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Civil Unrest - Housing in Hawaii12/13/2022 The civil infrastructure of our cities are based on piping waste, water, electricity, and other forms of energy through pipes... Which are usually underground, and take a fortune to build, maintain, and expand. This system is the result of eons of evolution whereby we now place them under roads so as not to get in the way of building foundations. Then we direct stormwater, wastewater, and other byproducts away from the buildings through these pipes to go somewhere. And we direct air, fresh water, electricity, gas, and other important items into the pipes for various uses that a building may need.
It's a simple system, but takes an extraordinary amount of energy from designers, engineers, and building officials to coordinate this orchestra of spaghetti that is essential for our lives. It's an incredibly fragile system since when a pipe breaks - usually due to an accident, natural disaster, or just plain apathy - that we must pay another extraordinary sum to not only find the leak, but to dig large trenches to replace them. It's surgical, and costs more than surgery. For those of you who aren't planners, this spaghetti that runs through our streets are engineered in size based on specific assumptions about our weather, population growth, and local usage at the time of development. AND it is regulated by our civil servants who faithfully serve our cities and municipalities. Each dancing in a choreography that is mostly helpful, and with federal oversight by agencies like FEMA and the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). Who both work very hard at trying to manage the slow cleanup of our environment through steep fines and regulation if our municipalities fall out of line of our environmental goals. The city municipality keeps a strict chain of command of who and what pipes are put into the ground... and most importantly - when. This regulation can hold off real estate development in many areas for decades. Here in Hawaii, developing a significant portion of raw land into homes, shopping, schools, and other services typically takes about 25 years... nearly an entire career... or about two and a half real estate cycles. Just to arrange for the potable drinking water, the storm water management, the roads, the land subdivisions and setting up roads, fire station access, and other city services... take over ten years. It probably can be done faster... but our city planners want to manage the growth of our cities. It's not in the public interest to grow too fast.... we've seen what's happening in China. It's possible to manage the pace of growth, but in our town of Honolulu - growth is managed not with a simple yes or no. But rather it is done with a more passive aggressive approach... yes you can... but you'll need to do these things... and when you finish those, we'll see if there's more to do since new laws may have been added in the 25 years since. And so the builder is stuck in a mire of extraordinary risk of time and cash in order to develop their property. And the waiting consumer who needs a home must wait for quarter centuries - yes the Department of Hawaiian Homelands actually has clients on the list who are waiting for access to land for that long (and longer)... as they wait for the infrastructure to be planned and executed. I'm sure you might already be able to detect the subtle hints of cultural exclusion popping out of the sea like an iceberg. This is the true reason why housing in Hawaii in non-existent. That we must wait, and that we can no longer afford the housing that exists. And the true reason why we have NO affordable housing. The civil infrastructure that purportedly helps our city and it's inhabitants stay clean, healthy, and at most times dry, protected, and "civil" in times of disaster is what all this "hoopla" and "auwe" about housing is about. There is a solution....Yes - after years of think-tanking with our American Institute of Architects (AIA) Honolulu's Design for Risk & Resiliency Committee, yours truly actually has one... But before we unveil it, there's a bit of background info to digest; several dots to connect, and a huge helping of imagination. Isn't this what architects are supposed to do for society? Help you imagine? First we must question the core premise of how and why we build the civilization that we do. What if we decide that we want to take more risk? That we don't mind treating our own water? That we don't mind getting flooded once in a while? That we could lose our homes in a hurricane? That we could lose lives? That we may need to find other ways to treat our sewage to be sanitary? Or that we won't have power piped in to our homes? Perhaps we generate all of the above on our own? In the coming articles, I'll tackle each of the decisions that we've made about our lives, health and safety - and then you, dear reader, can decide if waiting a quarter century is worth it.... For perhaps the risks that we think we are mitigating... are truly not. At which point waiting those 25 years may not be worth it at all! For isn't the loss of time sometimes greater than the loss of anything else? Stay tuned - we'll start connecting the dots together!
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