Dean Sensui, former photographer and photo editor at the old Honolulu Star-Bulletin, had an thoughtful Facebook post yesterday. Hopefully he won’t object to my sharing some of it.
So many deplore development and want it stopped. A good idea, perhaps. But who is willing to give up their homes and go elsewhere?
Pearlridge didn’t exist prior to 1970. Are they willing burn down their homes, plant a forest in its place and leave Hawaii?
Much of Leeward Oahu was ag land. Cane fields. Moanalua Road was an oil-coated cane haul road until the 1970s. Waipahu High School’s newspaper is called the “Cane Tassel”, yet there are no cane fields to be seen anywhere.
Same with upper Pearl City. Hawaii Loa Ridge. Village Park. Makakilo. Kapolei. Crestview. Waipio Gentry. Mililani.
Cane and pineapple fields are now subdivisions.
Yes, things were very different way back when.
Coincidentally, I ran into a few old photographs that document the “Before” for the area from Wahiawa down to Waipahu and Pearl Harbor. My mother took these while we were on a family outing in August 1957. They were taken from Mauna Kapu, up in Palehua, looking down at the Central Oahu area, down to Pearl Harbor. This was well before any significant urban development in that part of the island. Now it’s hard to even imagine those agricultural open spaces, or how the population growth to come could have been handled in a way that wasn’t so dependent on suburban sprawl.
Here’s one of the photos. Click on it for links to larger versions of all four photos.
![[text]](http://ilind.net/oldkine_images/view_from_palehua/source/image/before--1.jpg)
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Adding a bunch of condo towers to Pearl City is a totally lame brain idea no matter what one thinks about the broader issues of where we are and where we are going.
If you don’t mind, please share why it is lame.
The infrastructure is already there, so it doesn’t require disturbing undisturbed area.
Yes, there is infrastructure that needs to be upgraded, but is it better to extend outward? That is what Honolulu has been doing and its why the city gets more expensive to maintain.
Not building anything makes sense if the population is stagnant or shrinking. Honolulu’s population isn’t doing either of those things, and it’s not projected to go in those directions.
What is the better plan?
1) Freeway access is terrible.
2) The roads are already reliever routes for H-1
3) the area is a traffic mess already
4) only a small percentage of people will go without cars
5) a huge amount of land is available to the west
I’m interpreting Bill’s Comment No. 5, that “a huge amount of land is available to the west” to mean that to keep building outward is the better plan.
I disagree, if that’s what you meant. Feel free to correct me if I am interpreting you incorrectly.
No. 5 is not the better plan. It is the existing plan. Approvals are already in place for tens of thousands of homes to the west. And a residential high rise project is being proposed for the Kapolei business district.
Stacking the Pearl City traffic corridor with high rise condos is going to be a disaster. I respect you may see things different. But I would be very surprised if there was a significant number of homeowners in the area that support this.
Ah, thanks for the clarification. So your No. 5 is to continue to develop the second city to its full extent, but not go beyond its boundaries.
I agree with you then, that this is the current plan for developing Oahu.
And thank you for respecting my difference of opinion. I am in favor of sticking to the current plans that allow existing urban areas (wherever they are) to be developed.
If a ship sinks, can passengers on a crowded lifeboat direct others still in the water to use other less crowded nearby lifeboats, or would they need to jump into the water to avoid hypocrisy?
In a practical sense, I don’t understand why it should be necessary to raze existing homes to ward off the harm that will come with further development. If you have enough natural drinking water for existing residents but would need to resort to desalination or toilet to tap to further develop the area, is it unreasonable to be of the opinion that further development should either not occur or occur elsewhere? We have terrible traffic problems out here, is it unreasonable to want to see traffic conditions improve rather than worsen?
There is a harm tolerance threshold, development is fine up until that threshold is reached. Where that threshold lies we each have to decide for ourselves. However, to make that decision, we need information about our situation as well as our options. Talk to people in West Oahu. Most people don’t know that we are headed toward desalinated drinking water. There are still lots of people around who think rail is going to make traffic better than it is now. Our ability to make sound decisions is being thwarted by the deficient dissemination of information.
No argument with you, Undecided, about limited resources.
But there is the practical matter of what to do with an increasing amount of people who want to live here. What is the solution? If Hawaii is not going to implement policies to turn people away, we are also creating an impending disaster by not planning for the increase in people.
