Entries Tagged 'Places' ↓

I received an email from Kevin Chang who said he enjoys reading Hawaii Blogger. Even my mom hasn’t said that.

Kevin works for The Trust for Public Land. They acquire land for conservation, with the goal of reconnecting people with the land; whatever that means.

As you might suspect, Kevin’s organization is supporting the Campaign to Protect Turtle Bay. Turtle Bay is considered Oahu’s last slice of country; beaches, surfing, landscapes (are those windmills still up there on the North Shore?), habitat of endangered species (turtles, seals, and land developers), local agriculture, and Hawaiian ancestral burial grounds.

Governor Linda Lingle and many others want to buy the Turtle Bay resort and surrounding property, about 850 acres, to preserve it for the future. No one is doing much with the land these days, though the Turtle Bay owner has plans. Everyone has plans for developing something.

I am curious, though, and curiosity begets questions.

What will happen to the land if the state buys it from the current owners? If the developers have their way, North Shore residents will have more jobs available and a much shorter commute to the jobs they have now. I can’t imagine how traffic on the North Shore could get worse.

Will a few additional resort buildings on the owner’s property harm the seals and turtles and Hawaiian burial places? If the state buys the land will Hawaii residents still be able to use the land? If so, how?

Another question that I haven’t heard answered is, ‘If you owned the land, what would you do with it?‘ How would you feel if you were told you could not do with your land what you planned, and was legal when you bought it?

A typical house on Oahu costs about $600,000. A typical condo goes for almost $400,000. After enduring a few decades of rising property costs, people are clamoring for affordable housing.

At prices like that, who can blame people for clamoring. It’s what they do when things don’t go as they want.

What can the state do to provide affordable housing? Change the definition of what is ‘affordable.’

If you can’t afford what’s considered affordable by the state’s definition, then the deficiency is your own fault. Earn more. Somehow or another, affordable means about $450,000 to $550,000. Think about how much money a family must earn to afford a monthly mortgage, even with 10-percent down payment.

But, hey. It’s affordable.

There’s a condominium conversion down the street with prices in the $300,000 range. The building is closer to what used to be called ‘the projects’ or ‘low income housing.’ It’s a very old apartment building that was converted to become a condominium.

For many buyers, it’s also affordable. So, why isn’t it selling like hotcakes? Even those who can afford $300,000 aren’t buying because the building still looks like ‘the projects’ or ‘low income housing’, therefore, appreciation isn’t likely to occur.

But it’s affordable.

Winter is over, spring is here, summer is on the way. Then why was it so cold last night?

Yes, I know. Cold is relative. An overnight low in the mid-60s can’t be considered cold, especially to those who shiver day and night where it’s really cold (Missouri, I’m lookin’ at you!). It’s not really cold here. It just feels like it sometimes.

It felt cold this morning.

There was a bit of a wind, which, for those who understand the Wind Chill Factor, makes whatever temperature feel cooler than that temperature, whatever it is. I tell my relatives from Missouri that I don’t bother to go outside when the daytime temperature hits below 70-degrees.  I like the overnight low at 70-degrees and the daytime high at 80-degrees. That’s perfect.

Hawaii may have more perfect days like that than any other place on the planet. I’m not keeping track and I haven’t been to all the other places on the planet but I grew up in Missouri and all the weather that everyone else on the planet gets they get in Missouri.

Sometimes in the same week.

I don’t know whether we’re in the middle of a global warming crisis or not, but it hasn’t been as cold and wet on an annual basis in Hawaii as it was 20 years ago.

Now we find out that the University of Hawaii athletics department was losing money the past few years. What a surprise. What? The department doesn’t want another independent audit of their financials? What a surprise.

New Athletic Director Jim Donovan was required to apologize for the lack of transparency regarding the University’s athletic financial condition. In the meantime, he gets to use one of his nine lives early in his tenure as the AD who followed the deposed Herman Frazier.

