| "We're translating the environmental issues that we've always dealt with in terms of how it's affecting people every day." | |
| Gordon Grau, University of Hawaii Sea Grant College Program |
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Decisions about what, where, and how communities are built have profound impacts, not only on the land and sea environments, but on people's daily lives. Everything from the schools children attend to the length of daily commutes and the amount of exercise engaged in are impacted by decisions made long before ground is ever broken on a development.
Coastal resource managers in Hawaii are working to help developers and local government officials take a more holistic approach to land-use decision-making using smart growth principles.
"Not only are we more effectively addressing our mission, goals, and objectives, but we're also making them relevant to people's everyday lives," notes Gordon Grau, director of the University of Hawaii Sea Grant College Program. "When we're talking about somebody sitting in traffic for three hours to get to work or to get their kids to school, it resonates with people. We're translating the environmental issues that we've always dealt with in terms of how it's affecting people every day."
Through the University of Hawaii Sea Grant Center for Smart Building and Community Design, Sea Grant and many partners brought a national team of smart growth experts to Hawaii to work with local landowners, developers, and city planners—and are providing ongoing support—to help create a more comprehensive approach to regional planning.
As a result, a development of about 12,000 new housing units and commercial space on Oahu has been designed to minimize its coastal environmental impacts, and smart growth principles are being incorporated in development and redevelopment projects across the islands.
Past Planning
Like many communities across the country, development in Hawaii has spread out from urban centers, taking over lands traditionally used for agriculture, putting longer distances between homes, stores, and jobs, and making people dependent on their cars.
"We have made over the past 40 years every mistake in land-use planning that a community can make," says Jeremy Harris, the former mayor of Honolulu. "We've adopted laws that encouraged sprawl. . . We've ended up with horrendous traffic and pollution."
Sprawling development is blamed for everything from wasting tax money by increasing the need for new roads, new water and sewer lines, new schools, and augmented police and fire protection, to adding to rates of obesity, since the options of walking and bicycling are less practical.
More roads mean more stormwater runoff, which degrades water quality. Traffic resulting from sprawling urban areas impacts air and water and is considered a significant source of carbon emissions contributing to climate change.
"The major contributors to the problems in coastal waters and watersheds have to do with what we're doing on land," Grau says. "That recognition should change the way we approach environmental problems," including water quality, ecosystem and habitat management, coastal hazard mitigation, and other Sea Grant priority issues.
Creating Sustainability
In general, smart or green growth is simply creative development strategies that can preserve natural lands and critical environmental areas, protect water and air quality, and reuse already developed land.
Smart growth neighborhoods typically are designed to have shops, offices, schools, churches, parks, and other amenities near homes so that residents and visitors have the options of walking, bicycling, taking public transportation, or driving.
A greater mix of housing can make it possible for people to live their lives in one community, from the young couple buying their first home to senior citizens looking to downsize.
"What smart growth promises, and I believe that it can and does deliver, is that balance between responsible development, which allows us to preserve open space through proper use of higher densities, while at the same time providing an increase in quality of life," says Eric Crispin, the former director of Planning and Permitting for the City of Honolulu.
The high quality of life in these communities typically makes them economically competitive, creates business opportunities, and improves the local tax base, notes Stephen Meder, director of the Center for Smart Building and Community Design and a faculty member of the University of Hawaii School of Architecture.
Meder says that smart growth's focus on reducing stormwater impacts and protecting natural environmental buffers can also help prevent flooding and lessen the impacts of coastal hazards, such as tsunamis, hurricanes, and storm surge, thereby increasing community resilience.
The features that distinguish smart growth in a community vary from place to place and even project to project, depending on the local natural and cultural resources, existing social situations, and the economic and political forces behind land development, management, and zoning.
Introducing Concepts
Soon after the Center for Smart Building and Community Design was created in 2004, Sea Grant began working with the City and County of Honolulu, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Development, Community, and Environment Division, and local developers to bring smart growth experts from across the country to the island of Oahu to introduce the concepts during a multi-day workshop.
The workshop focused on the benefits and challenges of implementing smart growth principles in two existing projects—the new development of Kapolei, where large-scale planning activities were underway, and the redevelopment of Kailua.
"We had a packed house," Meder says. "We were really fortunate that every developer building homes in the area came," as did landowners, city planners, and other stakeholders.
Fostering Change
The city continued the momentum created by the workshop by bringing the experts back for subsequent meetings, and developers in both Kapolei and Kailua revised their plans to incorporate some of the ideas presented by the team.
The workshop "definitely fostered some of the thought behind the planning of Ho‘opili," says Mike Jones, president of D.R. Horton-Hawaii Division, which is planning the 11,750-home and commercial development in Kapolei.
Jones notes that D.R. Horton hired several of the experts who presented at the workshop to help design the project. As a result, Ho‘opili has had extensive community involvement and plans center on mass transit and various modes of transportation options, including pedestrian and bike paths. The project also will feature a mix of housing and commercial uses.
Ripple Effect
"The workshop was a phenomenal success," says Meder. "The success is showing a number of years later, not only in the development of Kapolei, but in other parts of the state, as well. We're seeing the ripple effects."
The Center for Smart Building and Community Design has gone on to provide smart growth assistance to other community groups, local governments, and developers that has resulted in planning changes and the development of new codes and ordinances addressing shoreline setbacks. Several books and manuals have been contributed to, including a coastal hazard mitigation guidebook that was used in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
"Sea Grant really turned the light on in the room," says Crispin. "They showed us that doing the same thing will only yield the same results of sprawl."
He adds, "They showed us that there is a different and better way that can be profitable, while allowing greater quality of life and sustaining the environment at the same time."
For more information on smart growth, point your browser to www.epa.gov/smartgrowth/. For information on the Hawaii Sea Grant Center for Smart Building and Community Design, go to www.soest.hawaii.edu/seagrant/. For more information on smart growth efforts in Hawaii, contact Gordon Grau at (808) 956-7031, or sgdir@hawaii.edu, or Stephen Meder at (808) 956-7031, or smeder@hawaii.edu. For more information on the Ho‘opili development, go to www.hoopilioahu.com
