Housing ‘for the greater good’

Two new housing projects that will change the landscape of Lihue near Kukui Grove Center are set to start construction early next year, signaling a historic shift in priorities for the Lihue town core.

Possibly by the end of next year, these two new projects will welcome their first occupants:

w A 20-unit, modular, “permanent supportive” community to be occupied by currently homeless people, complete with full so-called wrap-around social services and possibly sustained by a self-governance system under which residents resolve their own disputes. The complex, to consist of modular studio and one-bedroom units fabricated on site, will occupy Pua Loke Park, state-owned land near the Kukui Grove Cinema.

w The 54-unit affordable rental workforce housing complex that will rise on what is currently 1.47 acres of a parking lot behind the theater. It will include one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments in three, four-story buildings. Units will be allocated to families earning between 30% and 100% of the island’s median household income. In addition, five units will be set aside for currently homeless families.

“In business, they say it’s location, location, location,” said Mayor Derek S.K. Kawakami. “If you can figure that out, it just ups the ante as far as your chances to be successful. I have to say that there’s no place in my mind that is a better location for this.”

Final costs have not been announced for either project because construction contracts have not yet been finalized, said Adam Roversi, director of the Kauai County Housing Agency, which will develop the Pua Loke Park homeless complex. He said the workforce project will utilize leased county-owned land and be owned, developed and managed by the Ahe Group. Ahe is an Oahu-based, affordable-housing firm that said it has completed $56 million in new, affordable-housing construction and rehabilitation since 2014.

The modular homeless housing project, said Kawakami and Roversi, will be managed by Women In Need, a nonprofit service agency with offices in Honolulu and Lihue. Kawakami and Kimmy Cummings, Women In Need’s Kauai clinical director, said the project is not “transitional” housing in the way that term if usually understood, implying that residents live there on only a temporary basis. Instead, the project falls under the classification of “permanent supportive” housing.

The project will be funded from state emergency-assistance resources made available by Gov. David Ige, Kawakami said. The project is part of a program called “Ohana Zone.”

In an email to The Garden Island, the Lihue Business Association raised concerns about whether the projects are consistent with the existing Lihue community plan, but Roversi said the administration is confident both the workforce housing and homeless permanent supportive housing developments address key goals of the plan.

The two projects, Roversi said, “are consistent with the community plan’s goals of concentrating development within a 10-minute walk of the Lihue town core and with the goal of providing accessible housing opportunities including workforce housing in a higher density than what is currently available.”

Cummings said Women In Need would partner with a real-estate-management firm to operate the homeless complex. “We want to keep the therapeutic relationship positive,” Cummings said, “which is sometimes a challenge when you have to go collecting rent.”

There will be, she said, “a service provider for intensive outpatient treatment of problems like substance abuse and mental-health needs. That’s why we are doing wrap-around services, following the housing-first model. Once the person gets housed, a lot of things happen. A person will start to take their medication on time. If they are using drugs, they may eventually stop.”

Cumming said the project will build on a model already in operation on Oahu, in which residents form a self-governance body that has the power to find ways to help residents work out their problems or, if necessary, vote them out of the project.

“We’re going to look at that and try to build the same community with the self-governing group,” she said. “It needs to be something that makes the place not be stigmatized as a project. It’s got to be appealing and very safe, yet very easy to get in.”

Kawakami said a unique feature of the homeless housing project will be that some of the one-bedroom units will have connecting doorways so that two units can be combined into one to create a space large enough for a family.

There will be 10, one-story buildings in the homeless complex, along with a community center in a separate building. The architectural style, Kawakami said, will be plantation-bungalow.

The mayor said the project might be completed by next summer.

“That’s a very aggressive timeline,” he said, “but we do things aggressively here because that’s the only way you can do it. If you’d be timid on these things, they’d take forever.”

“Ohana Zone,” Kawakami said, “is permanent supportive housing that’s targeted toward young local families with children and single moms with children who are right on the cusp of breaking into what I would say is the ability to pay for market rents. Those are the folks who are the working-class homeless, the people who are out there working with children, trying to do the right thing.

“Maybe they’ve fallen on hard times. We had to focus like a laser on this, because when you take a look at the homeless situation, it’s such a wide spectrum. In terms of mental-health issues, there’s a range of severity of those who want to be treated and helped and those who don’t want to be helped. We really said that, to start moving the needle on this issue, who is it that we’re trying to best serve? That’s the population we would like to aim for, because we feel that’s where we can see a great level of success.”

Kawakami said Women In Need will in many cases focus on homeless people currently housed in shelters.

“From a continuum-of-care standpoint,” he said, “we feel that Women In Need can take a look at their clients and help them get back on their feet at the shelter, and perhaps those families can transition into this Ohana Zone project, and then they can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

In that sense, the mayor said, the physical presence of the new workforce housing development across the street from the permanent supportive housing project is no coincidence. He said county officials hope circumstances evolve so that homeless people in shelter housing may transition to residency in the Ohana Zone project and progress well enough that they may ultimately qualify for space in the workforce housing development.

“We take our time to plan these things out,” Kawakami said, “but we move with purpose because we’re well behind where we need to be as far as housing goes. Every single day I come to work, our cast members — our team members — are reminders because most of these folks have young families.”

He noted that his chief of staff, Sarah Blane, recently gave birth to twins. A second staff member in the mayor’s office also is expecting twins.

“Everybody here is driven,” Kawakami said. “They’re not just driven because they have kids, but they just recognize the situation that we’re in right now.”

He noted that his own daughter is now a sophomore in high school and he is mindful that she will come of age and enter the housing market on island at what promises to be a difficult time in terms of the shortage of hundreds of units of affordable rental housing.

Kawakami said the county understands that there may be some community opposition to both of the projects in question.

“We get pushback at times because people who already have their own homes and are comfortable perhaps don’t want these types of affordable housing developments next to them,” he said.

“I can certainly understand where they’re coming from. But, for the greater good of this island, some of these very tough decisions need to be made, and historically what has made Kauai successful is that we were able to keep our local families here despite the cost of living. I think there’s a lot of unfair stigma attached to who we’re trying to provide housing for, and in that sense, we’re OK with some of the resistance. It’s part of growth and it’s part of change.

“We’re trying to work as diligently as we can, under the timeline (given by the governor) that we’re presented with, to make sure that everybody understands our intent. We understand that people will be worried about security issues.

“The rules that we’ll have in place will hold the people who live within this village accountable. When you start empowering people and you start building people up, and not just providing roofs over their heads, you give them confidence and a skillset. You start seeing them take leadership roles.”

Cummings said the homeless project might be ready to receive residents as early as July.

“It’s right around the corner,” she said. “We want to make this project as safe and pretty as possible. We don’t want the people to be stigmatized. We have people who have (federal government housing) vouchers, but they still can’t find a home.”

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Longtime news reporter and retired communications executive Allan Parachini lives and makes furniture in Kilauea.