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Saturday, February 5, 2000
What will rise from the ashes
Vancouver offers one possible future
of Andy Anderson's spiked
Ferris wheel-marketplace plan?
It's time to look beyond standard
development concepts and seek
out fresh ideas for using public
land for public benefit
Encourage activity that enriches lives By Alex Achimore
Special to the Star-BulletinSO, what's next for Kakaako? Now that the competition for development rights at Kewalo Basin has collapsed, what can we hope for? And what should be happening now to get it right the next time?
In the last 10 years, there have been a host of proposals regarding what to do with the makai area of Kakaako -- the almost 200 acres of state-owned land lying between Honolulu Harbor and Kewalo Basin. We now have the Waterfront Park, really still just grass holding the area ready for some bigger ideas, and the Children's Discovery Center -- probably the best success story to date in redevelopment of this area.
But a clear strategy for redevelopment of the other parcels, including the Kewalo waterfront, the land where the city parks its garbage trucks, and the land under the Produce Center, continues to elude the Hawaii Community Development Authority (HCDA) -- the state agency holding title to and responsible for these properties.
The lack of direction was clear in the manner in which HCDA pursued the recent development offering that D.G. "Andy" Anderson is crying foul over. Essentially, HCDA was asking the private sector to contribute its ideas to the planning process -- hoping that the right idea would surface. Ignoring for a moment who got eliminated and why, the ideas submitted included:
Another idea, developed earlier in a planning exercise HCDA paid for in 1992-93, proposed a new health and wellness center to solidify Hawaii's tentative hold on this growing business sector.Two mini-golf courses; one of them, in combination with a Ferris wheel, merry-go-round and retail, constituted Anderson's proposal;
The wellness concept acknowledged that while Hawaii may never compete with Stanford Medical Center or the University of Texas for high-intervention medicine that foreigners may seek in the United States, we could still take the lead in addressing concerns of relatively healthy but aging baby boomers. This would offer the world an additional reason to travel to Hawaii -- to get maintenance check-ups, possibly some therapy, and tailored information on how one can lead long and vital lives.
The outer islands are well-suited to provide the therapy, recuperative environment and health maintenance information, and certain institutions like Earl Bakken's North Hawaii Community Hospital have pursued this niche vigorously. Nevertheless, the wellness concept developed for HCDA envisioned a centrally located, first-stop facility, as well as a site for in-depth research and information storage as a necessary piece for Hawaii to take full advantage of this opportunity.
The makai area, with its spectacular and inspiring site, room for fitness facilities in the park, and central location, was seen as ideal for such a bold new idea.
Obviously, this idea never got much attention, and is now joined on the shelf by those submitted in the recent development competition. Taking a look at them all together, we can categorize some as:
A) Amusement parks with various rides.Whether or not the right idea has surfaced yet, the argument can be made that these are public lands and should serve purely public purposes, such as economic diversification, as well as providing recreation facilities that don't charge admission. They should not be used to develop simply more of what we already have and/or can be built on nearby private lands.
B) Themed retail and restaurants.
C) Economic diversifiers -- concepts that try to create different types of jobs with higher salaries than the largely service-based wages of the visitor industry.
A different approach
It is difficult, some may say impossible in Hawaii, for large private landowners to support the development of new industries that will take us in different directions. The way commercial loans are evaluated and "fiduciary duty" is legally defined conspire to limit innovation and instead promote doing more of what has been done before.In other words, don't expect Victoria Ward or even the reinvented Kamehameha Schools, the other major landowners in Kakaako, to offer property to wildly innovative new businesses. On the other hand, these and other institutions can greatly assist in the expansion of support and spin-off industries that are initiated by other means.
Therefore, let's use public lands to generate something we can't get any other way, such as helping businesses that offer jobs in new areas to get established here.
So, how do we go forward and use our lands for such publicly beneficial purposes?
Clearly HCDA needs to move in more productive directions and perhaps community input has been the missing ingredient in the search for the right development concepts.
Granville Island, across a 200-foot inlet from downtown Vancouver, B.C., is a good example of a community-driven development that is extremely successful.
The similarities to the makai area are uncanny -- both are former industrial lands, on landfill in the heart of the city, and controlled by an authority that supersedes city government. In fact, Granville was cited by two of the 11 recent proposals as a model for the makai area. Granville Island contains a farmer's market, a marina, boat repair yard, artists' studios, an art college, a performing arts center, numerous restaurants, playgrounds and day care, a small hotel, and even a cement plant -- a holdover from its industrial past.More importantly, Granville was developed through a community visioning process led by design professionals, but driven by the rank and file.
The resulting concept was defined as an "urban park" -- not merely playing fields and open space, but also all the community-enriching facilities that can't meet the financial tests demanded by fiduciaries and commercial banks. Rent is collected (the farmer's market grosses more than $1,000 per square foot per year), and the project receives no subsidy from the government, but clearly the rents charged are not based on some mythical "highest and best" use, but rather on the tenant's ability to pay and its value to the community.
