[ NEW HOME ]
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Home: Where the heart
and the wallet is
Buying a new house these days
might take effort, a lot of money and some
luck, but it all pays off in the end
The craziest thing was that out of the type of home we were looking for -- single family, first-time-buyer house -- the most affordable ones were brand new.
I'm not saying they were cheap. I almost had a heart attack signing all those papers. You tell people on the mainland the price range you're looking at, and their eyes bug out.
My eyes are still bugging out.
But they were cheaper than most anything else out there.
Specifically, when we started looking last summer, Ewa by Gentry's Las Brisas development's standard prices were starting in the lower $200,000s (and now the last few started at the mid-$200,000s with the high-end ones nearing $300,000).
My wife fell in love with one of the models and its walk-in closet during repeated tours, and that was that.
People told us there was too much traffic in Ewa Beach. Well, there's traffic everywhere. Why would you want to live there? This was the only place we had any chance of getting a house.
And they were brand new, and nice.
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The sticker still shocked us, but we took a deep breath and took the plunge.
Of course, it wasn't that simple.
The problem wasn't just finding houses in (or even out of) your price range. It was finding houses, period. Open houses had offers by the time they hit the paper. There were no available houses.
So when we went to visit the Gentry Las Brisas office to consider this seriously, they gave us a Star-Bulletin article that detailed a group of prospective buyers waiting in line -- camping out -- for days in hope of winning the privilege of giving someone more than $200,000.
These were pretty much the only houses on the island in this price range. They would be brand new. And it was first come, first served.
As you can guess, that created complications. The first 10, 11, 12 people got houses (depending on the number "released" each phase). The rest were left frustrated.
And the price went up by tens of thousands of dollars with each new set of houses, every month or few weeks, and the lines -- and the waiting lists -- started again from zero. There were always 11 cars ahead of us.
We were never going to get a house. It was starting to seem hopeless.
Everybody at Las Brisas was very nice. But it was still hopeless.
Apparently, we weren't the only ones getting frustrated. At last, Gentry tired of the lines, too, and changed the rules, going with a lottery. Our luck finally came through. We excitedly picked out our lot, on the corner, No. 145.
"Your house will be blue," they said. Oh. We hadn't realized that even that was predetermined in this all-the-same suburban planned neighborhood. Good thing we like blue.
We were excited.
We visited our dirt. We took pictures of it. We picked out which kind of carpet we wanted from the choices offered. We ordered a dishwasher, which was extra (if I'm going into debt for 30 years, I want a dishwasher).
We moved in at the end of March. They put the houses up quickly, which we also noticed on our first tour and after we moved in. But they encourage you to keep track of anything that needs to be fixed or adjusted or redone, and they do it. Which is nice.
We love having our house. Just having a house and not having to park on the street, and everything. It's just a different mind-set. It's wonderful.
My ti leaves and grass are growing (slowly). Our walls are painted (mostly). There are kids everywhere in the neighborhood (if you drive by, watch out, because they don't really look for cars).
We finally got the blinds ordered and in, which I installed myself with the help of an electric screwdriver and some colorful language.
It's really, really nice. I'm a poor man now. But we love having a house.
[ OLD HOME ]
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Kaiser’s vision created
a plush paradise
Joel Corba was 5 years old when he and his family moved into one of the first model homes in Portlock built by famed industrialist Henry J. Kaiser. It was 1960, and Hawaii Kai was considered "really out in the sticks," said Corba, recalling that Kaiser High School was a flower farm back then, Kalama Valley was pig farms and the only grocery store was a small one under a banyan tree near where the Chevron station stands today.
"It was so far from town, people called it Kaiser's Folly," said Corba, now 50, a real estate agent who still lives in Hawaii Kai.
By 1960s standards the Corba's cinder-block model home was plush. It still stands today at 535 Poipu Drive in the upscale Portlock neighborhood of Kaiser's master-planned community of neighborhoods.
Corba remembers the gold wall-to-wall carpeting, the two-car garage and three concrete slab patios. The washing machine and dryer were inside the house in a modern laundry room, quite the style statement at a time when homes that had their own washing machines kept them outside. The house, which "was built like a fortress," had a shake roof, another novelty at a time when most roofs were built of tar and white coral, said Corba.
Blond Japanese ash lined the living room walls, and the large modern kitchen with white counters had state-of-the art appliances that were avocado green, recalls Corba.
"One of the things Henry J. was big on is that every woman would have a beautiful view from their kitchen window," Corba said, "and for years my mom had a perfect view of Hahaione Valley and the Koolau Mountains."
Corba said his father, a professor of engineering at the University of Hawaii, paid $38,500 for the three-bedroom, two-bathroom house with large back, side and front yards. Corba said that was considered a fortune at the time, particularly for a house so far from town.
Corba said his parents sold the house in 1982 for about $250,000 and that today the property would sell in the range of $800,000.
Kaiser, a steel tycoon whose shipbuilding empire cranked out 1,500 vessels during World War II, saw what others could not.
Kaiser defied conventional wisdom and built a huge hotel on the blighted outskirts of Waikiki. His Hilton Hawaiian Village, which many warned would fail, sparked a wave of hotel development. He went on to build a hospital on the then-untested concept of prepaid health insurance.
Kaiser's last achievement was "the new resort city of Hawaii Kai." He wanted to put his name on the community, but the City Council only allowed him to use the first three letters of his last name.
In a 1960 newspaper account, Kaiser said he wanted to develop the 6,000 acres around Koko Head leased from Kamehameha Schools into "a veritable Venice or Newport beach." He planned a new hotel, waterfront homes, shopping centers, golf courses and schools.
In the same newspaper story, he described dredging Kuapa fishpond to make it suitable for boating and to create "20 miles of waterfront peninsulas reaching up the valleys where homeowners may have their boats right off their front yards."
Kaiser, who liked to drive his pink jeep to the top of a mountain to view the progress of Hawaii Kai, vowed that "no forest of TV antennas and utility poles and wires will mar the beauty of Hawaii Kai. Underground utilities and coaxial cable systems will go into all the neighborhoods."
