The field of architecture sort of found Deepak Neupane through results of a standardized test he took after high school, pointing him in its direction.
Neupane, now director of planning and development for the Hawaii Community Development Authority (HCDA), later added engineering, finance and urban planning to the mix and now taps all those resources as he helps shape the future of Oahu’s urban core.
A couple decades from now, he wants to be able to walk through Kakaako with his son and daughter, now ages 2 and 4 respectively, and say: “Some of the things you’re seeing … and the things you love about Kakaako, I was part of that, part of building that.”
Neupane, 55, was born in a small village in Nepal and later moved to Kathmandu, leaving there in his 20s. He was living in Maine when, back before the age of the internet, a friend pointed out a newspaper ad in The Boston Globe for a position with what is now WAT&G, a Honolulu architectural firm. He sent in samples of his work, got a phone interview and then a job. That was 26 years ago, and he’s called Hawaii home ever since. Neupane also has worked as a lecturer at Honolulu Community College and as an architectural consultant.
Neupane has both bachelor’s and master’s degress in civil engineering at the University of Hawaii, and in 2005 received his master of business administration in finance, also from UH.
He spent seven years with the Kahoolawe Island Reserve Commission (KIRC), and among his KIRC projects, Neupane is most proud of building a rainwater catchment and water storage system on Kahoolawe that now produces 500,000 gallons of water a year to revegetate the island.
As KIRC transitioned from federal to state control, Neupane moved to the HCDA in 2006, working with community members to envision the future of Kakaako Makai.
For Neupane, it’s gratifying to see the fruits of his team’s labor.
“That’s the beauty in being in urban design and architecture. At the end of the day, there is something that people can look at, touch, feel.”
Neupane and his wife, Namrata, and their two children, live in the Ala Wai area.
Question: When you started with HCDA in 2006, what was your role?
Answer: I started out not as the planning director but project director working under someone else. My first project was the waterfront development. I really took the initiative after that to work with the community … envisioning the future for Kakaako Makai. …
I had a conversation with my boss at the time. He felt I could contribute more to the organization if I took over as planning director. So we swapped jobs. That’s how I became the planning director.
At that time HCDA was going through the Mauka Area planning rules; I took over that project. The initial idea was to just make minor changes to the Mauka Area plan and rules. When I got involved I looked at it and … it didn’t work. The vision was podium parking garages, 45-feet-level bridges going everywhere. That’s not what we really want in an urban environment. …
We as a culture are moving away from a very automobile-centric culture to a more pedestrian-, human-oriented society and culture. I said I think we really need to have a paradigm shift here. … The consultant at that time … agreed we need to create this pedestrian environment in Kakaako. … The rules were adopted in 2011. It was a long process.
Q: When did you start off?
A: We actually started in 2005; I took over in 2007. … You don’t see a parking garage that comes down to the ground floor. We have active, ground play. We have taken it one step ahead with the transit-oriented development (TOD). We started out in early 2012 and went through a lot of community outreach. Since then we did an environmental impact statement. I just provided an update to the board. We are continuing on building on that philosophy of urban design. The goal there is to really create outdoor living — sidewalks, plazas, outdoor urban living. I’m working with my team now to move forward finalizing the plan, adopting rules.
Q: When do you think the TOD rules will be finalized?
A: Knock on wood: If everything goes well, we are targeting the end of year.
Q: With rail exceeding its budget and its new time frame, it obviously affects your planning.
A: When I presented the plan to the board, one of the things I emphasized is that transit-oriented doesn’t mean that it is specific to rail transit. I think Honolulu already has a robust bus transit. We cannot forget that one of the most rudimentary and earliest forms of transit is walking, bikes and all of that. We’re working with the City and County with bike lanes. … Even if the rail transit doesn’t come in the near future, I don’t think it takes away from the urban concepts and the concept of this public living room that we have. Pedestrian-friendly and pedestrian-oriented — that’s valid and effective whether we have rail transit or not.
Q: What are some of the features that you think are valuable in your TOD planning? What would you highlight?
A: I would really like to highlight how we’re really making the streets friendlier for people and creating an urban living room concept. … With the Mauka Area Plan and TOD plan, the effort there and the philosophy behind it is to create an urban, 21st-century downtown in Honolulu that’s live, work, play — obviously encourage more people to live in an urban area. We are an island and we can’t keep on expanding. … While researching for the TOD plan, I came across, it’s more than an article and less than a book, written back in 1939 by Lewis Mumford. Lewis Mumford was an urbanist and a modernist back in the early ’30s. He was invited by, at that time, the territorial government to come to Honolulu and produce a park plan for Honolulu. While he was here doing his research, and I guess after that, he wrote an 80-or-so-page article called “Whither Honolulu.” In that document he talks about how Honolulu can’t keep on expanding forever. … I think in the TOD plan, we are taking that to heart. We need to focus in our already-urbanized area where we have infrastructure, we have everything that’s necessary.
