HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – A proposal to bring safe and sanitary conditions back to downtown Honolulu passed its first hurdle at the Honolulu City Council Wednesday.
Bill 51 focuses on creating a business improvement district funded by property owners and investors who say they are willing to pay to help revitalize the area.
Fort Street Mall has been a designated improvement area for five years, and supporters say it’s been transformed. The proposal is to expand the Fort Street district to include all of downtown Honolulu, inside a square formed by Nimitz Highway, Richards Street, Beretania Street, and Nuuanu Avenue.
The larger district effort would be patterned after Waikiki, where staff called “Aloha Ambassadors” keep up with litter, graffiti, and loitering.
Downtown still hasn’t recovered from the COVID exodus, with dead zones for commerce and discomfort for residents and workers who are moving into office buildings being renovated by investors like Avalon’s Christine Camp.
“We’ve invested, but if we fail, the next wave of investments is not coming, and downtown needs a lot of investments, not just from big developers, but from little shops at eye level,” she said.
Camp testified at the Honolulu City Council Wednesday as Bill 51, introduced by downtown council member Tyler Dos Santos-Tam, got its first reading.
“Downtown is going through a transition, but without the support to focus on cleanliness and safety, it may not succeed, and downtown is too big to fail,” Camp said.
Mark Anthony Clemente expressed support on behalf of the Hawaii Carpenters Union.
“A win-win situation for both residents and businesses alike,” he said. “So let’s breathe some life into downtown.”
Dos Santos-Tam says Waikiki shows the potential.
“They have been able to do power washing. They’ve been able to do events. They’ve been able to have additional security, and that’s exactly what downtown needs,” he said.
Warren Wong, a member of the Fort Street Improvement District Board, said conditions have made it harder to recruit commercial tenants.
“The businesses that that I deal with the biggest thing is the cleanliness and the homeless,” he said.
Chris Fong with Tradewind Capital is helping organize support and details of the proposal. He says the downtown ban on people lying or sitting on public sidewalks will facilitate moving homeless people along and getting them help.
“The approach will not be to push out, you know, nefarious people to other districts, and with the right management in place, the approach is to work with social service organizations to actually get those people help, get them to the places they need,” he said.
The money to hire managers and street-level maintenance and safety staff would come from owners and businesses, not residents or taxpayers.
“I think some of the area businesses feel like they don’t want to pay more, and I totally understand that,” Dos Santos-Tam said. “But the reality is, our downtown is really on the cusp of, I think, a transformation, and this is just going to kick things into higher gear.”
The council easily passed the downtown improvement district on first reading Wednesday.
It will be several months before it might win final approval.
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