Posted on: Tuesday, May 3, 2005
Relocating tenants feel wistful, 'sticker shock'
By Dan Nakaso
Advertiser Staff Writer
It's hardly a shock anymore when Tammy Kim comes to work at the sagging Moanalua Shopping Center and finds that yet another business has moved out and left behind an abandoned storefront.
Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser The final days are approaching for Pang and the handful of business owners witnessing the end of the 51-year-old shopping center, one of the first of its kind in the Islands. The 15-acre spot sits on Navy property one mile mauka of Pearl Harbor's Nimitz Gate.
By June 15, the last of the one-time 35 or so tenants has to be out. Work will begin on July 15 to demolish the 85,000 square-foot center to make way for 30,000 square feet of new retail and restaurant space and a two-story, 55,000-square-foot Navy building.
The work is the result of an agreement between the Navy and The MacNaughton Group in which The MacNaughton Group will build a one-stop center for incoming and outgoing Navy families and demolish and rebuild the main portion of Moanalua Shopping Center. The fast-food restaurants and gasoline station that ring the main shopping center will remain.
The MacNaughton Group rendering In exchange, The Mac-Naughton Group will operate the shopping center for the next 40 years under the management of CB Richard Ellis Hawaii.
The arrangement is expected to pump new energy into the tired-looking, open-air shopping center that opened Aug. 19, 1954.
Starbucks and Jamba Juice have agreed to move in when the new Moanalua Shopping Center is ready Feb. 6, said Todd Hedrick, asset manager for The MacNaughton Group. Other businesses are in negotiations, he said.
Interest in the new development will probably draw even more customers, Hedrick said.
But in the transition, business owners such as Pang, the dentist, have found that the center's peeling exterior, deteriorating pipes and dwindling foot traffic have protected them from the realities of retail office rents on O'ahu.
Pang has seen both military and civilian patients at Moanalua Shopping Center for 12 years and never had his rent go up.
Now he plans to move into a new practice in the Aiea Shopping Center. His office space will double to 960 square feet, but his rent will triple.
"I tried for six months to find a place like this, but there's no way I could get a rent like I have now," Pang said. "I used to have a Ma-and-Pa operation, just me and one other person. Now I need to hire more people and have more overhead. I've got to grow up and really work."
Heath Habbeshaw, pastor and administrator of one of the remaining tenants, Calvary Chapel Pearl Harbor and its Pearl Harbor Christian Academy, said the Navy and MacNaughton Group have worked with them to ease the transition.
Advertiser library photo Classes will end June 3 for Pearl Harbor Christian Academy's K-8 school. Then the church and school will move to a bigger location in Waipi'o-Gentry, Habbeshaw said.
Habbeshaw expects the new location will attract even more people. And he's excited to see what the new Navy building and shopping center will look like.
But the last days are still hard.
"It's a landmark that's going away," Habbeshaw said. "All of a sudden, like just last week, you walk outside and realize that another tenant left. You look in the window and see that everything's gone."
Reach Dan Nakaso at dnakaso@honoluluadvertiser.com or at 525-8085.
"It's like a ghost town here now," said Kim, the officer manager and dental assistant for one of Moanalua Shopping Center's last surviving tenants, dentist Harrison Pang. "It's really sad. All of the old-timers, we've been together for years."
The 51-year-old Moanalua Shopping Center will be torn down in July to make way for new retail and restaurant space and a two-story Navy building to open in February.
The new Moanalua Shopping Center will fit up to 21 tenants in 30,000 square feet of retail space that will surround the new Navy building. Starbucks and Jamba Juice have agreed to move in.
The new space can accommodate up to 21 tenants, but some businesses will probably use more than one of the 1,300-square-foot bays, Hedrick said.
"We're sympathetic," said Jeff Arce, a partner with the MacNaughton Group. "Frankly, the tenants that are there have been paying rents that are comparable to the quality of the facilities there. It's good for them in the short term because they can continue to pay below-market rents. Unfortunately, when it's time to actually adjust to the market, a lot of them get sticker shock."
The Moanalua Shopping Center was one of the first of its kind when it opened in 1954. A dentist who is relocating to the Aiea Shopping Center will pay triple the rent that he paid at Moanalua.
