Can We Make Honolulu Cool?

What is smart growth? To find out,
HONOLULU met with five government and private groups planning smart growth in
Kapolei and urban Honolulu. We also spoke with some of smart growth’s critics
here and on the Mainland. OK, urban planning doesn’t reach out and thrill, well,
almost anyone as a subject. But in the coming years, it could change a lot about
how you live, where you work, how you get around town every day. If you want to
know how, read on.

Smart growth is an amorphous, politically loaded catchphrase.
To understand it, one first has to understand its opposite, another politically
loaded catchphrase-“sprawl.”

Sprawl could define every square foot of growth
that American cities have experienced since the end of World War II. Sprawl is
you, where you live right now. It is the spread of single family homes, freeways,
highways, strip malls, shopping centers, industrial parks and the like. It is
the planning model that says a parcel of land should have only one use-housing
separated from commercial, separated from retail, separated from industrial. “We
the city] have created sprawl ourselves by zoning five, 50 or 500 acres of land
at a time for homes only, instead of for all the services a community needs,”
explains Eric Crispin, an architect by training and now director of the city’s
Department of Planning and Permitting.

Those who build sprawl call it “development.”
If you live in sprawl, you probably call it your “neighborhood.” Sprawl’s defenders,
such as the American Dream Coalition, insist that large suburbs of single-family
homes, and the roads and cars that connect them to other services, have allowed
unprecedented numbers of Americans to afford their own homes, leading happier,
more productive, more private lives than at any other time in American history.
You, too, may think you’re very happy with your home in the suburbs, your garage,
your yard where your kids can play.

But sprawl’s critics-from the Sierra
Club to former vice president Al Gore-survey the spread of homes, garages, McDonalds
and Wal-Marts and see a wasteful use of land that threatens the environmental
and cultural health of the nation.

Above all, sprawl’s critics don’t like
your car. Sprawl has made us “overdependent” on automobiles, the city has argued.
There are too many freeways and too few bicycle paths and walkways. The anti-sprawl
mentality is neatly captured in a 1998 speech Gore gave to the Brookings Institute:
“We drive the same majestic scenery, but in too many places, the land is burdened
by an ugliness that leaves us with a quiet sense of sadness. Acre upon acre of
asphalt have transformed what were once mountain clearings and congenial villages
into little more than massive parking lots.”

If sprawl is a poison-and you
may want to think for a moment if you really consider your home, your street,
your neighborhood Safeway to be “an ugliness that burdens the land”-than smart
growth is sold as the antidote. “It’s an attempt to go back to the way we designed
cities before World War II,” explains architect Tim Van Meter, who is advising
the city on planning.

In local terms, this means neighborhoods such as Chinatown
or Wai’alae Avenue, as opposed to Mililani or Waikele. Instead of low-density
housing (detached single-family homes with yards), smart growth urges higher densities.
Instead of designating a parcel of land for a single use, it advocates mixed-use
zoning. Take a look at the before-and-after images of Liliha Street on pages 72
and 73, for example-older apartments would be replaced with buildings offering
retail on the ground floor, residential and even office space on higher floors.

before

Liliha and Kuakini Streets This is Liliha Street in Kalihi as it looks now. What do we see? Overhead electrical wires, low-rise housing with no street presence, single-use zoning, meaning a parcel can either be business or residential, but not both, separates the residences from the businesses, across a busy street. Parking lots dominate the street scene.

Or look at
what the city thinks Kaka’ako could become, on page 75, blocks of six-story, mixed-use
buildings. “This is the density of all the great cities of the world, Paris, Amsterdam,”
says architect and urban planner Rick Williams, also of Van Meter Williams Pollack.

Crispin
created these images because he thinks urban Honolulu and Kapolei aren’t quite
working as real communities. “These are the two places on O’ahu we’ve designated
for future growth,” he says. But Kapolei is developing scattershot, taking shape
as a series of housing developments instead of a full-service city. And Honolulu
is underutilized, ripe for redevelopment. Smart growth, he thinks, could fix both
towns.

