Honolulu Mayor Announces Plan To Speed Up Affordable Housing In State Of The City Address
Mayor Rick Blangiardi also announced $25,000 recruitment bonuses to help entice new applicants to the police force.
Honolulu Mayor Rick Blangiardi announced Thursday in his annual State of the City address that lifeguards will be getting their own department and that he will merge housing departments to focus on affordable developments.
In a 50-minute address, Blangiardi touched on the city’s many pressing challenges — making housing more affordable, reducing homelessness, fixing backlogs within the Department of Planning and Permitting, increasing public safety and filling the city鈥檚 workforce vacancies.
Blangiardi plans to restructure the city in two areas: housing and ocean safety. These areas are key to how the city operates, he said, and their restructurings reflect a new sense of priorities.
“I鈥檝e said from day one that we want to be more of a facilitator than a regulator, and local government has the most direct impact over housing production through land use regulations and housing policies,” Blangiardi said.
The city plans to take more of an initiative in increasing the supply of housing units itself rather than leaving it to private developers.
To accomplish this goal, the Office of Housing will be merged with the Department of Land Management to become the Department of Housing and Land Management, essentially working as the city鈥檚 real estate arm. In January, the department purchased properties in Iwilei for about $50 million with the intention of developing them into a mixed-use neighborhood of affordable housing.
This will be a years-long endeavor with a lot of moving parts.聽
For one, the city currently doesn鈥檛 have the authority to finance mixed-use developments. A bill being considered by the Legislature would give the city this power.
Iwilei is also the site of a future Skyline station, and the city’s investment in the neighborhood is in line with its goal to place new housing in areas around mass transit, a strategy known as transit-oriented development.
In the interim, the city and the state are partnering to provide homelessness services in the same neighborhood.
Honolulu’s large homeless population is one of Blangiardi’s most daunting and visible issues.
He said the city’s Crisis Outreach Response and Engagement program, or CORE, will be increasing its workforce from 35 to 50 people to assist with nonviolent and non-medical 911 calls involving homeless people. He said the city’s Rental and Utility Relief Program has assisted at least 21,000 families who were in danger of eviction.
Head of Ocean Safety John Titchen has been pushing for lifeguards to get their own department for years. Now, lifeguards and paramedics both work for the Department of Emergency Services.
Splitting into two departments would allow each department to advocate for its specific needs, including differing equipment and expertise. The logistics are still to be determined, but the estimated timeline is for the summer 2025, department head Jim Ireland said in a press conference after the mayor’s address.
Standing up the new Department of Housing and Land Management will also take about a year, said Office of Housing director Denise Iseri-Matsubara.
At last year’s State of the City, Blangiardi announced a task force to study the topic of splitting Ocean Safety from the Department of Emergency Services. The task force recommended the move last week.
But the task force recommended against splitting the Department of Planning and Permitting in two, Blangiardi said. Instead, the city will invest more in measures such as a new software system for processing applications to replace an outdated system from before 2010.
Blangiardi committed to a bold goal for the department.
鈥淥ne year from tonight, the average amount of time it takes for a residential permit to be reviewed by DPP will be two to four weeks. And in the year following that milestone, commercial permit applications will be reviewed by DPP in six months or less,鈥 he said.
Hiring more people will also be an important component of improving the beleaguered department鈥檚 operations, he said.
Attracting new people is a challenge for almost all city departments. To that end, Blangiardi also announced a graduated series of recruitment bonuses totaling $25,000 for new Honolulu police officers if they remain in the job for three years, and said that his administration is negotiating with the Hawaii Government Employees Association to raise pay for engineers.
