Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 32, Number 4, 1 April 2015 — Urban sprawl will get us all [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Urban sprawl will get us all

saw a cartoon a long time ago of an older eouple sitting in rocking chairs on their front porch staring out across their white picket-fenced yard. Their old farmhouse was surrounded by hundreds of new houses, shopping eenters and traffic. The man says to the wife, "We used to live in the country - now we live in the city - and we haven't moved!"

Urban sprawl seems alive and well in O'ahu County. In West O'ahu, consider that Ho'opili, a project replacing hundreds of acres of prime agricultural land with hundreds of acres of houses, will probably get a green light from the Honolulu City Council by the time this eolumn is published. In Central O'ahu, Koa Ridge, another large urbanizing housing project displacing agricultural lands with 5,500 houses is a done deal. Then, on the North Shore the Envision Lā'ie project essentially ramps up an ambitious mix of residential, commercial-retail, and hotel is well on its way to hnal approvals. But, I credit them with being upfront about the urbanizing impact it will have on this still rural community. These three projects, positioned in West O'ahu, Central O'ahu and Northwest O'ahu, whieh plant urban sprawl flags in three of 0'ahu's most important and strategically placed O'ahu communities is an onerous omen of things to eome. Yes, we need affordable housing.

But we knew this day was coming way back in the '80s. So the state Legislature in its wisdom supported as public policy the now burgeoning high-rise residential surge of Kaka'ako, whieh was supposed to include affordable housing, in order to offset the need for residential urban sprawl. But the tradeoff didn't happen and now the high-rises are rising and

urban sprawl is sprawhng - everywhere. So, how does this kind of urban growth happen? Navigating the quality of growth for a Paeilie island is one of the most difflcult public policy challenges in the world. Hawai'i, like all Paeilie islands, does not have the luxury of vast expanses of space. So there has to be a low tolerance for mistakes in land-use planning. The globalized economy shows up on islands like ours flnancially driven by offshore investor groups with investment models that, while suitable for eontinental application, is unsustainable as an island strategy. Development in Hawai'i is like a movie and the script is being written someplace else. Whether locally driven, or generated from some far-flung boardroom, the result is the same. Urban sprawl. The greatest disappointment is when loeal government itself, however inadvertently as some may argue, become instruments of investor groups that spring from the globalized model of balance sheet economics that know no boundaries. And there is no plaee on earth beyond their reach. ■

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