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Some Hawaiians choose to live on the Big Island, where land is more affordable but where there’s an active volcano.

PAHOA, Hawaii — Jaris Dreaming built his spacious solar-powered home in a clearing of Polynesian jungle. He drinks rainwater and eats avocados from trees in his backyard. Mainlanders express envy when they hear how he bought nearly 100 acres of Hawaii’s Big Island for just over $100,000.

But there’s a catch to this offgrid paradise: Dreaming lives a short stroll from a lava-spewing rift of Kilauea, one of the world’s most active volcanoes.

The growing ferocity this month of Kilauea’s eruptions, which are burying home after home under rivers of molten rock, has provoked questions about how thousands of families managed to put down stakes in such a disaster-prone domain in the first place.

Puna, the magnificently forested region of the Big Island where some of Kilauea’s most intense eruptions are taking place, ranks among the most remote corners of the U.S., luring real estate developers, renegades and modern-day homesteaders with colossal appetites for risk.

“We have a reputation for being something of a pirate’s lair,” said Dreaming, 64, who was raised in New Jersey with the name John Fattorosi. “But we really just want to live freely in a place of stunning beauty without anyone telling us what to do.”

While rattling people here who generally want little to do with mainstream culture, the destruction unleashed by Kilauea is also exposing fault lines in Hawaiian society, focusing scrutiny on the state’s severe housing shortage and the questionable land use regulations that governed the development of one of the Aloha State’s last bastions of affordable property.

Land developers minimized any volcanic risks, and they were not without support: a prominent volcanologist at the University of Hawaii, bolstered Leilani Estates, the now evacuated rural outpost overrun by lava flows in some areas, by claiming that there was little risk to the development from a volcanic eruption.

Mario Tama / Getty Images

Tamir Kalifa / New York Times Emanuel Roditis is led out of his burning house as lava from Kilauea advances through his property in Pahoa, Hawaii.