2016-07-29 BDHRA Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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would really‒‒you know, we don’t wanna turn this area into a parking lot it’s so beautiful. Another disconnect is in terms of the energy. So we’re talking, ‘Well, what are we going to do with HELCO? They don’t use that space anymore,’ maybe the challenge is we go to HELCO and we say, ‘Okay look, here’s all this development; how are we going to provide energy? That’s you, that’s your kuleana.’ Use this space. Use it as a place where you’re going to connect the discarded organics and generate bio-gas and use it to produce electricity. You know, come up with your best and brightest idea that you would like to showcase and have it be part of this concept. That would be a wonderful invitation to them. The last thing is when you’re talking about affordable housing, you know people were talking about, ‘Well let’s do something over there by Seaside,’ but what’s wrong with that‒‒you’re addressing this need for affordable housing and you’re talking about low- income people, but then what you’re doing is you’re pretty much keeping them in that low-income or that poverty place. This is an opportunity to generate a lot of money, so the idea should be to move them into the area and to give them the same opportunity that you’re giving to the hotels to generate income. How do you do that? The trend now is Airbnb, the trend now is sharing homes or having like an ‘ohana style thing where people come and stay. So we don’t want to say, ‘Oh okay, we’re going to think about you low income people, here’s your place over here, you just stay there and you stay in poverty.’ We want to bring them into the opportunity. Why do we want to have Hilton or Sheraton come in? They come in; they suck all the money out of the economy. Why are we creating an opportunity for them? I think we should be creating an opportunity for the people, the young people who are graduating from the cultural program at the University. They’re low income people cause they’re just getting started and say, ‘Here look, this is for you, this is what we created for you; here’s an opportunity for you.’ So if there’s a unit for them to live in, there’s a unit for them to rent and they get the income off of that. And the income they generate off of that allows them to buy their condominium and they become home owners instead of low income rentals. And so we’re almost there, but we just need a little bit more creativity and openness and forward thinking and will come up with something amazing. DELIMA: Okay, thank you. Okay, go ahead. KANUHA: What will happen now is that based on all the comments, public comments we got and the commentary we have from today, is we’ll go back and take a, you know, put together another version of the conceptual plan and bring that back to you folks again at your next meeting. So that’s how our process will be working. In the meantime we’ll make efforts to focus in on some of the more specific issues that were raised in terms of marketability, circulation, things of that nature. Staff’s been taking notes; this has been recorded, so we’ll have a good record of where we’ll go next in terms of developing a conceptual master plan. Page 18 of 20 Banyan Drive Hawai‘i Redevelopment Agency July 28, 2016 Minutes