A movement is underway to increase building height and density in the Waikiki Special District for the first time in about 50 years to allow smaller parcels to be turned into affordable housing and make the district more resilient to climate change and sea-level rise.

Affordable housing shortfalls and the threat that evolving environmental conditions could put Waikiki underwater were not among the top community issues in 1976 when city regulations were adopted to set height, density and setback requirements.

The special district rules, a subsection of the county’s Land Use Ordinance, were meant to keep Waikiki from becoming an urban jungle but had the unintended effect of rendering many owners unable to improve their nonconforming properties or sell them for a good price.

In the mauka side of the district, new development is sometimes surrounded by blight, especially on some of the ancillary streets where height limits allow for just single-story buildings, which are increasingly vulnerable to environmental changes.

Honolulu City Council Chair Tommy Waters said he started a discussion about the possibility of a building update at a Waikiki Neighborhood Board meeting on Tuesday, with the goal of hearing from constituents.

“Community leaders including stakeholders from the Waikiki Improvement Association have reached out to me about the concept of additional height and density to meet the city’s affordable housing needs and to mitigate against potential climate impacts to Waikiki,” Waters said.

This latest planning effort is expected to coalescence with broader adaptation efforts already ongoing in Waikiki, where proposed solutions have ranged from turning the state’s most densely populated residential and most trafficked resort neighborhood into its own island with a Venetian-­style canal system. Other options include turning it back into wetlands, building structures on piers, moving coastal structures inland, and less radical options such as hollowing out the lower floors in buildings.

State Sen. Sharon Moriwaki (D, Kakaako-McCully-­Waikiki), told the Honolulu Star-­Advertiser that she is open to updating county development rules. However, she said it will be important that the update accounts for other conversations about adaptation and resilience that are happening simultaneously.

“It’s about taking into account the people that are impacted today and those that will be impacted maybe even 50 years into the future,” Moriwaki said.

The University of Hawaii’s Sea Grant College Program, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, and School of Architecture already have been working on a coastal flood adaptation project for Waikiki.

Dolan Eversole, Waikiki beach management coordinator for the Sea Grant Program, said Wendy Meguro is the principal investigator for the coastal adaptation project, which has produced a series of conceptual design renderings of what adaptation could look like for the built environment in Waikiki.

Eversole said the concepts are largely the result of diverse stakeholder engagement. He said feedback on the designs and approaches was collected during workshops held over a three-month period in 2021.

Waikiki’s economic importance as a top tourist destination means that it cannot retreat from sea-level rise but must rely on an “in-place” adaptation strategy, according to Eversole.

Time is of the essence since environmental conditions are worsening and Waikiki Beach is the epicenter of Oahu’s visitor industry. Oahu drew nearly 6.2 million tourists, or about 60% of the state’s 10.4 million visitors in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic. These Oahu visitors accounted for more than $8 billion in 2019 visitor spending, or about 46% of the statewide tally of nearly $17.8 billion.

Eversole said the timing of the Land Use Ordinance’s Waikiki Special District update is ideal given “the onset of the Waikiki Resilience Plan and the update to the Waikiki Design Guidelines as two of many updates occurring to planning and zoning.”

Moriwaki said feedback from the community during last year’s workshops indicated that some of the scenarios proposed by UH architecture students, such as turning Waikiki into a Venetian-style island, could create positive change. The ideas cost money so they will not happen immediately, but Moriwaki said discussing them has benefited the community by making people more aware of the impacts of sea-level rise and the urgency to plan.

“What are some positive ways to deal with it rather than tearing all the hotels down or moving them back,” she said. “It’s not going to happen right away, but when they have to rebuild, at least there’s a plan on how to do it rather than, ‘Oh my gosh, we have to do something now because that wall just fell over.’”

EVERSOLE SAID Waikiki is not uniform in its exposure to sea-level rise, so planning has to account for the possibility of anywhere from a 1- to 6-foot rise in the most vulnerable sections.

Preserving the man-made beach in Waikiki has been a focus for some time. Now, discussions have turned to protecting the visitor district and its residential neighborhoods, which means planning to adapt everything from buildings and open spaces to transportation and utilities.

