Quote:
Originally Posted by MayDay
You’re welcome! I have photos of other construction projects and will try to upload asap. One thing I found odd - in Kaka’ako, on Queen Street there were new buildings going up right next to scruffy car repair shops and microbreweries but the street had no sidewalks.  |
Well first off the reason parts of Queen st. and some of the other roads in Kakaako have no sidewalks is due to the roads being privately owned by the Chun brothers (they own a portion of Queen St.) who are quickly becoming despised by many in the community. The state government is working towards either condemning the land using eminent domain or forcing private roads to upkeep their roads to city standards (adding sidewalks and keeping the roads paved). Its been an ongoing issue for several years and many residents in Kakaako including myself have been lobbying the State and County to do something about it. The Chun brothers crossed the line when they started charging business owners for parking and towing their customers cars. Hopefully by the time rail is in Kakaako they solve the dispute quickly.
You can read about it here in these articles (both are a little old and since then the state and county have made progress on figuring out what to do)
http://hawaiipublicradio.org/post/ro...treets-kakaako
http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/1...f-queen-street
Another issue facing Kakaako development is that most those "scruffy auto repair shops" actually own the land and building they work in. It's not uncommon for light industrial businesses in Hawaii to own the land where their business operates. Usually what happens is once the business owners retire they pass it down to their kids and the kids either sell the land to a developer or they continue the business. If you were to ever look at a tax parcel map of Kakaako you would see that some areas in the neighborhood are divided into hundreds of little parcels. Its going to take a long time to consolidate the land in Kakaako. Another issue thats going slow down the process is there is such strong demand on Oahu for light industrial/warehousing space that many land owners may actually make more money keeping the land as is as opposed to selling it to a developer. Lets just say that Auto repair shops on Oahu are raking in a ton of money and many of the owners are backlogged with business. Many of them are patient and don't see any reason to sell the land anytime soon. Plus with the success of turning those warehouses in microbreweries/bars and clubs it may just be those many of those old buildings never get redeveloped but re-purposed instead. Some of the best new bars on Oahu are in old warehouses...