Q: Any other subjects that Mumford brought up that are relevant today?
A: I think it was very insightful that back in 1939, the population in Honolulu was only slightly over 100,000, for him to start thinking that expanding is not a possibility — you have to create compact, sustainable neighborhoods. We talk about sustainability as a 21st-century idea, when actually it’s a very ancient thinking, sustainability. … Now we are kind of struggling to implement that. I believe for whatever reason Honolulu went the other way and expanded. And now I wouldn’t call it contracting, but I call it putting our resources back in the urban area and regenerating the urban area instead of creating more development outside.
Q: How do you think you folks are doing on the diversity aspect of Kakaako? We have so many towers going up for high-income folks. How do you think you’re doing as far as middle- and low- income residents?
A: I think we are doing good. I would let the numbers speak for themselves. Today between everything that’s been developed and everything that’s permitted: We’ll end up with 10,000 units in Kakaako — actually 4,000 of that is what you would call affordable. For a family of four earning under 140 percent of the median income … The median income in Honolulu is slightly higher — I think in 2015, $87,900. I think that there is a good mix of affordable. … That said, we are not complacent about it. The HCDA is taking an active role in producing more affordable housing. … The focus now is coming up with a strategy to create more affordable rental housing and, for that matter, rental housing in Kakaako. … We’re working with Forest City in Kakaako. Stanford Carr is working on Hale Kewalo on Piikoi (Street), which is a 128-unit, affordable at 60 percent AMI rental project that will remain affordable for a 60-year time frame.
Q: Are there certain cities or urban areas that you look to as prototypes?
A: I certainly do. I think Vancouver — I was fortunate to go there for a conference. The urban design, towers … We’re trying to follow the philosophy that Vancouver had. Vancouver gets voted or mentioned as the most desirable city.
Q: What were the major features you noticed when you visited Vancouver?
A: One is mass transit that works really well. Another one is the pedestrian realm. An active urban environment with a combination of housing, retail and all of that that really makes it happen. I kept going back to that same urban living room philosophy. They have their own character. Some of those it’s going to be hard to replicate. To some extent the urban vocabulary has to be organic and local. Historically, we don’t have a long history of architectural design and urbanism in Honolulu. Sometimes that can be a challenge. We take concepts from outside and we put a local flavor to it.
Q: Going to the Waterfront Park, the 20-year plan — what was the general reaction to that? I know some people might have gotten sticker shock.
A: $45 million is a big number, but given the size of the park and the facilities we are anticipating, that’s not unusual. It’s a reasonable framework.
The $45 million is not all public funding. The plan talks about public-private funding. Some are going to be, obviously for good reason, … publicly funded. If there is no revenue generated from a facility, then it’s very difficult for a private-sector investor to say I’m going to put the money in there. The genesis of that was we have two great parks. One is out of the district, one is in the district.
There is a different character from Ala Moana park to Kakaako (Waterfront) Park. It behooves us to make Kakaako Waterfront Park a more active park so that families can use it. There are active areas, there are performing areas. As there are more and more residents on the mauka side of Kakaako, there is going to be a need for passive as well as active uses for the park. … Let’s put in a nice slide in the park that children can slide down. (Mission) Dolores Park in San Francisco has a huge slide that gets used a lot. And interactive water features. … A couple years ago we visited New Zealand. … In Auckland, there is a small green area; half of it is a green park and half of it is an interactive water feature. My 20-month-old daughter had a great time jumping around. … We need to create something so a family can come to Kakaako, do their shopping, go out to eat and take the children to the park. … What we have right now, it doesn’t have those amenities that are conducive to that. It will be more and more a desired thing as there are more families living in Kakaako.
Q: Are you looking forward to rail, personally?
A: Personally, yes. We need to focus on mass transit and I think rail is a good form of mass transit. There can be differences of opinion about technology, whether it’s elevated, at-grade and all of that. But I think that’s secondary. I think the idea is to have that form of mass transit.
There’s a good form of mass transit (already), but nothing compares to rail. If you go to cities with rail transit in the U.S. in Europe or other places, you see the role they play, the impact that it has. That’s why I think we should not just stay within the 20 miles we are building. We should already think about expanding.
I think my ideal vision would be that the rail will be through East Honolulu and even to the Windward side … make it so convenient that a lot of people don’t need to get in their car when they can use mass transit. That is the future for us. … We need to expend our energy in developing a sustainable system that remains sustainable for a long, long, period of time.
Q: And it will bring everyone to the urban core.
A: As an engineer and having worked on some big projects, big public-improvement projects and infrastructure projects are challenging, but just because there are challenges and there are cost overruns and things like that, we cannot abandon it. ….I always tell people, I quote … (Albert) Einstein, that imagination is more important than knowledge. … We should never lose that ability to imagine what the future could be.
Einstein imagined what the world would look like if he was riding a beam of light. That’s how he came up with the theory of relativity. We need to be able to never give up imagining and having these big visions. … We need to be a dynamic society that looks to the future.
