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City leaders pay plenty of lip service to Honolulu’s shortage of affordable housing, but it’s getting harder to believe they have the will to truly engage the challenge.

Where is the sense of urgency? The enthusiastic collaboration? The acknowledgement that elected leaders working at cross purposes only slows things down and makes voters angry?

As Civil Beat’s Anita Hofschneider has detailed in reports over the past two weeks, city responses to the affordable housing challenge plod along, their slow pace rationalized as necessary for more rapid gains later on.

Meanwhile, the price of housing in Honolulu and the number of people in need of affordable housing grow much more quickly than the city’s response to either dynamic.

• Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s affordable housing plan continues to be fine tuned and has yet to be introduced to the City Council, 1½ years after Caldwell made the plan public with a splashy, high-profile unveiling. To be sure, it’s important that the plan be well informed and workable, but we’re among many who wonder whether the time lag means developers’ desires are being given greater weight than the needs of the people. And we wonder whether postponing council members’ opportunity to have input on the plan leaves helpful experience and ideas off the table during this important conceptual stage.

• A city program meant to increase the number of available rental units has only produced seven new permits and 63 pending applications in its first six months. Caldwell predicted last fall there would be thousands of applications from homeowners eager to take advantage of the bill’s provisions that make it possible to establish “accessory dwelling units” on their property. Officials with the city Department of Planning and Permitting claim there has been “significant interest” in the program, but the underwhelming response has sent them scurrying for incentives, like waiving city fees for two years. Proposed sweeteners await review and approval by the City Council.

• Two housing projects that would add nearly 650 affordable units in Moanalua and Chinatown have been stalled at the City Council over concerns of nearby residents. Both projects are in areas zoned for housing, but one faces two bills that would put a moratorium on new construction in the Moanalua area, while the Chinatown project has faced Council slowdowns that have already pushed its groundbreaking back from this year to late 2017, at the earliest. The mayor made his case for council action at a recent press conference, only to have Council Chair Ernie Martin mock him.

Each of these issues might be addressed more quickly and creatively if collaboration and mutual support were present in the mayor-City Council relationship. Instead, passive aggression in the form of poor communications and political jockeying around the mayoral race later this year seem to be driving an already poor overall relationship to new lows.

Instead of expedience in addressing the affordable housing need, we get tit-for-tat bickering through dueling press conferences and an endless airing of petty grievances that are often hard to read without laughing out loud. Participants in the juvenile repartee are, in some cases, nursing hurts that are three years old, dating back to the earliest days of the Caldwell administration.

If they were children, all parties would have been grounded long ago and lost all privileges until they mended their differences. Instead, they’re running city government.

Councilwoman Kymberly Pine summed it up accurately last week when she told Civil Beat, “Right now we’re not doing very much. We can point fingers all we want but in the end we’re not helping people. So let’s stop pointing fingers and let’s find something that we can agree on. Someone is going to have to give in to somebody.”

The Stakes Are Big — And Growing

Until better angels take hold, the city’s affordable housing problem, along with other big issues facing the mayor and City Council, will continue to grow. A  determined Honolulu needs 11,000-plus new rentals by 2020 to meet demand from city residents earning less than 140 percent of area median income.

The demand is particularly acute among fixed-income seniors — a reality made more profound by the state’s emerging demographics: “Between 2010 and 2040, Hawaii’s population 65 years and older will increase 104 percent, compared with our total population increase of 28 percent over the same period,” from the University of Hawaii Center on Aging.

As the mayor himself says in the introduction to that report, one-quarter of the Honolulu population will be over the age of 65 by 2030.

Those are the stakes. And they only get bigger while council members whine about not being properly invited to events by the mayor or the mayor announces city business in press conferences without first communicating relevant information to council members.

Later this year, Caldwell may well run for re-election against perhaps his chief opponent in all this, City Council Chair Martin. Voters might be quick to align themselves with the candidate who can step up in a sincere effort to put differences aside and commit to direct communication and honest engagement in service of Honolulu residents, particularly those whose fortunes are most dependent on city progress in affordable housing and related areas.

Caldwell made a significant gesture in that direction at his recent press conference as he urged the council to fund staff positions he’s requested for housing: “I’m making the plea not to do politics but to do good government.”

Council members Ikaika Anderson (who seems to have a decent relationship with Caldwell) and Joey Manahan (less so) have already pulled papers for re-election and would certainly win points with voters for statesmanship if either were able to broker a more productive environment for city business. Likewise, the terms of Pine, Ann Kobayashi and Ron Menor all end soon.

But the prospect of benefiting electorally hasn’t been enough thus far to draw out a new level of leadership.

If meager progress on meeting the most fundamental of needs — putting roofs over the heads of those who can’t do that on their own — isn’t enough to prompt greater cooperation and basic manners, everyone responsible for that dynamic ought to be turned out of office.