Granville is a great model, and surely there is a comparable solution for us in the makai area. It will take a broad-based discussion to arrive at the right idea, however; the top-down government solutions of the past and recent "let's see what's out there" tapping into private developer's minds will not take us where we need to go. While consensus-building is difficult and requires leadership as much as listening, it may be necessary just to get developers to return to the table.
If nothing else, Andy Anderson is right when he states that the recent seemingly arbitrary process turns off developers. They will be reluctant to participate in any new offering until they believe that the direction is supported by the broad community and can't be changed by the whim of a few politicos.
What do we do now?
Here are a few suggestions:
If so, staffing levels and required staff expertise should be reviewed, in order to create an entrepreneurial agency more comfortable with the freedom from government rules pertaining to real estate that it was originally given.
All of this is possible, but it will take outside pressure to make it happen. A coalition of community groups representing economic development, recreation and environmental concerns needs to gather to push this public development in the right direction. And the time is now. While rumors are circulating about the economy's imminent recovery, it certainly hasn't gotten any broader. The makai area still represents one of the state's best opportunities to push an economic development agenda with a real asset -- prime land. This could have happened years ago; let's not wait any longer.
| | |Alex Achimore, an architect and urban planner, was planning director for the HCDA from 1995-1998. Later he consulted for one of the teams vying for development rights in the makai area. He now lives in Davis, Calif., and manages development projects for the University of California.
Granville Island, across a small inlet from downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, has striking similarities to the makai area of Kakaako -- both are former industrial sites, on landfill in the heart of the city, and controlled by an authority that supersedes city government. Granville Island is a successful example of a community-driven development that could serve as a model for how Kewalo Basin looks in the future. One possible future
for KakaakoVancouver's Granville Island
teems with fun and commerce
Government should
By Burl Burlingame
encourage activity that
enriches our lives
Star-BulletinThe state's failure of vision in "redeveloping" the Kakaako district is symptomatic of a deeper disease in Hawaii's government, that of equating financial excess with quality of life. The way we live is not nearly as important as the way we spend. There is a fixation on products that provide tangible, empirical results -- like dollars in the bank -- while intangible assets -- education, culture and community health -- are given short shrift. This is fallout from generations of caretaker power-structures in the islands, ranging from the patriarchy of Hawaiian royalty, to plantation-centered economies, to being a ward of the American government. Although Hawaii has been a state since 1959, those who run our government still act is if we're in Big Business' pocket, in which the value of our labor goes elsewhere and cultural necessities are superfluous.
That's not the way the real world operates. Most governments around the world, even the most extreme, recognize that safeguarding and shepherding the intangibles of community life are a core function of government. A healthy culture is not just indicated by employment figures and bankruptcy rates; it is also tied to the sense of tradition, history and caring about the community. Being a citizen isn't a job, it's a way of life.
Kakaako is a prime example of psychologically not being able to get off the plantation. The concept of "highest and best use" to our planners meant simply maximizing revenue, and what is best for the community was ignored. The attempt to gentrify Kakaako, to reinvent it as a sterile landscape of A-list hotels, theme parks, upscale businesses and swank malls meant destroying it as Honolulu's middle-class economic engine. It was the place where small businesses gave Honolulu character and a middle-class economy within the urban core. Many were forced to scatter and relocate, or go out of business. Destroying this district without creating an alternative not only helped sink our economy during the '90s, it creates a service economy, in which citizens serve the visiting rich and vacationing tourists, and -- as usual -- profits go elsewhere.
Take that huge vacant lot near Ala Moana Center, in which Wal-Mart has expressed an interest after it sat fallow for years. Hawaii politicians were only too eager to cheer on a financially shaky proposal, with the result of hundreds of small businesses scoured away and replaced by a single corporate giant whose profits will not remain here.
Hawaii government is consistently anti-education and anti-culture. A use plan commissioned by the Legislature for potential museum and cultural uses for Barbers Point was completely ignored by planners because museums are neither businesses nor formal education centers, so there was no "slot" for them.
Museums, cultural events and historical centers go begging for basic operating expenses, instead of being assets that create Hawaii's sense of place -- and international marketability. A planned historical festival is refused promotion by the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism because museums and historical centers are not considered legitimate contributors to the local economy. Hawaii's landmarks are crumbling and landscapes are going to seed while legislators sit on their thumbs and wait for a international corporate Big Brother to bail them out, despite the damage to Hawaii's unique and irreplaceable qualities.
Plantation days are over. Big Brother has sold us out. Time to join the grown-up world.
Star-Bulletin writer Burl Burlingame helped create
some of the concept plans listed above.
