A man goes before a government agency and pleads for a housing project that he says will give his children and grandchildren an opportunity to buy a home nearby.

The appeal evokes images of family cohesion — kinfolk sharing events of the day over potluck dinners, grandpa and grandma helping busy parents raise and care for youngsters and passage of clan traditions from generation to generation.

Another man stands up at a public hearing to petition for carpentry work and for jobs for others in his trade. He tells of being unemployed for years and his difficulty with paying his bills.

Such emotional bids have become part and parcel of the script that precedes decisions on land development in Hawaii.

So, too, the arguments from the companies that want to do the building, contending that their mission is to fulfill what people and businesses desire, which are houses (equivocally dubbed affordable) and commercial space (at present, hardly in short supply).

The story line also wraps around concerns about thicker traffic logjams and costly demands for government services and infrastructure.

Mixed into the case of the moment — the Schuler Division of D.R. Horton’s Ho‘opili project — is agriculture, an always provocative element, cast this time in the current mode of food security.

Food security is more widely thought of as a problem for impoverished nations and for people whose low incomes force them to choose between paying for utilities and medicines or bread for the table.

For Hawaii, it means establishing an industry that can more readily sustain a population that right now depends primarily on imports, a goal that will prove more elusive if farmed land is covered over by 11,750 houses, as is the intent with Ho‘opili.

To insulate its plan to build on 1,554 agriculture-zone acres, the company has added what it calls urban agriculture to its blueprint, a yet-to-be detailed concept for commercial farms, community gardens and yard plots where food products can be grown.

The idea seems more notional than real. The strips of land designated for farming appear to be merely buffers between the H-1 freeway and adjacent developments. During a hearing before the state Land Use Commission, which will eventually decide Ho‘opili’s fate, Schuler’s sustainability expert could not say if the 159 acres designated for commercial farms are suitable for crops. He was also unsure about how many of the 84 acres to be set aside for homeowner farming would see actual production.

The developer and Ho‘opili’s supporters argue that though the site is in active agriculture, the city designated it as an area for urban growth decades ago and the classification should be respected. But when needs, objectives and circumstances evolve as they have on an increasingly crowded island, plans thought appropriate in the 1970s no longer fit and should be revised.

Opportunities for families to live in the same neighborhoods or buy a house, and for steady employment are hard to cast aside. Still, there are other ways, such as redevelopment in the urban core, that could fulfill them without limiting other opportunities.

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Cynthia Oi can be reached at coi@staradvertiser.com.