchased an 82-unit private apartment complex in Kauai and converted it to a rent-to-own program reserved exclusively for residents meeting the 50% ancestry threshold. The plaintiffs include Eric Ryan, whose application was immediately rejected because he doesn't meet the blood quantum cutoff, Linda Twitchell, a non-Native Hawaiian tenant facing eviction after seven years in her apartment, and David Kalahika, who is 25% Native Hawaiian and will lose his home to someone on the waitlist who clears the 50% bar.

Hawaii Governor Josh Green pledged to vigorously defend the statute, while Attorney General Anne Lopez stated the program has "provided opportunities, stability, and hope to generations of Native Hawaiian beneficiaries." The plaintiffs counter that the ancestry requirement violates constitutional equal protection guarantees. According to the analysis, the evictions are particularly questionable because they displace current residents while the governor simultaneously claims the law is meant to remedy dispossession. The report notes that a 1920 House report justified the original law by citing concerns about excessive social assimilation and declining native populations, though some scholars have characterized the blood quantum rule as a dispossession tool disguised as protection.

The evicted residents are being pushed back into a volatile housing market where renters struggle to find affordable options and most must spend over 30% of monthly income on rent. The analysis argues that forcing people out of their homes through discriminatory ancestry rules worsens housing insecurity across the state rather than alleviating it. The lawsuits also question whether the Department even has authority under the 1920 Act to buy private property and convert it to Hawaiian home lands, since the law's stated purpose was to preserve land previously held by the Hawaiian monarchy—not to acquire new properties and evict existing tenants.

The courts will need to determine whether ancestry-based housing restrictions can continue to exist and whether they justify removing residents from their homes. For now, Hawaii retains the power to tell people they aren't Native Hawaiian enough and evict them based on a rigid government-imposed genealogical standard that exists nowhere else in American housing policy.