My parents bought a small 3-bedroom home along Kealaolu Avenue in Kahala at the beginning of 1942, when it was located on the boundary between the city and the country.

“When we gave directions of where we were, we used to say that we were on the last street within the city limits because many businesses didn’t deliver past here,” my mother, Helen Yonge Lind, said in an oral history interview in 2000.

They stayed in the house for the rest of their lives, and over those seven decades, the neighborhood changed dramatically around them.

A 2006 story in Pacific Business News by Janis Magin captured the angst my parents, both then 92, were experiencing.

The backyard of John and Helen Lind’s Kahala home is seeing more shade from the afternoon sun these days.

The house viewed from the back yard.

It’s not from the large mango tree they planted behind their home in 1947, but from the two-story home being built next door, which towers over the Linds’ 63-year-old single-story house on Kealaolu Avenue.

On the other side of the Lind home, a concrete foundation awaits the frame for another two-story house. A concrete block wall erected over three days in June replaced Helen Lind’s croton hedge, which had separated the two properties for years.

Sandwiched between these two residential construction projects is the 1,200-square-foot, three-bedroom house the Linds bought in 1943 for $6,000, “less $100,” John Lind said. “There was a scratch on the floor.”

But, Magin wrote, Kahala was being redeveloped at a rapid pace.

“Solid yet aging homes like those owned by the Linds are fast disappearing, replaced by massive designer homes that dominate the mostly 10,000- to 12,000-square-foot lots,” she wrote, noting that “[t]he new construction is not only changing the look of the neighborhood, but the economics as well.”

It has become a high-priced area where even teardowns can sell for several million dollars.

The conclusion of the PBN story circled back to my parents’ view.

The Linds’ house takes advantage of the trade winds and the outside, with a small yard filled with flowers and fruit trees. But given its age and size, it likely would be considered a teardown if they were to put it up for sale, something the couple, who are both in their 90s, don’t plan to do.

Helen Lind remembers the days when homes had good-sized yards and neighbors knew each other, before the walls were built around big new houses.

“They’re out of place here,” she said of the new homes, then paused. Maybe, she said, “we’re out of place in our own neighborhood.”

I remember my mother’s rather wistful memories of the old Kahala, before walls and gates and security systems cut neighbors off from each other.

I grew up knowing that there was a 7-foot panax hedge between our house and the neighbors on either side, ostensibly providing lots of privacy, but there were also three-foot gaps through the hedges, evidence of the frequent visits back and forth over the years.

“It’s not the same,” my mother would say about her home and her neighborhood. I don’t recall her saying that the new crop of homeowners had wrecked the neighborhood, but that was certainly what I understood was behind her words.

Being of a certain age, I’m now no stranger to that feeling of being “out of place.”

He said with a sigh.