Category Archives: Planning

Do resales of “affordable” units undermine housing policy?

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“Something wrong here.”

That was the subject line of an email from a reader earlier this week.

He pointed to a story about the new condo at 801 South Street, on part of the site which formerly housed Honolulu’s two competing newspapers (“High-rise in Kakaako completed, owners set to move-in June“).

The story quoted Marcus and Sara Hayden, UH employees who had just closed on a unit in the building, their first experience with home ownership.

Here’s the final paragraph of the story.

Hayden also found out that the unit, which he bought for $414,000 with two parking stalls, was appraised by his lender at $480,000. Hayden and his wife expect to sell the unit in about 18 months or so to move into a larger unit in 801 South B that Sara Hayden contracted to buy before getting married. The neighboring tower is slated to be finished late next year.

The reader commented:

If people are already planning to sell their affordable priced condos at a profit before they even move in, it seems to defeat the whole concept of housing for the working people.

This wasn’t a criticism of the Haydens, but rather a question of policy.

Is this a problem for Kakaako’s few new “affordable” projects? Are there policies to limit speculation in affordable units? Perhaps someone else can fill us in.

Strong land board nominations counter worst-case views of Gov. Ige

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The nomination of Carleton Ching to serve as director of DLNR goes to the Senate floor today for a final confirmation vote.

The report of the Senate Committee on Water and Land on Governor’s Message 514 is long and unusually detailed, and worth reading.

It reads, in part:

The lack of familiarity with the subject matter of the DLNR was not surprising, given that the nominee has no job experience in the subject, nor has he volunteered for any conservation or resource projects.  What was surprising, however, was the nominee’s argument as to why the Committee should not be concerned with this fact, which seemed to be that the Committee members should simply trust him to follow the mission of the DLNR.
 
     A nomination to the position of Chairperson of the BLNR is too important to risk to an improbable candidate having no background in conservation, environmental protection, and historic preservation.
 
     Your Committee did not get a convincing impression that the nominee has an understanding of the constitutional obligations and rights that make Hawaii unique.  Many important day-to-day decisions that the Chairperson makes do not go before the BLNR or the CWRM for a vote.  These seemingly innocuous daily decisions can have an enormous impact on the public’s rights and on Hawaii’s natural, cultural, and historic resources in the short run as well as the long run.
 

Despite the negative committee recommendation, I suspect the item would not have been scheduled if the necessary 13 votes had not been nailed down by the Senate leadership. That said, it may be a close vote, surprises do happen, and internal legislative dynamics are often hard to predict from the outside. We’ll see, though, in just a few hours.

The loud public debate over Ching’s nomination has meant Governor Ige’s nominations of three members to the Board of Land and Natural Resources have been largely overlooked.

The three are Keone Downing, Ulalia Woodside, and Chris Yuen. A small business operator, a land manager, and a Big Island attorney and farmer, as well as former county planning director and a prior land board member.

The nominations provide additional clues to deciphering the governor’s posture towards DLNR. Some comments left here and on other media sites have expressed the view that Ige’s choice of Ching reflects a broader “give the key to the candy store to developers” approach.

These nominations appear to contradict that particular narrative.

Each has strong credentials. All three have track records that bridge the gap between conservation and business in a manner that hasn’t raised the red flags of environmentalists in the same way that Ching did, while reflecting the “balance” that Ige and Ching have spoken of.

In fact, I would suspect that the selection of one of these three to serve as DNLR director, while naming Ching to a seat on the land board, would have made more sense and would have caused far less controversy.

[Correction: An earlier version of this post stated, without attribution, that Ching went to intermediate school with Gov. Ige. According to Ige’s Chief of Staff, Mike McCartney, this is incorrect. They were not friends from school. I should have attributed the statement, which I saw in a post by Henry Curtis last month at his Ililani Media (“Talk Story with Carleton Ching and Kekoa Kaluhiwa“).

