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Down to Business: Village Design Guidelines Begin to Emerge

Oct 23, 2009

KAILUA-KONA, HI – With broad Kona community goals already established, thanks to the award-winning Kona Community Development Plan (CDP), the second day of the Honokohau Village charrette ended with a community talk story seeking to apply the goals to a specific place.

Susan Henderson, director of design for the PlaceMakers consulting team, said the opening discussions constitute “a baby step” towards customizing the CDP-enabled Village Design Guidelines. “We welcome your continued input over the next five days.”

Photo of Kona Architecture

Residents viewed examples of Kona character, from the simple to the more ornate.

Residents viewed examples of Kona character, from the simple to the more ornate.

To demonstrate how Kona-appropriate guidelines might be “calibrated” to produce development consistent with local character and the wishes of residents, the PlaceMakers consultants displayed a draft summary table that lists particular rules for setbacks, building frontages, and other characteristics that determine the look and feel of a place. By the charrette’s concluding presentation next Tuesday evening, the table will reflect all the input and idea-testing during the week. It will be part of the first rough draft of the Village Design Guidelines.

There are still multiple opportunities for participation in the remaining days of the charrette schedule. If you need a general overview of the project’s goals, read our BIG PICTURE summary in the column immediately to the right.

The talk story sessions on Thursday focused on goals the community team wants to keep in mind as the guidelines customization continues. Conserving and enhancing the natural resources of the Island and of Kona in particular were key topics in one session, where participants talked about ways general lessons of sustainability might be applied to this project and ways in which unique aspects of Hawai`i and the study area (the soil characteristics of lava, for instance) demand special attention.

Fortunately, sustainability goals are automatically enhanced by transit oriented design. Compact development that offers multiple choices for getting around means fewer Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) by private automobile and less green house gases in the atmosphere.

Lowering VMT and expanding transportation alternatives, especially the human-powered alternatives of bicycling and walking, supports a second goal under discussion in the Thursday talk story sessions: community affordability. Buying, insuring, and maintaining an automobile adds $8,000-9,000 to family budgets, according to AAA estimates. If families are able to get by with even one less car, the savings free up cash for other needs. And if communities are allowed to reserve less real estate for parking and for highway-scale thoroughfares, taxpayer money can be invested in ways that offer more direct benefits for everyone.

CEOs for Cities, a non-profit advocacy group for leaders in metro planning, estimate that reducing VMT per person by one mile per day in each of the 51 largest metro areas would produce annual household savings approaching $30 billion.

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  • Big Ideas Become Reality as Kona
    “Charrette” Applies Community Development Goals

    “This is a whole new way of planning,” says Margaret K. Masunaga, deputy director, County of Hawai`i Planning Department. “That’s what makes this so exciting.”

    The immediate focus of this new planning experience in Kona is the Honokohau Village, a 80-acre site that includes the new West Hawai`i Civic Center. But the broader aim is educational.

    As County Planning Director Bobby Jean Leithead Todd explains in this video, this is the first major project to be planned under the award-winning Kona Community Development Plan (CDP), enacted into law in September of 2008. During the multi-day public “charrette," residents and community leaders, developers and builders, and County officials and staff will get to see how new guidelines apply to a real project in a real place.

    “We’ll use this experience to learn from and to teach one another,” says Masunaga, who was hired by Mayor Billy Kenoi and Planning Director Bobby Jean Leithead Todd to oversee Planning Department activities in West Hawai`i. Masunaga is a resident of Captain Cook in South Kona and lives on a Kona coffee farm.

    “By the time we’re finished, we’ll all know exactly what it means when we say ‘TOD’ and what the term implies for development in Kona,” says Masunaga.

    TOD stands for Transit-Oriented Development, a neighborhood development approach encouraged under the new Kona CDP. The transit orientation comes into play when development can be designed to make the most of not only personal automobile travel, but also biking, walking, and transit. A TOD, in fact, maximizes the advantages of mobility choices so that people representing a wide range of ages, abilities, and incomes can share the advantages of living, working, and playing in a compact, walkable community.

    The Kona CDP provides much more than guidance for TODs, of course. It prescribes goals for putting Kona-appropriate development in the right places, in the right scale for those places, and in the right relationships to surroundings. The upcoming Kona charrette will customize Village Design Guidelines described in general in the Kona CDP specifically for the 40-acre, transit-oriented site around the West Hawai`i Civic Center.

    “So we’re not just talking about planning for transit, walking, biking, and cars,” says Masunaga. “We’ll also use the charrette to set standards for Honokohau Village that will include building setbacks and heights, the width of streets and sidewalks, the mix of building types, allowable density ranges, and the placement of public parks and other open space. The result will be a village design that encourages a true neighborhood atmosphere.”

    Conventional planning approaches often complicate community-building goals. “In the not so distant past,” says Masunaga, “we planned subdivisions that were disconnected from one another and where people without access to automobiles were isolated. The disconnections affected all sorts of other things, including infrastructure investment, environmental protection, and public services like police and fire fighting. “

    “One of my dreams,” Masunaga says, “is that my seven-year-old daughter will be able to safely walk just about anywhere she needs to go for her daily needs. That’s not possible in most places in Kona now.

    “Mahalo nui loa to everyone who made the Kona CDP a reality. Now we can implement the policies to guide the Planning Department and the Planning Director on how we want Kona to look like in the next twenty years and into the next generation.”