“Smart” vs. “Sprawl”

Which local problems
can smart growth solve? Just about anything, if we listen to the agencies and
planners HONOLULU spoke with. On Kapolei issues, these include the city, the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency; the University of Hawai’i Sea Grant program and
two private consulting firms: traffic planner James F. Charlier, AICP, of Charlier
Associates Inc., out of Boulder, Colo., and urban planners from the architectural
firm of Van Meter Williams Pollack, of San Francisco, Calif., and Denver, Colo.

For
example, smart growth could mitigate childhood obesity.

“[Sprawl] is a
social health problem,” says Crispin. “We’ve had people from the state Department
of Health come to our cabinet meetings saying we have an epidemic of type II diabetes
in kids as a result.”

Maybe. But kids have been growing up in car-centric
suburbs for half a century and have managed to stay trim until just recently.
Childhood obesity has also been attributed to hours spent on the Internet, PlayStation,
GameBoys, fearful parents who don’t let their children play in the streets like
they used to, junk food at home, soda machines at school, dwindling physical education
classes and more. Who knows what else?

How about crime? In the past, the
city has argued that suburban Honolulu, being so spread out, is inherently more
costly to police. However, that doesn’t appear to be true. Honolulu Police Department’s
annual budget averages out to $77,702 per year, per police officer. The New York
Police Department spends $91,782 per officer.

Crispin insists that sprawl’s
single-use zoning encourages crime. “You have business districts that are empty
at night, residential areas that are empty during the day,” he says. “There are
no ‘eyes on the street,’ and we know that ‘eyes on the street’ prevent crime.
In a mixed-use area, when the shopkeepers leave at the end of their day, the apartment
dwellers come home to the same buildings and can see what’s going on in their
neighborhoods.”

Maybe. But why is it that our densest, oldest cities, where
mixed-use is the norm, are the same places where residents fear crime the most?
Why is it that, as soon as city dwellers have children, they move out to the perceived
safety of the suburbs? Why don’t those eyes on the street work?

Van Meter
explains that urban-renewal projects created crime by loading only poor people
into high-density developments. Others around the table insist density is irrelevant
to crime. “You haven’t seen a ghetto until you’ve seen a suburban ghetto,” says
one.

Crime, they went on to insist, is related more to socioeconomics.
Poor areas suffer high crime, no matter how many eyes nervously watch the street.

Smart growth is supposed to fix this by mixing people of different incomes
into the same developments. But, in practice, this hasn’t happened. So far, New
Urbanism-the component of smart growth that calls for denser, mixed-use neighborhoods-has
resulted mainly in upper-middle-class ghettoes, no different from the socioeconomic
segregation you see in today’s gated executive developments in ‘Ewa Beach.

after

Liliha and Kuakini Streets This is what the city says Liliha Street could look like if its future redevelopment were guided by smart-growth principles. The most obvious change as that the new buildings shown stand right up against the sidewalks, restoring a coherent streetscape. Where does all the parking go? Concentrated off the streetfront, in, say, a garage with enough parking for the block, or in lots behind the businesses, as one finds in Kaimukï. The new buildings themselves would be zoned for mixed uses. For example, affordable housing upstairs over storefront businesses such as retail, a dry cleaner, a video rental shop. Or apartments over office space over a ground floor of retail in. A prominent corner property could house shopping and entertainment options, where neighborhood residents would simply hang out. The city believes a better, denser smart growth mix of residential and commercial functions lining the street will lead to, more pedestrians. Of course, many of the features that pretty up this after image—trees, fancy street lights and deeper, sheltering eaves with better signage along the shops at right— require no smart-growth initiatives at all.

