News: State Development Agency Pitches Final Plan For Westside’s Walkable City
Posted on Sep 16, 2025 in MainState Development Agency Pitches Final Plan For Westside’s Walkable City
The Hawaiʻi Community Development Authority is closing in on a final plan for Kalaeloa but major infrastructure needs mean it will be years before new development can begin.
By Matthew Leonard / Sept. 16, 2025
The state agency charged with redeveloping land around a World War II-era Navy base in West Oʻahu continues to amend its master plan to meet the demands of Hawaiʻi developers eager to start building in one of the island’s growth areas.
So far those changes are all aimed at accelerating construction of a district that would be six times the size of Kakaʻako in a region that could house nearly 1 in 6 Oʻahu residents in the next two decades. They include eliminating minimum requirements for off-street parking and allowing smaller homes to be built.
Developers, including Hunt Companies Hawaiʻi and Gentry Homes, are pushing for more concessions less than two months before the Hawaiʻi Community Development Authority votes to adopt the final version of the plan on Nov. 3. The public comment period closes Wednesday.
The authority’s master plan for the Kalaeloa Community Development District is the state’s blueprint for repurposing 3,700 acres that once formed the Naval Air Station Barbers Point, and has already been more than two decades in the making.
The catchphrase for Kalaeloa is the “20-Minute City,” a community in which most day-to-day services are within walking or biking distance of homes. The plan calls for transforming a community of around 3,000 people with fewer than 1,000 housing units into a series of mixed-use neighborhoods combining residential and commercial activity connected by low-speed tree-lined streets and walkways.
The patchwork of parcels owned by two dozen federal, state, city and private owners transferred to the authority in 2002, includes the Kalaeloa Airport, light commercial and industrial activity, residential areas and designated historical sites.
Even if the plan is finally adopted in November, it will be several years before major infrastructure, including upgraded water and power, could be brought online to enable development to begin, and it’s yet to be determined who would bear the cost.
The authority must also thread the needle of meeting its development mandate while addressing concerns that it could damage what remains of important Native Hawaiian archaeological sites, as well as portions of ʻEwa Field, the first location struck by Japanese forces during the 1941 attack of Pearl Harbor.
So while HCDA’s most recent rule updates include a requirement for exterior signage to be in ʻŌlelo Hawai‘i as well as English and mandates Native Hawaiian consultation on design advisory boards, the authority has also moved to allow more “flexible green building standards” and reduced the setback requirements for portions of buildings over 65-feet high.
“The Hawaiʻi Community Development Authority is tasked with redeveloping Kalaeloa,” HCDA Chief Executive Craig Nakamoto told Civil Beat, “and for that to occur we really tried to make it simpler for developers to navigate the permitting process.”
The developers, including Hunt and Gentry, have welcomed the most recent rule changes that now allow projects to be permitted based on the project size, rather than the parcel area.
But points of dispute remain, including the plan’s landscaping requirements, the extent any regulations would apply to private streets and the details of various architectural standards such as requirements for routing utilities underground.
Nakamoto said Monday he is confident any issues can be resolved to allow the projects to proceed and Paul Kay, chief operating officer of Hunt, seems to agree.
“While there are a handful of outstanding issues that we continue to discuss with staff,” Kay said at a Sept. 3 authority meeting, “we are satisfied these can be addressed.”
Some local residents, however, are not so sure. They say the current plan doesn’t acknowledge the area’s current infrastructure needs and fails to address how the development would support sustainable population growth.
The slider below overlays an aerial view of the Kalaeloa Community Development District with a graphic showing land ownership. Drag the slider across to compare.
Sheila Medeiros, a Kapolei resident who sits on the Makakilo-Kapolei-Honokai Hale Neighborhood Board, is worried the local community will be left to pick up the pieces.
“All these developers are going to build and then they’ll be gone and we are left with problems with traffic, not having enough schools and not having enough health care,” Medeiros said. “Nobody’s really taking into account that resources are limited.”
Medeiros points to issues with Kalaeloa’s water supply, which was installed by the U.S. Navy in the early 1940s and doesn’t comply with Honolulu Board of Water Supply standards. Now the water system is run by a private company, Kalaeloa Water Co., and is currently leaking over a million gallons of well water per day, according to an HCDA analysis.
The Board of Water Supply also doesn’t have sufficient source capacity to provide potable water to Kalaeloa, according to written testimony submitted to the authority by water board manager Ernie Lau.
“I’d like to know what metric the HCDA are using to determine the water capacity for new growth,” Medeiros said.
An infrastructure master plan the authority expects to release toward the end of the year will address some of the outstanding issues, HCDA Planning Director Ryan Tam said. “I think the primary issues are electricity and water, including drainage and stormwater.
Tam added that “the master plan will look at what’s needed and maybe it’s something that the state will have to fund through various ways to facilitate the development in the district.” He said HCDA is currently in the procurement process for $30 million in improvements to the electricity system in Kalaeloa.