Frazier had already used his nine lives, so he left. That’s how it works. You only get nine. Evan Dobelle used up his as President of UH. When the UH Board of Regents did a Nine Lives Audit, they found Dobelle at the maximum already, so they canned him and restarted the Nine Lives Clock on new President, David McClain.

Looking back, Herman Frazier probably wasted two or three of his nine lives just with the June Jones contract fiasco. New AD Jim Donovan gets to use the New Guy life, which is usually the first of the Nine Lives to go. It can’t be used again, but he still has eight.

How will they be used? Upgrading UH facilities will cost Donovan at least two or three lives. Those money fights drag on for years. June Jones was so popular in Hawaii that he could have been elected Governor, yet he wasn’t able to get facilities upgraded. What chance does Donovan have?

Once the nine lives are gone, officials are required to hit the road. The really smart officials start looking for a new job when they’re at five or six lives, and make a jump before they hit number eight.

I find it difficult to believe that no one saw this coming. Molokai Ranch will close their doors. Over 120 people on Molokai will lose their jobs. Hundreds more will suffer from the economic fallout as fewer tourists will visit the once but no longer ‘friendly isle.’

What happened? Residents of Molokai refused to allow Molokai Ranch’s owners the opportunity to develop property elsewhere on the island to offset financial losses. Faced with mounting red ink from Molokai Ranch, and with no ability to turn a profit from previous investments on the island, the developer decided to shut the doors.

What goes around, comes around.

As much as friendly isle locals may love their laid back lifestyle, mostly unchanged for decades, what they haven’t figured out is how to peacefully coexist with dictates of progress. In one form or another, change is inevitable. Even now the change of economic hardship will affect hundreds and hundreds of Molokai residents. Some will leave the island. Many more will feel the economic change in a very personal way.

Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

This morning I walked out the door of our condo and saw an old man using the lawn water faucet near the front of the building. He was an old man with long hair, sandals, a dark shirt and pants so soiled they seemed to shine in the sun. His skin was very dark,  similar to that of men and women who toiled for years in the pineapple fields.

From ‘the look‘ I assumed he was homeless. They have a rather distinct look.

My first inclination was to yell out and tell him to leave before I called the cops. Instead, I watched for a moment. He stood by the water faucet, not bothering to look around to see who might be watching him. He washed his hands in the water, then reached to a back pocket and pulled out a cloth, about hand towel size and held it under the running water.

He wiped his face and hands with the wet towel, leaned over and took a drink of water from the faucet, then he turned around, very slowly, still not looking back in my direction, and he walked away.

He found a cool spot and some momentary refreshment on a hot, dry day. I knew he’d be back.

What does it cost to send your kids to private school vs. public school? In Hawaii, the difference can be substantial. No, it is substantial. Is there a corresponding difference in the education a private school student receives vs. a public school student?

Assuming day-to-day food and clothing costs for students are about the same, tuition at Punahou School will be almost $17,000 per student for 2008-2009. That’s about $1,400 a month, which means a parent must earn an additional $24,000 or so each year just to pay for the child’s tuition.

By the way, $17,000 does not cover all the costs. Parents must ante up for other optional fees and a few other mandatory fees not included in the tuition. Matson calls that a surcharge. Punahou calls it a privilege.
A good education at Punahou is so expensive that the tuition and mandatory fees still do not cover the school’s entire cost to educate a student. Punahou School says the deficit is covered by the school’s endowment, which appears to be money collected by the school from graduates and donors and parents of graduates as some kind of surcharge on a surcharge.

All that money exchanging hands brings up a couple of questions.

The first is, what is it about Punahou School’s education process and methodology that makes it cost so much more to educate a student than it does in public schools? After all, Hawaii’s DOE manages to educate (I’m stretching this to make a point) students in public schools using about 10-percent of what it costs to educate a student a Punahou School.