Some
critics insist that high-density, pedestrian-oriented New Urbanism actually increases
crime. The police in Bedfordshire, England, for example, in a report titled, “Designing
Out Crime: The Cost of Policing New Urbanism,” noted, “New Urbanism’s position
on community safety is entirely subjective and based on fundamentally false premises.”

As
for “eyes on the street,” the report adds, “Attempts at providing natural surveillance
by locating flats on top of garages do not, in the main, significantly reduce
the prevalence of auto-crime and perceived disorder.”

What about the environment?
“This is where the EPA has its interest, the air and water quality impacts,” explains
Geoffrey Anderson, of the Environmental Protection Agency. To Anderson, the problem
with sprawl is that “it takes huge tracts of land that were providing their ecological
function of filtering and storing water and converts it into an impervious surface
that creates polluted runoff. These development patterns also cause people to
drive long distances. Even as we crank down on tailpipe [emission] standards and
make each mile cleaner, if you drive double the miles, we’re fighting a losing
battle.”

Nationwide, the EPA promotes smart growth, because it preserves
open space and provides transportation alternatives.

Locally, the city often
talks about “keeping the country country.” As Crispin says, “We can’t keep paving
paradise and putting up parking lots.”

Some of this is pure rhetoric. There
already is a growth boundary around the ‘Ewa plain that confines development to
former sugar lands, specifically to keep development from “paving paradise.” These
lands haven’t served a natural ecological function since before the rise of sugar
plantations in the 1800s. They’ve been ploughed, irrigated, fertilized, pest-controlled,
burnt to the ground routinely, all in pursuit of a monocrop-in short, land so
removed from paradise as to be deemed fit only for human habitation.

A
Car of One’s Own?

Traffic congestion is, to some people, sprawl’s
greatest sin. It is certainly the average commuters’ daily misery. At HONOLULU’s
meeting with the city and its partners, everyone agreed that traffic has gone
from bad to worse, with worse still to come.

What can smart growth do about
all this traffic? Within Kapolei and the ‘Ewa plain, it might help, up to a point.
Charlier points out that the “pod” developments of present-day Kapolei are not
even car-friendly.

Hundreds of homes in self-contained clusters curlicue
around cul-de-sacs and dead ends, all of these local streets converging on Fort
Weaver Road at exactly one intersection. “Developments in ‘Ewa aren’t connected
to each other, even when they’re built by the same developer,” he says.

The
developments aren’t connected to nearby commercial centers, either. This turns
every little trip for a quart of milk, or to take your child to visit a school
friend two developments over, into a car trip on the same road everyone else is
using. Consequently, arterials like Fort Weaver Road are choked with local traffic
when they were supposed to serve people traveling in and out of the region. “There
aren’t nearly enough collector and connector roads out there,” says Charlier.
“There aren’t enough alternative routes.”

That quart of milk comes up often
when the city gives smart-growth presentations. In these talks, the quart of milk
is invariably retrieved by a solo driver in an SUV. Fair enough. But the city’s
own smart-growth consultants are saying that these milk runs jam up the roads,
because there are too few roads, too poorly planned.

In fact, it can be
argued that Hawai’i has yet to even try road building to mitigate traffic. According
to U.S. census data, Hawai’i has the nation’s lowest supply of urban highways
for urban dwellers. (Honolulu has 1,895 miles of urban highways for 876,000 residents,
or 11 highway feet per resident. The national average is 20 highway feet per urban
resident.)

before

Cooke Street and Mother Waldron Park These Kaka‘ako warehouses are what Eric Crispin, AIA, the city’s director of planning and permitting, calls a “remnant land use.” Their existence dates back to a time when a separate warehouse district was needed to supply the nearby Honolulu business district. Mother Waldron Park provides some pleasant, if pointless, green relief—it’s a neighborhood park without a neighborhood. (The park’s name is rooted in Kaka‘ako history, named after Margaret Waldron, a Pohukaina School teacher who founded and ran the school’s Kaka‘ako playground for 24 years. Waldron died in 1939.)