A further check shows that Ige graduated from high school in 1975, the same year Ching earned a degree from Boise State University. So the two would not have overlapped in either intermediate or high school.

My apologies for the error.]

Throwback Thursday: Punaluu, June 10, 1952

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It was a Tuesday in June 1952, the day before Kamehameha Day, and we were in Punaluu. It may have been a day trip, or it might have been for a week.

Yes, that’s me, a couple of months short of 5 years old, sitting on my sister Bonnie’s lap. I’m don’t recall who the other two girls are. I’ll ask Bonnie to chime in with any info she recalls.

My mother carefully dated the photo and saved it in an album that was given to me years later.

I really have no specific recollections of this visit. I do know that one one of these Punaluu vacations, I ended up with a Portuguese man o’war wrapped around my arm and shoulder. That part, at least, is not a pleasant memory.

Click on the photo to see a larger version.

June 10, 1952

And Bonnie did respond with her own recollections.

The other two girls are Punahou school friends, Nancy Woffinden and Marla Ward.

Marla’s father was a (used?) car dealer. They lived in the big Tudor-style house still at corner of Kahala Ave and Hunakai, across from one of the walking accesses to Kahala beach. Nancy’s father was a weatherman, and we joked on the whole drive from Kahala to Punalu’u via Waipahu that he made a mistake and did not send us sunny weather.

We were spending the day with Auntie Emma and Uncle Gene Dunn who had a beachfront home in Punalu’u. These swings were in the front yard, placed for their own grandchildren whom I never knew. And yes, that was where we were likely to have up close encounters with Portuguese man-of-war. I am told they are different from, and less potent than, the box jelly fish. I am certain that we took a picnic lunch that day.

Auntie Emma and her sister Auntie Alice were schoolmates of our grandmother at the Priory. Our mother said she was an adult before she realized they were not blood family.

Auntie Alice was married to John C Lane, politician, friend of Prince Kuhio, and an original member of the Queen’s Guard who was later elected mayor of Honolulu. Yes, in 1893. The Lanes lived in the first beach house at the Ka’a’awa end of Punalu’u. If i remember correctly, the originally Pat’s at Punaluu was on the mauka side of the highway between the Dunn And the Lane homes. I remember a windbreak of ironwood trees on the right side of the Dunn lot (right if I was looking at the house from the highway), a large front yard, and a modest house set down close to the beach. There was a stone wall separating the front lawn from the highway, which (with the swings just behind the wall) was always my marker in finding the house.

Let’s hear the governor’s case for DLNR nominee

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Moving on….

It’s Super Bowl Sunday. This afternoon will probably a good time to go shopping, since I imagine stores will be pretty empty. I suppose we’ll try to tune in late in the game to get a flavor of things.

Meanwhile, lots of groups have rushed to judgement and have called on Gov. Ige to withdraw his nomination of Carleton Ching to head the Department of Land and Natural Resources and the state land board, citing his past work as a lobbyist for development interests.

To some extent I agree. As my Quaker friends might say, “that’s not a name that would have occurred to me.”

But I don’t know Carleton Ching, so I would like to know more about the reasons behind this nomination instead of assuming the worst and rejecting the nomination out of hand. Why did the governor select him for this post. What qualities does the governor see Ching bringing to the job? The big problem right now, it seems to me, is that we don’t know.

Why go to war with governor without full knowledge of his thinking on this? That doesn’t seem like the most fruitful course of action at the beginning of his first four years in office.

I’m actually a believer in social roles and the way they shape both thinking and behavior. Take a developer’s lobbyist out of that position and assign him the task of managing the state’s lands and its natural resources, and he may very well throw himself into the job with enthusiasm and effectiveness.

And what about other skills? Management skills? Ability to control a large bureaucracy? Those are important. Does he have such experience? I don’t know, and would like to know.

So I’m not rushing to the barricades at this point. But I’m most curious to hear what’s said in favor of his confirmation, and at that point to try to judge what it means about Governor Ige’s leanings in this important part of state policy.