My story in the current Honolulu Weekly recounts problems between buyers and Crescent Heights, the developer at the luxury Koolani condominium in Kakaako. I understand that it ran under the headline, “The war at home”. This story resulted from my curiosity about the real situation in these new high-rise communities, and it turns out there’s a whole lot going on that business reporters aren’t attending to.

I’ve received several inquiries and comments about the story. Here’s one.

Thanks for the article a about this condo. I was involved in the sale of a unit and saw first hand how Crescent Height operates. I was mystified when they notified the Buyers of an advanced closing date when the building was nowhere near finished. The effect of this is to trigger the Buyers mortgage and pay off the developer. In other words, they got their money two to four months early. On a big project like this, the construction interest is a real big deal so by doing so, they really got a big savings or subsidy from the hapless buyers.

Crescent Heights did even better on the Ala Moana Hotel where they closed on the individual sales to Buyers even before they started renovation of the individual units. Then at a later date, the Buyer would lose use of his unit for three months while they did the renovation, although he still had to pay his maintenance fees and other costs.

Crescent Heights was lucky in being able to take advantage of the real estate boom and get away with these kinds of tactics. So please keep up the publicity since the mainstream papers don’t mention this.

By the time you read this, we’ll either be home or close to home after several days in Atlanta, over there in the middle of what they’re now calling a “historic drought”.

Meda was busy with the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, her primary professional organization, while I was upstairs in our room at the Marriott Marquis Hotel tethered to my MacBook Pro and Sprint wireless connection.

The high points, as far as I am concerned, were our day out on a thrift shop tour led by former Hawaii journalist Karen Waygood, now settled here in Atlanta and a regular in the thrift store circuit, and our walk over to the High Museum of Art, a wonderful museum with an outstanding collection.

We had been reading about the drought for weeks before the trip. It had been announced that Atlanta has less than 90 days of drinking water left, which made me wonder when they start closing down hotels to save water. But when we got here, we were surprised to find few signs of drought visible to visitors. Our hotel didn’t didn’t make any visible efforts to save water. None of those common hotel requests to save water by reusing towels and sheets were present. Beyond water-saving fixtures in the rooms, nothing about a drought was seen or heard in the hotel. I can’t believe that more isn’t being done now that the drinking water supply is reportedly down to a matter of weeks.

In any case, just click on the photo for a few of my visual impressions of Atlanta.

Meanwhile, I’ll be posting as usual tomorrow.