In
any case, it’s not the milk runs that have ‘Ewa drivers steamed. It’s the one-
to one-and-a-half-hour morning commutes to town.

This, too, is said to
be the result of car-centered sprawl. Will smart growth fix it? Is there any place
in America where smart growth has alleviated traffic congestion?

“Is there
any place where anything has alleviated traffic congestion?” counters Charlier.
“I’ve studied that, and the answer is no.”

“What you can do is mitigate
the impact of future growth,” added Van Meter.

The best smart growth can
do, with an arsenal of transportation options-cars, mass transit, buses, bike
paths, walkways and more-is keep congestion from getting worse. Right now, those
other options aren’t even happening on the ‘Ewa plain. Says Charlier, “If Kapolei
is going to develop into the second city you’ve said you want it to be, it’s going
to need some kind of transit.”

Smart growth is often interchangeable with
another term-transit-oriented development. We could look to Portland, Ore., for
a hint of what could be coming to O’ahu. Portland established rigid growth boundaries
in 1979 and committed to transit-oriented development. It went for smart growth
before the term even existed.

Portland suffered through a recession in
the ’80s, during which the population problem was out-migration, not overdevelopment.
But Portland boomed in the 1990s, so much so that now, some people are chafing
against those limits.

Explains John A. Charles, an analyst for the Cascade
Policy Institute, a nonprofit free-market think tank in Portland, “In Portland,
smart growth means a fanatical commitment to street cars and every kind of rail.”
In Charles’ view, Portland’s approach to smart growth has made traffic congestion
worse than it would otherwise be, by sacrificing existing roads and road building
in order to fund transit. “We just opened another five-and-a-half miles of rail
here, which they built by cannibalizing a major arterial road. Four lanes have
been taken down to two.”

Transit-oriented development is costing Portland
in other ways, he says, through subsidies and quality-of-life issues. Transit-oriented
developments in Portland are high-density suburbs, with minimal parking-for example,
.65 dedicated parking spaces per housing unit-mandated by planners on the assumption
that residents don’t need cars. “But this housing is denser than the market would
naturally bear, so developers have to be subsidized just so they’ll build it,”
says Charles. Then, despite the planners’ parking restrictions, residents move
in with two cars anyway. “This parking spills out into the surrounding low-density,
single-family neighborhoods and begins to ruin them.”

Charles insists that
in Portland, “Smart growth is now angering so many people, even those who once
supported it, that it’s sowing the seeds of its own destruction.” He is one of
those who have turned around on the subject. For 17 years, he was the executive
director of the Oregon Environmental Council, lobbying to pass green-friendly
legislation. “I voted to tax myself for light rail as recently as 1994,” he says.
“Then I moved to the far east side of Portland, specifically to be a light-rail
commuter. That’s when I became a critic.”

Another rail critic to visit Portland
recently is Cliff Slater, of Honolulu, who often writes about planning and transit
in his The Honolulu Advertiser column and who was instrumental in defeating a
Fasi-era rail project. “I visited one of Portland’s new rail stations near the
Intel plant,” he reports. “The development around it looks like the 1880s New
York Bowery, the people are just jammed in there.”

Slater insists that smart
growth is based on misplaced nostalgia. “People don’t live like they did before
World War II, so why would we build our cities like that? Are you going to stop
at Home Depot, buy lumber, then hop on a street car?”

Planners also fetishize
historic European downtowns. “Madrid is the ideal urbanist city,” says Slater.
“Everything is five stories tall, with apartments over shops and restaurants.
You hardly see a single-family home. There’s a wonderful train, buses, taxis galore.
Everything you could want. The traffic congestion is awful.”

Finally, Charles
and Slater both point out another unforeseen consequence of smart growth as it
has played out in Portland-housing is more expensive. “Smart growth isn’t solely
responsible for that,” says Charles. “But it is a factor.”

On O’ahu, where
the median price of a single-family home is steadily approaching $500,000, we
might be more allergic than Portland to higher housing prices.

