Baldwin Avenue Turns Over Every Season. The Forty Acres Behind It Just Moved After Years.

Walk Baldwin Avenue on any Saturday this August and count the storefronts you don't remember from last year. You'll lose count somewhere past four. A bath and body shop with a fragrance lab where you blend your own scent. A kava lounge that knocked down an interior wall and started serving shepherd's pie. A tattoo studio run by a Maui-born artist who spent a season on cable television. Even the boba bar on the corner has quietly changed hands. None of this is unusual for Paia. What is unusual sits just west of the avenue, on forty acres of former sugarcane land that just cleared a hurdle it hadn't cleared in years.

Those two facts, the churn on the avenue and the movement behind it, run on entirely different clocks. Confuse one for the other and you'll misread what's actually happening in this town right now.

The Avenue Remembers in Seasons, Not Years

Storefronts in Paia turn over the way tide pools refill. A lease ends, a new tenant repaints the same small storefront, and within a season the block reads as new again. Right now the roster looks like this:

That's a normal amount of turnover for a two-block commercial strip in a town of roughly 2,500 residents. What makes this particular round of openings worth a second look is where three of them came from.

Where the New Signs Are Actually Coming From

Maui Memories, a fashion and art boutique, reopened on Baldwin Avenue this past winter. It used to be on Front Street in Lahaina. Belle Surf Café & Lounge is now operating out of Paia as its flagship location, after its original spot on Front Street was destroyed in the Lahaina fire. The Jewelry Stand Maui, which sells locally designed pieces made with ecologically harvested black coral and semiprecious stones, is another former Lahaina business that found its second life here.

That's the part the storefront count alone won't tell you. Some of what reads as Paia's commercial expansion is really West Maui's displacement, businesses that lost their physical address in 2023 and rebuilt somewhere the rent made sense and the foot traffic still existed. Paia didn't grow those tenants. It absorbed them. Worth knowing if you're trying to read the town's commercial health off the number of new signs alone.

The Forty Acres That Just Moved

Here's what didn't happen on a seasonal clock. In May 2026, the Maui County Council's Housing and Land Use Committee voted 7-0 to forward the EC Paia Town project to the Maui Planning Commission. The site sits mauka of Hana Highway, makai of the former Paia Mill, and west of Baldwin Avenue, on land currently used for cattle grazing.

The developer, Sam Hirbod, operates through a company called EC Paia, which purchased roughly 340 acres of former Alexander & Baldwin sugarcane and mill land. Only 40 of those acres are designated for development under the Maui Island Plan. The remaining 300 stay in agriculture. What's proposed for the 40:

• Up to 170 homes
• Commercial space
• A medical clinic
• A public parking lot of roughly 200 stalls
• Relocation of the existing Paia mini-bypass road westward, with the current bypass converted into a greenway for pedestrians and cyclists

None of this is built, or even fully entitled. The committee vote sends the project to the Planning Commission, and the full Council still has to ratify the recommendation before that happens. This is a years-long process that just moved one procedural step forward, not a groundbreaking.

The Argument Under the Vote

Public testimony on the project split the way it usually does when open land near a small town gets a development proposal. Longtime Paia resident Francine "Aunty Mopsy" Aarona testified in support, telling the committee:

"I am for growth, but smart growth."

Opponents worried the project would erode the plantation-town character that makes Paia recognizable in the first place. When testimony suggested the project was driven by outside corporate money, the developer's attorney, Cal Chipchase, pushed back directly:

"Sam is EC Paia. It's his company. There isn't a conglomerate behind him."

The detail that matters most for anyone who actually parks in Paia on a Saturday is the 200-stall lot. A lack of parking has been a persistent headache in this town for years, the kind of chronic friction that shows up in every community meeting regardless of what else is on the agenda. A dedicated public lot addresses that specific, long-standing complaint directly, which is likely why even some skeptics of the broader project single out the parking piece as the part worth supporting.

What Doesn't Move at All

None of this touches the one clock in Paia that answers to nobody. Trade winds pick up over Ho'okipa most afternoons regardless of what's approved at the Planning Commission, and the beach's competition calendar runs on its own schedule too. This spring's Quatro Maui Pro, a 5-star World Cup windsurfing event, ran its closing ceremony out of Paia Bay Coffee & Bar, one of the town's most recognizable open-air spots. Storefronts will keep turning over on Baldwin Avenue. The EC Paia Town project will keep working its way through hearings for years yet. The wind at Ho'okipa isn't waiting on either one.

If you're trying to figure out what actually changed in your town this year, that's the sort thing worth being able to sort out clearly. And if you're weighing what any of it means for property here, whether you're watching the entitlement process for a specific reason or just curious what a 200-stall parking lot might do to values on the makai side of Baldwin, the MacArthur Team Maui has been tracking Paia long enough to tell you which changes are noise and which ones are signal. Call or text the team to start the conversation.