The road to increased profits is paved with good intentions.
Thousands of Hawaii residents are living on the streets. We have tens of thousands more doubled-up at home with mom and dad, in a friends carport, or have given up and moved away. However, the Governors’ Emergency Proclamation Relating to Housing (EP), while well intentioned, is not the answer.
The EP needs to be dramatically re-imagined and rewritten, or trashed altogether. Unless affordability is required and protected within the proposal, it’s all for naught.
Before politics, I owned a real estate company on Kauai and dealt personally, face to face, with many a “deal-maker.” I’ve been a general partner in two residential development projects.
I’ve been in the room when the deal-maker is making the deal, driving the price of the property down, pushing back against the requirements of government, and pushing up on the price of the finished product — all to maximize profits.
Without a written binding mandate requiring affordability, the push to maximize profits trumps the best of all intentions.
I’ve been in rooms overflowing with friends and neighbors voicing their objections and expressing their concerns about various developments — sometimes winning and sometimes not.
Hawaii Revised Statutes (HRS) Chapter 92 and the Sunshine Law are crucial and necessary for these conversations to even exist.
While serving on the Kauai County Council, I saw the deal-makers come and go, telling us always how much they loved our community, how they would develop the best product possible, and beg us to grant them additional entitlements — increasing their profits.
Always, without fail they would ask for more. They then would flip the property — along with its “entitlements” — to the next developer in line, who comes back to ask for more again.
I was there when the landowner of what is now known as Kukui‘ula came before the Council to beg for increased entitlements. It wanted to build a shopping center, luxury housing and possibly a hotel. Years earlier it was zoned agricultural, then was changed to residential after the owners promised it would be developed as homes for local Koloa residents “for generations to come.”
It was a lie of course. Kukuiʻula today is only for the wealthy, with single-family homes selling for more than $10 million, luxury vacation rentals, a private members-only club — and yes, with token affordable housing stuck somewhere in the hinterland (of course without club privileges).
Without requiring strict development deadlines in exchange for government help, subsidies and new entitlements, developers will too often just “land bank” their growing investment — always coming back for more.
Developers want less regulation and higher sales prices so they make more money.
While serving in the state Senate, it seemed like an annual ritual: every year they were at the Capitol, pushing legislation to remove or reduce the state Land Use Commission and HRS Chapter 343 (protecting health and environment).
The answer to faster permitting is increased staffing and modern technology. This important element is left out of the EP — entirely.
As a past director of the state Office of Environmental Quality Control (OEQC), I learned no developer wants its project scrutinized for environmental impact. Under the EP, this legal requirement turns into a self-reporting perfunctory “check the box.” The EP contains no right for the public to question, object to, or appeal approval of the developers application or ultimate project certification.
Bottom line: The Governor’s Housing Emergency Proclamation increases profitability for landowners, developers and investors; provides nothing in writing that ensures or protects affordability for residents; and throws under the bus far too many important environmental and public trust protections.
Gary Hooser, formerly a state senator and Kauai Council member, is executive director of the Pono Hawaii Initiative. This was submitted prior to last week’s Maui wildfire disaster.