So
is it smart, or not?

By now you might be thinking smart growth
is a horrible mistake.

Maybe. But what about those pictures? Look at that
projection of what Kaka’ako could look like. Look at what Liliha Street could
look like. Either photo illustration also demonstrates what Kapolei could develop
into.

Don’t those places, those imagined, future Honolulus, look cool?

OK.
These images are obviously advertisements, each building immaculate, every pedestrian
grinning. “Smart growth” itself is a sales slogan, smugly insisting that what
has gone before is dumb, dumb, dumb. A skeptic must resist the urge to put smart
growth in quotes every time it pops up.

after

Cooke Street and Mother Waldron Park Using the higher-density, mixed-use approach of smart growth, the city thinks this bleak warehouse district could look like this instead. Shown here are mid-rise developments that fill their blocks, with parking in the center of the blocks and the human elements brought out to the sidewalks. The building at left (1), could combine apartments and offices over a ground-floor shopping arcade, shaded by trees. At the right, another building holds apartments and offices over ground-floor restaurants (2). The resulting neighborhood has about the same building heights and density of such cities as Paris or Amsterdam. Key to the smart-growth approach is bringing major amenities within walking distance of residents—note the full-size Foodland supermarket at the bottom of the center residential/office building (3). Since it now serves a neighborhood, Mother Waldron Park is shown here enhanced with points of interest (4) and places to sit and linger (5).

Slater
is right that planners fetishize old European cities. The planners HONOLULU spoke
with actually brought up Paris and Amsterdam as ideals to strive for. But it may
not be such an uncommon experience for locals who travel to older cities such
as New York, Chicago or San Francisco, if not Paris or Madrid, to look around
at the shops, restaurants, museums, salons, art galleries, nightclubs, apartments,
coffee houses, boutique fashion stores, dry cleaners, Virgin Megastores and used-book
shops, side by side, in a swirl of delightful urban diversions and say, “How come
Honolulu isn’t like this?”

Smart growth, say its advocates, could make
Honolulu, or Kapolei, like that.

Under current regulations, the city hasn’t
even allowed this kind of experiment. Crispin insists that when the city talks
up smart growth, it isn’t proposing a new set of restrictions, such as banning
single-family homes in favor of row houses, or injecting commercial developments
into Old Kähala. “All we want to do is add the possibilities of smart growth to
our existing codes so people can try it as we build out Kapolei and redevelop
the primary urban core of Honolulu.”

Crispin, Van Meter and his crew, Charlier,
all have an infectious enthusiasm and evangelists’ zeal for smart growth. Like
any evangelists, however, they make assertions we must take on faith. Smart growth
as the cure for any disease we might have caught from that old devil sprawl. It
obviously isn’t, however. It will not magically make fat children thin, or disperse
traffic jams. If anything, smart-growth advocates are pushing dubious claims at
the expense of what may be, for some people, smart growth’s chief attraction:

If
it’s done right. If we learn from the mistakes made on the Mainland. If it remains
voluntary so we can be sure it’s what we really want. Then, maybe Honolulu can
finally become cool.

Cool like Paris. Cool like Greenwich Village. Imagine
cool downtown Honolulu as a dense, textured, culturally rich, walkable, live-work
urban experience.

“Oh, no one who’s anyone goes to Maui anymore. You’ve
got to stay in the Four Seasons Bishop Street.”

“Atlanta is dead, man. I’m
opening my next gallery in Honolulu.”

We could potentially be sold on that
future as its own reward.

But don’t let the planners tell you that such
growth has no downside. Dense, textured, culturally rich, walkable, live-work
urban experiences are also crowded, expensive, noisy, choked with traffic and
full of strangers who will sometimes make you afraid. We can’t have the good without
the bad.

Any smart person could tell you that. The real question for Honolulu
is, Do we want this? That is something smart people will have to figure out for
themselves.