You don't need much of a house when the weather is nearly perfect year round. Many of the older homes in Hawaii are just shacks with electricity and plumbing. The houses built after haole invasion in the sixties are more like what you may be used to in CONUS.
Shacks were indeed , the order of the day, for early Hawaiian housing. After statehood (59) things did start changing a bit going into the 60’s. They paid more attention to setbacks because they had to adopt the national building code.
If you look at some of the aerial shots of what is left of Lahaina you can tell the older housing areas from the post-70 housing just by noting the spacing of the ash piles: older-—no gaps, newer-—spaced in a planned sort of way.