2010-11-17 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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Okay, number 7. Create Type -II housing. This is just Type II housing is just a title. It could be Type K, it could be Type B, it could be whatever you want to call it. But I just call it Typell because we have one type out there, and that's a permitted house. Typell housing would also be a permitted house, but it's for all those people that live out there in Rubbermaid sheds, tents, lean -tos, carports, buses. I mean, there are a lot of folks out there that live in shacks and such. Several years ago I had found out that there was an effort by Building Division folks as well as I think we have one of our zoning inspectors involved in it to build a very minimum structure. And this structure would be easily built, very cheap, and so they came up with a couple designs. And at that time, the Department of Health came along and says well no, you can build that but you still have to have a cesspool or a septic system. And that's very costly. And if you look how these people live already, they don't have any cesspools or septic systems. They don't they may have a basic water catchment system. But they live really off the land. They're very basic in their lifestyle. And I would say that the way to approach this is to not try to make people conform to our established building standards, to find an alternative for people that want to live a little bit off the grid, a little more simply - -to be able to have a home that still meets health and safety issues but are not restricted to our building standards. Typell housing is similar to Type K in Mendocino, Sonoma counties in California, where they allow people to build basically the structure they want to build in rural developments. And I made some recommendations here as to what some of the parameters would be. Minimum square footage, 120 square foot. If you think of that and go wow, that's not very big. But that's a 10 -by -12 foot tent. And there's a lot ofpeople that are living in tents smaller than that. A Rubbermaid shed, in which I've found people living in, is 7 -by -7. And when you find people living in buses, they're not living in the whole bus. Half that bus is full of stuff. And so they're living in just a small, compartmentaled portion of that bus. So if we found away in which people are able to live in a structure that is permitted by the county, that is cheap to build, that can be expanded upon, I think that we would find more people willing to do that. When you eliminate the high -cost items such as cesspool, septic system, and replace that with a Hawai `i approved composting toilet, when you use rain water rather than hooking up to the county water system, if you happen to be in an area like that, you can reduce the cost of housing significantly. And you'll also find community groups and organizations that are involved in helping people building homes who might be able to help a lot more people if the cost is significantly reduced. We also increase costs by saying okay, when you come into the Building Department, you now have to have it architecturally stamped, and that costs $700 or more. If we have architecturally approved already homes, in which people can go, that's what I'm going to build and this is where I'm going to place it, then you've already got the architect approval for that structure. So then all we need to do is just make sure that it was built accordingly. So I think there's a better way of handling our problems with housing than ignoring it, which is basically what we're doing right now. We find somebody that's in an illegal structure, we got a complaint, we're forced by law to follow through with that, and they have to move. So where do they move? They find another lot somewhere and they set up their illegal structure there until somebody complains about it. So I think we need to take a pro- active approach towards this. 14