INTRODUCTION

RAIL, AFFORDABLE HOUSING AND TOD: A LOOMING CRISIS AND AN OPPORTUNITY

The City and County of Honolulu is constructing a twenty-one-stop rail line, currently estimated to cost around $9.2 billion. The success of this project ultimately depends on development around the stations. With proper planning, TOD can bring tens of thousands of new affordable housing units, alleviate traffic congestion, and make Hawaiʻi an even better place to live and work. The success of TOD depends upon effective collaboration among a wide variety of public and private partners.

BACKGROUND: RAIL PROJECT, COUNTY AND STATE INVOLVEMENT

Rail transit is a project of the City and County of Honolulu, but it is financed with administrative support from the state. Honolulu voters approved the rail project in 2008, and funding has come primarily from a half cent sales tax on Honolulu residents. However, the Honolulu City Council started serious discussions about the impact of rail years before. Since starting TOD planning in 2007, the city has created eight neighborhood TOD plans which cover 19 of the 21 stations. Four of the plans have been adopted, and the other four plans are in process. These TOD plans will update the zoning codes to provide higher density and other incentives to promote development along the rail. The two stations not covered in city plans, Kakaʻako and Civic Center, are located on land under state jurisdiction, and therefore are subject to TOD plans created by a state agency, the Hawaiʻi Community Development Authority (HCDA).

ESTABLISHMENT OF THE TOD COUNCIL

Recognizing the need for multisector collaboration, the state officially started coordinating efforts with the establishment of the TOD council in 2016. Act 130, SLH 2016 established the TOD council and defined the Office of Planning as the lead agency to coordinate smart growth and TOD planning in Hawaiʻi. The Office of Planning has significantly fewer resources to devote to TOD than does the City and County of Honolulu. The city has six full-time TOD employees and there is a TOD subcabinet meeting twice a month where departments deliberate over TOD implementation details. Currently, the state TOD Council is administered with part time support from an Office of Planning administrator. Funding was recently allocated to hire a TOD project coordinator and a program manager. Despite these limited resources, in 2017 the TOD Council published a strategic plan and helped agencies to determine priorities. One priority was a regional infrastructure plan to assess delivery options for TOD on state lands. The Office of Planning requested $1 million for TOD planning statewide and was supported by the 2017 State Legislature with $1 million in funding for TOD planning on O‘ahu.

Since first convening in the middle of 2016, the council has created a plan, outlined priorities and helped agencies better communicate about TOD opportunities. However, there are still some structural issues which inhibit effective collaboration.

BACKGROUND OF THIS STUDY

This study is part of a larger project on the Waipahu TOD area being completed by the UH Community Design Center. The overarching goal is to identify barriers to TOD Council collaboration and suggest strategies to ameliorate them. Specifically, the purpose of this project is to:

1) Understand the roles of the various agencies involved in TOD and what key TOD stakeholders see as barriers to collaboration; 2) Highlight positive trends and strategies to build on existing strengths; and 3) Identify structural issues that are impeding collaboration and suggest new solutions.

SITE FOCUS

We address these questions by focusing on the Waipahu site. Meeting with agencies and partners involved in the development of a single site helped to frame and focus the conversation, while