So I say, we do something, and until there’s a better suggestion out there, the solution is plan for growth and build smartly. (You can disagree about what that means.)
Setting aside the concept of seniority, let’s say for the sake of argument that we did agree to level our existing homes in Leeward Oahu and return the land to nature or food production in exchange for not allowing any development here. If we did that, where would all the population growth for the rest of Oahu then be directed?
Whatever the answer to that question is, maybe that’s where development should be going now.
For a while now, I’ve been espousing the idea of growing upward in the urban core instead of out in the country. In my opinion, if we continue to pursue population growth, that growth should take place between the airport and UH and should include a comprehensive public transportation system that may very well include a rail system that would travel at, above, or below ground level as most appropriate. It would be much cheaper to develop, operate, and maintain as well as pay for eventual capital rehabilitation and replacement costs for a shorter rail system running between the airport and UH than a much longer system extending out to Kapolei.
Rail and transit-oriented development has potential but we are overdosing on it by extending it so far out of town. It may be that extending the rail, by itself, to West Oahu would slow the growth rate of traffic slightly. But if the changed zoning densities and increased height limits of transit-oriented development accompany rail to the west, any beneficial effect on traffic rail may have had will be more than erased.
In spite of the name, in the vast majority of TODs, most residents continue to drive. In California, residents of transit-oriented developments, on average, use transit for only about 25 percent of the trips they make. A few walk or ride bikes, but most use automobiles to get around. Along the rail route, those transit-oriented development based autos will add to the traffic problem.
When you consider that an increase in the number of cars is a consequence of population growth that rail can have an effect on but not eliminate, doing what we can to limit the distance in which those cars travel to a relatively small geographical area seems to make more sense than extending that area of car travel to a span of more than 20 miles that is severely short of road capacity. It would also be greener.
Another advantage to clustering growth into a more compact area becomes apparent when you look at another mode of travel, biking. A bike ride of, at most, and often much less than 7 to 8 miles between Kalihi and UH is a lot less daunting than a bike ride of closer to 20 miles starting out from West Oahu. At these shorter distances, bike riding becomes a viable alternative to driving in traffic. Additionally, shorter trips made using public transit between points within the urban core would be much less time consuming and therefore much more pleasant than longer public transit trips between West and Central Oahu and the urban core.
Also, in the urban core the success of the live, work, play concept is much more assured. What would happen to Westside to Town traffic if you built the homes in the west but most of the high-paying jobs materialized in town instead of in the “Second City”? Is job location truly something that can be controlled by our government without risk of failure?
How confident should we really be that our city and state will be able to create and situate enough jobs, and enough demand for the output of those jobs, where they need to be in order to create a true second city on Oahu? They’ve been at it for some time now haven’t they? If we are to continue on our present course, those jobs will need to be there on the Ewa Plain at the right time. If they aren’t, we’ll have a much worse traffic problem to deal with than planned for. Considering that we can always expand later, if we choose to do so, doesn’t it make sense to finish developing the in town stretch between the airport and the university campus in Manoa first?
Many of us from the Leeward Side have sacrificed what feels like an exorbitant amount of time from our lives to traffic for decades. Our traffic problem is serious. It is more than spoiled view planes that are of concern to us, it’s time away from family and other pursuits, every working day. Even if some of us, for whatever reason, don’t seem to mind losing so much more of our lives to traffic compared to residents from other parts of Oahu, that does not make resistance to increased traffic an unreasonable or selfish act for those of us who do.
Our traffic problem is already bad enough. It would be a mistake to make it worse when there is a better option available that would reduce traffic’s rate of increase for Westside and Central residents while still accomodating population growth for Oahu as a whole. Granted, depending on who you talk to, and what day of the week you talk to them on, we may end up with less economic growth if we shorten the rail route, and a number of landowners along the route wouldn’t experience the windfalls they supported rail to obtain, but in return for this many of us would end up with a much improved quality of life.
To this end, let’s keep the rail in the city so we can keep the country country and preserve our ag lands to help ensure that we will always be fed in this changing world.
Undecided, what is the “better option available that would reduce traffic’s rate of increase for Westside and Central residents.”
You use a lot of words to get to that suggestion, but you don’t provide anything that supports that mysterious alternative.