“Everything is on the table. I think at this point what the resilient strategy is intending to do is to develop different adaptation pathways,” Eversole said. “Do we need to use ideas like raising buildings, raising streets, creating ‘floodable’ buildings? We would probably do all of those things in different locations in different phases. There’s no single solution.”

Moriwaki said funding is always a challenge. However, she said a legislative win for Waikiki during the 2022 session was the passage of Act 208, which gives counties the ability to create special improvement districts for environmental research, restoration and maintenance; natural resource management; and natural hazard mitigation to improve environmental conditions and provide community benefits.

She said this could build on the Waikiki Beach Special Improvement District Association, which has allowed businesses to partner with the city and state to plan for and fund services and improvements to Waikiki Beach.

Moriwaki said the Legislature also approved $400,000 for the state Office of Planning and Sustainable Development to begin the first phase of a pilot project in Waikiki to create the framework for an adaptation and resilience plan.

“It should be a real comprehensive plan. This is billions (of dollars) that are going to be impacted, especially in Waikiki, that have ongoing businesses, especially the hotels,” she said. “There could be major impacts to our economy as well unless it’s really planned out.”

Waikiki Neighborhood Board member Kathryn Henski, who lived through the devastation of Hurricane Ike in 2008 while living on Galveston Island in Texas, said she strongly supports coastal adaptation for Waikiki — but she does not support increasing building height and density.

“Waikiki doesn’t need larger or taller buildings. I feel like there is already way too much density,” she said. “Having been here on and off since 1975, I feel that everything just becomes larger and larger.”

Henski, whose views were shared by other residents in attendance at Tuesday’s neighborhood board meeting, also worries the community would not get enough truly affordable housing for what it would have to give up.

RICK EGGED, president of the Waikiki Improvement Association, said he is working with Waters and the city Department of Planning and Permitting to come up with a first draft to amend the Waikiki Special District subsection of the Land Use Ordinance, which was last updated in 2011.

“After more than 10 years, it may be time to revisit, especially given the new challenges that we are facing as a community,” Egged said.“Any changes to buildings now really need to take into account sea-level rise, the changing market and other things that weren’t necessarily anticipated to this degree.”

Egged said the last time Waikiki’s height and density were addressed was about 50 years ago. If any increases to height and density ultimately make the draft, Egged said they are “going to be tied to being able to change the building’s infrastructure to being able to handle the new challenges. It’s not just going to be a giveaway.”

He said DPP will have to review the draft and make recommendations before it heads to the Honolulu City Council.

Waters cautioned, “It is clear that at this time, there are very real concerns being raised by members of the neighborhood board and constituents regarding potential additional height and density in Waikiki. Any potential changes to the height and density in the special district would need to garner community support before I would go about proposing any new legislation.”

Jeff Merz, a Waikiki Neighborhood Board member and urban planner, said he favors updating the Waikiki Special District rules, especially given that additional height and density may be necessary to execute adaptation recommendations such as pedestal building to raise structures.

“We need to do this now,” Merz said. “The city says that we need to plan for a 3.2-foot rise by 2030, but there are people like (UH climate scientist) Chip Fletcher who have said that we need to plan for even more.”

Merz said in addition to addressing height and density, he would like to see the update loosen parking and setback requirements, which he said are still challenging for owners of the small lots that make up the bulk of the neighborhood.

He also recommends waiving environmental assessments for certain affordable housing projects to lessen the regulatory burden.

“Time is money for developers and ambiguity is an issue,” he said. “I review all of the EAs for Waikiki. A lot of them don’t even have any comments.”

Merz said mauka of Kuhio Avenue, or near Tusitala Street, there are pockets where building restrictions have created a situation where it is not economically feasible for lot owners to redevelop or reinvest.

A current harm from the lack of redevelopment is that it has the potential to exacerbate crime in the community, he said.

“I always talk about the broken window theory. If a neighborhood looks like nobody cares about it, criminals feel like they can get away with more. We need to make the neighborhood look nice.”