O ye people of West Oahu, hear me!
Have you noticed your morning commute becoming SUPER CRAPPY over the past few months? You know why it’s happening, don’t you?
They’re building new track houses in Kapolei. They’re building new track houses in Makakilo. They’re building new track houses in Ewa. Building, building, building!
DR Horton and Castle & Cooke construct lovely houses – houses with lovely cultured marble counter tops in the bathroom, lovely Corian solid surface counters in the kitchen, and lovely views into your neighbor’s lovely kitchen across your lovely postage stamp sized yard.
The houses in themselves are fine. They lack character, but they’re nice places to live for the people who own them. The problem is what is sacrificed in order to build them. These new homes result in less open space on the island, and more congestion in Makakilo, Kapolei, Ewa, and on the H-1.
It’s a tragedy that the city planning on Oahu is so abysmal and that our elected leaders are so in bed with the developers. Tens of thousands of new houses are slated for construction. All of us on the Leeward side still share the same one highway, the H-1. There is no room to expand the H-1 or to build another road. The H-1 already boasts the second worse traffic in the nation. Adding new homes adds new people to the island and new cars to the road, which diminishes the quality of life for people who already live here.
More lamentation below the fold.
To be clear: I’m not suggesting that the new homes being built will be purchased only by new residents. I’m saying that when you increase the overall inventory of available housing in a desirable area, you inevitably increase the population and the traffic in that area.
But the developers are not paid to worry about traffic. They only earn profit when they sell new houses. They aren’t paid to worry about their stakeholders, only to enrich their shareholders. Since they are not forced to pay for their externalities, the costs of their folly are passed on to the rest of us.
This is incredibly frustrating and disheartening. It seems to reflect a sad flaw in democracy and, indeed, in humanity itself. Why is it so easy for us to destroy everything good around us? How can we be so short-sighted, so greedy, and so selfish? Democracy is far and away the best political system ever devised, but it does have this flaw: when the voters become apathetic and stop watching the wheel, the system inevitably descends into plutocracy.
Our politicians contend that the island’s population is projected to grow so we must build new houses now to accommodate this growth. That is a wonderful piece of circular logic, isn’t it? The population growth is projected based on past growth, which itself was based on past development. The answer to over-population is not over-development.
New homes are great, but we cannot build an infinite number of them. At some point we have to face the fact that we can only fit so many homes in such a small geographical area. Eventually the development has to stop. It is only a question of when. Do we wait until we get an island with massive infrastructure problems that can never be remedied, with no green belts and no natural beauty? Wouldn’t it be better to just stop while we’re ahead?
What makes Hawaii special is it’s natural beauty. People from all over the world flock here for that reason. Our tourists escape places that are over-developed. The natural beauty of Hawaii is what drives the tourism industry. Track housing and chain stores, as nice as they are, don’t make Hawaii more special. They actually make Hawaii more ordinary. (Those stores also don’t add money to the economy here; in the long run they suck money out of the economy. In fact two of the main industries that add money into the economy in Hawaii are tourism and agriculture, and both of those things are threatened by over-development.)
Ho’opili is very obviously a dumb idea. These people want to build a major new housing development right atop 1,500 acres of prime farm land near the Ewa merge on the H-1, where there is already a major bottleneck on the morning commute.
The Ho’opili community may be well-planned within itself, but it’s not part of a rational overall plan for the island. Our leaders are not making sensible choices about our traffic, our infrastructure, or our food security. To build Ho’opili they’ll pave over what is literally some of the best farm land in the world.
In my view, we need to update our mindset. Our current pro-growth mindset dates back to the westward expansion of the 1800s. Our whole economy depends upon endless development. It is constructed upon construction. This isn’t sustainable. We ought to be transitioning from a pro-growth economy to a pro-maintenance economy. In a pro-maintenance economy, you focus on improving what you’ve already got instead of building more new stuff.
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