Posted on: Thursday, July 29, 2004

EDITORIAL
Kaka'ako gets ready to reach for the stars

We wonder if the folks at Victoria Ward totally understood what would happen three years ago when they added 16 movie screens, parking and some new shops to what until then had been a frankly sleepy shopping area in Kaka'ako.

Giving stunning new meaning to the cliché "critical mass," the rap on the Ward properties almost overnight went from "ho-hum" to "not nearly enough parking."

Today, restaurants, movies and shopping feed off each other, and people aren't so much annoyed to find themselves in elbow-to-elbow crowds as they are pleased to be where the action is.

Now General Growth Properties, the Chicago-based real estate investment trust that bought the Ward properties in 2002 for $250 million (it also owns Ala Moana Center), has announced a $100 million expansion that will add more than 200 rental apartments, more retail space and much-needed new parking.

What's envisioned now is an urban village where people live, work and entertain themselves.

This idea has been broached before. In fact, the words are eerily reminiscent of the waves of pie-in-the-sky plans for Kaka'ako that came after 1976, when the state set up a special super-agency to seize development of the district from the city.

Most of those plans never made it past the drawing board.

But something happened. And now, almost 30 years later, with many millions of state dollars poured into prosaic but necessary projects involving undergrounding utilities, new roads, sewage and storm-drain systems — plus some excellent parks — Kaka'ako is suddenly bursting forth in ways that now-forgotten planners promised long ago.

Makai of the Victoria Ward Centers, an ambitious new University of Hawai'i medical school is also seeking a critical mass of its own, attracting privately owned research campuses to its side.

Kaka'ako isn't finished yet, but the Ward Centers and the med school and the facilities that will soon surround it seem an adequate base to spur the rest to completion. The tricky part now is in getting the job done right. Momentum must be guided by akamai planning.

For all of those 30 years of state planning for Kaka'ako, we've called for a finished product that literally draws gasps of wonder.

This means protecting access and vistas to the harbor and oceanfront. It means guaranteeing expansive areas of green space and parkland. It means, as the Ward folks recognize, a strong residential component so there are people in Kaka'ako 24 hours a day.

And, we've said all along, it should include a signature architectural element in the heart of Kaka'ako, a symphony hall, ocean center or other facility that will come to symbolize urban Honolulu to the rest of the world.

San Francisco has its bridges, Sydney its opera house, Vancouver and Hong Kong their mountains and harbors.

Honolulu can match or even exceed these Pacific neighbors if we allow our thinking to soar and our ambitions to know no bounds.