For context, the HCDA spent $223 million for infrastructure upgrades for Kakaʻako, it’s largest completed project to date.
‘The 20-Minute City’
Since the closure of the region’s sugar industry, the ʻEwa region has seen rapid expansion, with its population nearly tripling from 43,000 in 1990 to 127,000 in 2020.
That trend is set to continue, the HCDA plan said, with the region expected to have a population of around 180,000, or 17% of Oʻahu residents, by 2045.
The Kalaeloa Community Development District includes the largest undeveloped portions still available on Oʻahu’s Leeward Side, and housing is projected to more than double there to nearly 80,000 units in 2045, according to the authority.
The HCDA first presented a vision for the district in 2006, but the authority said development has been slow since, due to continued military and civilian use of the Kalaeloa airport, and inadequate infrastructure.
This latest iteration of a master plan prepared by the HCDA and consultants Torti Gallas + Partners started about five years ago when the authority “realized that the 2006 plan and the 2012 rules really needed to be streamlined,” to kickstart new development, Nakamoto said.
Under the plan, Saratoga Avenue would become the “new downtown” of Kalaeloa and a “promenade type mixed-use area.”
“We really encourage putting the housing and commercial development right along the main thoroughfares to promote an active pedestrian environment,” Tam said.
But a bustling and sustainable mixed-use community feels a long way off in a small and comparatively poor community. Median income there is $15,000 below the state median of $95,300, and the poverty rate is 18.9%, compared to 10.1% statewide, according to the 2023 American Community Survey.
And the “20-Minute City” envisaged in the HCDA master plan is predicated on several factors the authority doesn’t directly control, including the completion of infrastructure upgrades and the creation of more local jobs.
The HCDA plan says that there is significant potential to grow jobs in Kalaeloa through the technology research and development hub and light industry already there. For those who work elsewhere, the plan assumes the expansion of urban transit services by the city along the Roosevelt Avenue corridor, where the densest new housing development would be built.
But the Skyline rail system stops 1.5 miles away from Kalaeloa, and there is currently no plan to extend it further westward. The transit options are TheBus and TheHandi-Van.
“Maybe we’re not at that point in the evolution of public transit,” Nakamoto said, “but in time we might be.”
Tam said “as we see more development and more activity in Kalaeloa we’re going to want to see the city expand transit services.”
Right now the community remains heavily car dependent, according to the census. The average commuting time for Kalaeloa residents to their workplace is 37 minutes, compared to 27 minutes elsewhere in the state, and 60% of workers drove to their workplace alone, the census found.
Nevertheless, the current master plan has removed off-street parking requirements for new construction, in line with a city ordinance meant to lower construction costs and ideally increase use of public transit.
“By removing the onsite parking minimum we don’t prohibit parking, we just put it on the developer to decide what the market demands for parking,” Nakamoto said. “If a certain development needs a lot of parking they can put that in.”
More Rule Changes Likely
How many new homes the Kalaeloa Master Plan will include won’t be determined for years, until developers start submitting detailed building applications.
It’s also unclear how many of those will be classified affordable.
The master plan only talks about creating housing with “an affordable component,” despite an overall shortage of affordable units for Oʻahu households earning 80% of the median state income of $95,300, according to the Honolulu Department of Planning and Permitting.
While the administration of Gov. Josh Green promotes affordable housing as a major priority, there are currently only 14 new affordable units scheduled for completion on Kalaeloa in 2026, and nothing beyond that, according to the state’s affordable housing dashboard.
Even as the final deadline for submitting revisions looms, Hunt Companies Hawaiʻi — which owns nearly 10% or 400 acres of Kalaeloa — and other developers are still pushing for more changes.
Hunt’s chief operating officer declined an interview. In additional comments sent by email, Kay said the company saw many positive elements in the current drafts.
The company is still lobbying the state authority to extend the duration of certain permits, including those for interim uses of vacant land, Kay wrote. That would potentially enable Hunt to draw passive income from its land holdings through interim leases, while full development proceeds.
In comments at the Sept. 3 HCDA meeting, Quentin Machida, CEO of Gentry Homes, said that developers are looking for certainty from the final plan before deciding whether they can proceed. Machida did not return phone calls from Civil Beat seeking specifics.
With public comment on the master plan set to close Wednesday, the most serious pushback has come from the cultural heritage sector over future management of the Native Hawaiian archaeological sites and potential encroachment onto historic parts of the air base.
Nakamoto is confident that the current version of the plan strikes the “right balance between preservation and development.”
But urban designer Ross Stephenson submitted testimony to HCDA in August urging changes to the plan to better protect the nationally listed ʻEwa Plains Battlefield site from future encroachment by developers. Stephenson said in an interview the master plan also represented an opportunity to keep “significant public land on the ʻEwa Plains open for future use.”
Civil Beat’s coverage of climate change and the environment is supported by The Healy Foundation, the Marisla Fund of the Hawaiʻi Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.