In February, the City & County of Honolulu’s annual report “On the Status of Land Use on O’ahu” came out. It provides insight and page after page of facts, figures, and possible scenarios going forward as we ponder, perpetually, why we don’t have enough (affordable) housing in Hawai`i… and local people keep purchasing one way tickets to the mainland.
I don’t pretend to be an urbanologist (nor have I ever played one on TV), nor am I a city planner, builder, or architect, but I did find one chart particularly fascinating. The report provides the usual rationale behind our housing shortage, including “…limited land, geographical isolation, global demand, and income inequality.”
O’ahu has just three land “use” districts: urban, agricultural, and conservation. Scanning a chart of land usage over the past 50 years, you might expect a gradual shift to urban land from either agricultural or conservation land. But you’d be mistaken. Since 1970, land zoned for conservation has remained remarkably steady at 41%. Preserving our `āina, I get it. The eye-opening numbers were the other two land types. Agricultural land since 1970 has fallen from 38% to 33% of the total. Urban land has grown from 22% in 1970 to 26% in 2020. That’s it; just a 4% shift.
You might assume that over the past half century, land formerly used for mainstay crops like sugar and pineapple might have (at some point) shifted. Not so. As a further example of the lack of redistribution of local land for possible housing initiatives, the report shows that between 2006 and 2020, fewer than 100 total acres on O’ahu were transferred to urban. To put that land mass into perspective, Aloha Stadium’s total fenced-in footprint is 98 acres.
I may be oversimplifying here, but just 4% of Oahu’s land area has been re-zoned in the past 50-years. That seems astonishing, especially since the “housing crisis” has been an issue addressed repeatedly for over a half-century. Fast-tracking efforts being made now to provide more housing to more people more quickly are commendable. But you gotta wonder- what took so long? Why the intransigence? Sure, we’ll cherish more self-sustaining agriculture, but why haven’t we seen (at least) a few more affordable vertical units (a kama`aina Kakaako, if you will) over the past 50-years in other O`ahu locales?
I’m sure there are good answers, somewhere, but these seem like fair questions to ask.
Think about it…