What We Heard in Honolulu: Housing, Data, and the Value of Real Connection

UrbanForm was lucky enough to spend some time in Honolulu last week alongside Haylee Ulrey of Autom Insights and Aaron Moffatt of White Rabbit Ashland for "Using Technology to Tackle the Housing Crisis" at Hawaii Tech Week, and the conversation left us energized.

The panel was built around using data and AI to decode the vast amounts of information need to make decisions at the city and state level, including zoning and other economic data. This was about connecting the right information to the right decisions, driving smarter housing policy, and trading playbooks with Hawaii's housing and civic-tech community. The room also got a look at Jerryck Murrey's work with Annum Housing, adding another piece to the picture of what's being built across housing tech right now.

Three things came through loud and clear.

Affordability is the shared starting point. Whether the conversation was about Oregon or Hawaii, every path led back to the same question: how do we make housing more attainable for the people who actually live in these communities. Different tools, different regions, same urgency.

Data accessibility changes who gets to participate. A recurring theme across the panel was how much friction disappears when zoning and housing data is actually usable, not buried in a PDF or locked behind a phone call to City Hall. When residents, developers, and planners can all see the same information, the whole conversation about housing gets more honest and more productive.

Transparency builds trust faster than anything else. The rooms where housing policy moves forward are the ones where the process is visible. People don't need every answer handed to them, they need to be able to see how the answer was reached. That's true whether you're a homeowner asking what you can build or a policymaker deciding where to invest.

And maybe the best part of the night wasn't on stage at all. It was the connections made in the room afterward, between people building housing tools on opposite sides of the Pacific who are now talking about how their work overlaps. That's the kind of thing that doesn't show up in a panel recap but ends up mattering the most.

So much of this housing work is thanks to our partnership with Southern Oregon Regional Economic Development, Inc., and we were honored to get to showcase it in Honolulu. We're grateful to Autom Insights for hosting, to everyone on stage and in the room, and to Hawaii Tech Week for creating the space for this conversation to happen. This felt like the start of something, and we're looking forward to seeing where it goes.