Tall & Urban News

Ala Moana Center could become home to some of Honolulu’s tallest hotel and housing towers under a proposal endorsed by city planners.

However, key Honolulu City Council members Thursday balked at taking a preliminary vote on the plan over concerns about density and lack of public input.

“This decision is going to affect how our city is going to look,” Councilman Tommy Waters said during a Committee on Zoning, Planning and Housing meeting. 
 
The nine-member Council is being asked to consider major amendments to a 2016 “draft final” plan of city transit-oriented development rules around the site of a rail station slated to be built next to Hawaii’s largest shopping center at one end of Oahu’s 20-mile (32-kilometer) transit line.

Under the proposal, an estimated five towers could be built on parking deck areas of the 50-acre (20-hectare) mall site mauka of Ala Moana Beach Park.

Brookfield Property Partners, owner of the mall, which generates some of the highest revenue among regional malls nationwide, last year asked for amendments to the city transit-oriented development plan to allow greater development on its property.

Under the proposal, towers up to 400 feet (121 meters) anywhere at the mall except for the existing Park Lane low-rise condominium site could be permitted by the City Council if the landowner provides acceptable community benefits.

Currently, the height limit for the mall site is 100 feet (30 meters) but with community benefit contributions can become 150 feet (45 meters) for most of the mall site and 350 feet (106 meters) for a strip along the property’s mauka edge and the Diamond Head corner outside Macy’s.

Brookfield also seeks to almost triple the amount of allowed building floor area at most of the mall, to 15.2 million square feet from roughly 5.4 million square feet (501,676 squre meters).

Another proposed change to the Ala Moana TOD plan would allow full-service hotels more makai of the Hawai‘i Convention Center, including a former YMCA site on Atkinson Boulevard and the Diamond Head side of Ala Moana Center.

The City Department of Planning and Permitting issued recommendations in a June 8 2020 memo for approving the proposed changes.

DPP said a few things have changed since TOD plans were formulated for the area in a process that included considerable public input through community- engagement meetings from 2012 to 2016.

One change was mall ownership. The prior owner, Chicago-based General Growth Properties, was primarily a shopping center operator and had less interest in larger-scale development. Brookfield, a Canadian- based real estate investment and development firm, acquired majority ownership of Ala Moana Center in 2018.

Another change has been winnowing options for extending rail to the University of Hawaii at Manoa because of two recent tower development projects along Kapiolani Boulevard.

Harrison Rue, city TOD administrator, told the Council committee Thursday that Brookfield is close to presenting a route for extending rail through its property, and that this can be regarded as a community benefit partly in exchange for higher density and height.

“DPP believes the proposed increased height and density on site is appropriate, with commensurate community benefits such as a rail corridor preservation agreement,” the memo said.

However, DPP hasn’t addressed one element that helped craft the 2016 TOD plan: community desire for building heights stepping down from 400 feet along Kapiolani Boulevard toward Ala Moana Beach Park.

“Don’t you think you should take this idea out to the public and let them decide?” Waters asked Rue.

Waters said he is concerned that towers at Ala Moana Center would largely be luxury condos with heavy offshore ownership similar to Kakaako, where many tower units are dark at night.

“That kind of scares me,” he said.

Rue offered that there could be ways to encourage more moderate workforce housing for residents, and said he supports seeking community input on proposed TOD plan amendments that he regards as modest and beneficial by clustering more residences close to mass transit in support of reducing car traffic.

Councilman Brandon Elefante said a rendering in the 2016 TOD plan showing what towers would look like from Magic Island is already a “scary picture.”

Rue said a few more towers closer to Ala Moana Boulevard likely wouldn’t change views significantly.

“We don’t think if the towers move slightly closer to Ala Moana that it’s going to be that big a difference,” he said. “It’s not a huge change in the plan.”

All four members of the Council committee at Thursday’s meeting — Waters, Elefante, committee Chairman Ron Menor and Ann Kobayashi — expressed concerns and deferred advancing the proposed changes via Resolution 19-238 to the full Council.

“We definitely need more public discussion,” Menor said.

Elefante noted that proposed changes would give Brookfield billions of dollars of development opportunities.

“I would love to hear more from the community,” he said. “Is this truly what we envision with the future of Honolulu?”

Only two members of the general public spoke at Thursday’s meeting.

Bryan Mick, an Ala Moana-Kakaako Neighborhood Board member, noted that the board passed a resolution in October opposing the TOD plan changes for Ala Moana Center.

Sheldon Glassco, a commercial real estate broker, said he supported the changes because high-rise residential and hotel development at the mall would improve convention center use, reduce illegal vacation rentals, create jobs, reduce traffic from Waikiki and optimize profits.

“It makes a better community,” he said.

A Brookfield representative did not participate in Thursday’s meeting, but the company has suggested to the City Council that it is unfair for the mall to not have parity with surrounding properties for development.

Kris Hui, mixed-use development vice president for Brookfield, also suggested in a presentation to the committee in October that public feedback from a 2013 community workshop showed that the “most desired” option for building heights at the mall was 350 feet as favored by 35% of participants.

Support for four other lower-density development options ranged from 5 percent to 25 percent each but added up to 65 percent.

Written testimony submitted to the committee in October was completely in favor of the proposed changes sought by Brookfield. These comments came from Hawaii’s two largest banks, local contractor Albert C. Kobayashi Inc., construction organizations, a few mall tenants, two architecture firms and local real estate brokerage firm Heyer &Associates LLC.

For more on this story, go to Star Adviser.