The second is, are Punahou’s students 10 times better, smarter, more well educated than public school students? On average, do they earn 10 times as much money?

What price education?

Honolulu has the third worst roads of any big city in the country, according to some transportation research group in Washington, D.C. 62-percent of our streets are in poor condition.

I believe it.

Eight or nine years ago I did some business in downtown San Francisco for a few days and thought their city streets were the worst I’d ever driven. They’re not. Los Angeles comes in at #1 for the worst roads in the country. San Francisco is #2, followed by ‘lucky you live Hawaii’ streets in Honolulu.

Even worse than making the Top 10 List for bad roads, is the estimated additional cost for more vehicle maintenance, faster vehicle deterioration, and added fuel costs. $760 a year additional. As in $63 a month more than the national average.

What’s interesting is that nationally, according to the report, only about 23-percent of roads are in poor condition. Honolulu is nearly three times the national average. Honolulu politicians and officials were quick to point out that the information is old news and the city has paved many bad roads since then. Of course, many roads have become worse since then, so I evens out. Someone else’s reality negates the reality offered by city officials.

Regardless, I drive on reality in Honolulu and it ain’t a pretty sight or a good ride.

The weather in my home state of Missouri can be miserable any time of year; sometimes most of the time. The weather is often called a ’state of misery.’ Local residents of the Show Me State often say, “If you don’t like the weather, just wait 20-minutes. It’ll change.” It does. Usually for the worse.

Weather forecasters in the Midwest live in a meteorologists paradise because all four seasons can happen on the same weekend. Storms, rain, snow, ice, cold, hot, and whatever isn’t pleasurable in between is cause enough for looking elsewhere for good weather habits.

Hawaii has good weather habits. Look at any long range forecast for weather in Hawaii. The projected daytime high temperatures rarely change more than a couple of degrees in any given week. The same is true for the overnight low temperatures. There is very little day-to-day change. When weather gets chilly, a relative term, obviously, it’s news. When the weather gets hot, say, about 90-degrees, it’s news.

Still, television meteorologists get the weather forecasts wrong in Hawaii about as much as they do in the Midwest. Weather is like that. Hawaii’s large mountains, ocean currents, and seasons combine to create weather pattern changes which affect the islands. Unknown to local meteorologists who try to determine an accurate forecast days in advance using scientific methods is the fact that some local residents have an effect on local weather.

If I wash my car, it will rain within 24 hours, yet KGMB-TV’s Guy Hagi never calls to ask when I plan to wash my car again. It’s a known scientific fact that rain-laden clouds from the Koolaus have been known to track my car for miles, waiting to dump a little drizzle on my newly washed vehicle just two blocks from home and covered parking.

It happens. It’s science.

So what if the economy is slowing and there are nationwide fears of a recession? What better way to make yourself feel good when we’re inundated with bad news is a new place to exercise our retail therapy rights.

Ala Moana Center to the rescue.

The retail overlords of Hawaii’s second largest shopping center** heard your prayers and responded with 18 new retails stores, including Nordstrom’s. Remember that blank spot just mauka of Ala Moana Center and across from Kentucky Fried Chicken and KGMB-TV’s studios? It’s now a Nordstrom’s and space for up to 30 stores.

Just moments ago you were worried about the economy and your job and how you’ll pay off all that credit card debt, right? Now you’re not worried at all. In fact, you’re excited, and have every intention of checking out Nordstrom’s and 17 other stores all waiting to help you with your retail therapy.

The Nordstrom’s Wing isn’t quite done, but it’s close enough to completion that the new stores are willing to sacrifice their goods in behalf of your latest need for therapy. After all, what better way to beat the blues than with a pleasant and calming trip to the new Ala Moana Center, following a brief round of the always enjoyable and adrenaline pumping exercise of, “Outta my way, woman. I saw that parking space first!”

**Come on. Waikiki is bigger than Ala Moana Center, right? More stores, more restaurants, less parking.