Honokohau Village, A Vision for Transit Oriented Development site masthead and project logo

FAQ

Want to know more about what’s going on? You’ve come to the right place.

Question: What’s all the excitement about?

Answer: The Honokohau Village project is the first major planning effort under the award-winning Kona Community Development Plan (CDP), which was officially adopted in September of 2008. The County of Hawai`i is leading this planning effort with two things in mind.  First, this is a chance to bring everyone with a stake in the process to the table to draft a CDP-appropriate master plan for a real place. Second, this is an educational exercise. The same categories of “stakeholders” – the County, local residents and business people, and real estate development professionals – will be involved in planning future projects under the new CDP. So this is an opportunity for all of us to get hands-on experience at how to get what we all want out of the process. We’re making a big deal about this project, because we’re determined to create a really good model for replicating in the future. Read more about the goals of this project in the BIG PICTURE space immediately to the right of this column.

Q: It looks like you’re concentrating an awful lot of effort into a relatively short time period. What’s the reasoning behind that?

A: You’re right, we’re determined to create the first rough draft of this plan in a week, beginning on October 21 and concluding on October 27. For the complete schedule, see our schedule page or search through the Project Calendar in the far right sidebar. This particular kind of super-concentrated workshop is called a “charrette.”

Q: A “charrette”? Why do we have to call the process by a French name? And what does it mean?

A: It’s helpful to use the exotic name – which roughly translates to “little cart” in French – to signal that this is definitely not business as usual. The name comes from 19th century Paris, when art and architecture students, working on a deadline, ran alongside carts taking their work to their professors, putting finishing touches on their assignments. The term has come to mean working on deadline to create finished work in the presence of clients – which, in this case, includes the public at large.

Q: So how is this not business as usual?

A: Charrettes are very specific kinds of workshops designed to move from ideas to action in a given time frame. They take at least four days in order to provide for three cycles of presenting ideas, publicly critiquing them, revising them, then representing them. Everybody with a stake or an interest in outcomes is invited to participate. And everything is done in collaboration with the three partners – the community, the County, and the PlaceMakers consulting team. By the end of the week’s work, we’ll have a consensus-based plan of action with illustrations to demonstrate how ideas look on the streets and neighborhoods in the study area. Read more about charrettes in the post, “Kona CDP Gets First Big Test.”

Q: With all these sessions strung out over a week, how do I know when to come?

A: You can pick your times depending on your interests and on how much time you can devote to the process. Don’t forget, though, that you can follow everything going on in the charrette here on this website. We’ll post updates and illustrations of work in process regularly. For a guide to when to come if you only have limited time, read “Interested by Time Strapped?”.

Q: PlaceMakers? Who are they?

A: The PlaceMakers consultants bring to this project experience from coding, design, development implementation, and communications work throughout North America and Hawaii. To read more about their work and to see bios of the firm partners who’ll be working in Kona, see their website. They’re experts in using charrettes to address planning goals exactly like the ones we have for Honokohau Village.

Q: Why do we have to use planning consultants who aren’t from here? Don’t we have planners on the County staff?

A: What we’re doing here is a once-in-a-generation exercise to translate broad community goals into the design and regulation of development in a specific place. It will be an exciting learning experience for us all. But since this is a first-time experience for both private and public planners and for development teams used to pre-CDP approaches, we can get to where we want to go faster and less expensively if we bring in the temporary expertise we need to demonstrate the process. If we had to acquire a PlaceMakers level of experience and expertise on our own it would take much longer and require many more County resources.

Q: But how can PlaceMakers become experts in Kona and Hawaii in so short a time?

A: They don’t have to. Those of us who live and work in Kona, who have deep roots in the culture and the economy of West Hawaii – we’re the experts on our region. We don’t need PlaceMakers to know what we know. And we don’t need to know everything they know. We need to combine their expertise on this method of planning with our expertise on the region. And that’s exactly how the charrette is organized, as a collaboration.

  • 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.”