THE THIRD QUARTER CENTURY
1950-1974

Postwar years bring
economic boom

Tourism and urban development
hit highs as optimism reigned

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By Rod Antone
rantone@starbulletin.com

Statehood, the first jet planes full of tourists, and land values soaring high.

The three decades following World War II brought all those things and more. While the state's two main agricultural exports -- sugar and pineapple -- reached their peak production in the mid-1960s, a new economic era had already begun on Oahu.

"It was best described as an island where the sun would never set," said Chuck Gee, a former associate dean at the University of Hawaii college of business and now an international tourism consultant. "By the mid-'50s, visitor numbers were doubling every five years.

"The island was just full of optimism."

"This is where the state came from," said Nick Ordway, a financial economics and institutions professor at UH. "We broke away from the agricultural past to the urban future."

"As a young man coming out of college in 1959, it was a great time to get involved in the real estate business," said Wendell Brooks, former vice president of Oceanic Properties, the real estate subsidiary of Castle & Cooke. "My first weekend sitting on an open house, I sold three apartments."

"I thought I hit the mother lode."

STAR-BULLETIN / 1959 Hawaii's post-statehood building boom included the Ala Moana Center, shown under construction in April 1959. At that time, Waikiki, in the background, was relatively uncluttered as high-rises and hotels had yet to appear on the horizon.

"The word that comes to mind was 'greed,'" said former KGMB news anchor Bob Sevey. "The development in Waikiki in those years was right on the borderline of criminal.

"Those high-rises on the makai side of Kalakaua (Avenue) never should have happened."

While there might have been different perspectives of what was happening, one thing was for sure: Oahu was the focal point of the state, and it was changing to match the rapid changes of its visitor industry. According to Gee, much of it was due to Hawaii becoming the 50th state in 1959 and new jet engine technology, which cut the 10-hour trip to the islands almost in half.

"Before statehood and the jet planes, tourism was always associated with small business," said Gee. "Husband-and-wife operations, bed-and-breakfast, cottage industries."

"Then the '60s came, and it was a Wild West sort of thing, with everyone looking for a piece of property to buy or rent."

Between 1950 and 1974, domestic and international visitor numbers shot up to more than 2 million from less than 50,000.

STAR-BULLETIN / 1963 Henry J. Kaiser, overlooking Hawaii Kai in its early days, was a major player in the 1950s-'70s housing development boom.

Add that on top of an already migrating number of people from the neighbor islands, and living space on Oahu became extremely limited.

"There was a massive depopulation of the neighbor islands ... most of them coming to work," said Ordway. "It was a rather significant population shift."

As a result, the residential construction industry boomed alongside tourism. One of the more ambitious housing projects in the 1950s and 1960s was by developer Henry Kaiser, who received a lot of criticism for hauling boulders out of the wetlands of East Oahu to build his vision of a residential community, now known as Hawaii Kai.

"He was determined to go forward full blast, and he charged ahead," remembered Brooks. "One sales manager said he only lasted six months because Kaiser would call him every hour and ask him how many homes he had sold."

"But nobody thought he was crazy ... a little ambitious, maybe, but not crazy."

The 1960s also brought another change with Hawaii becoming the first state to pass a condominium law, known then as the Horizontal Property Regime. The idea of owning single units quickly proved to be a popular real estate option.

"The number of single-family dwellings dropped down from perhaps 5,000 or 6,000 units a year to 2,500," said Brooks. "Condos in Waikiki and Makiki, meanwhile, soared up to 10,000 a year."

By the mid-'70s the real estate boom had tapered off, though tourism was still going on strong and would not show a decrease in visitor numbers until 1980. It was a downward trend which, for the most part, would go unnoticed.

"Tourism was always good," recalled Sevey. "We never had any major stories about tourism numbers or that sort of thing.

"It was there, and we thought perhaps it would go on forever."