The Honolulu Star-Advertiser On Politics column

March 21--Finally there is something that Mark Zuckerberg and I have in common.

We are both frustrated by the government.

The Facebook founder recently called all 26 million of his followers to rebuild the Internet after "expressing frustration to President Barack Obama over government surveillance."

My frustration is perhaps not that grand; I just think our leaders could do a way better job of planning, developing and building Kakaako.

Left on its own, Kakaako's undeveloped acreage is hot and smelly. In the 1970s it was taken away from city governance by the state after a series of tiffs with former Mayor Frank Fasi. The decades of talk are now matched by what appear to be a solid decade of high-rise construction that will be capped with Honolulu's$5.5 billion heavy-rail system roaring through it.

Open space is an afterthought, the tiniest 381-square-foot apartment starts at $250,000, and the first new building, 801 South Street, was exempted from the LEED building energy saving standards.

I know we could do better, because I grew up in the East Bronx in New York City in a housing complex called Parkchester.

Forty thousand people lived in some 51 apartment buildings on 129 acres, an area smaller than what is planned for Kakaako.

Because it was owned by one developer, Metropolitan Life Insurance, the entire project was planned.

The apartment buildings were between eight and 12 stories, seemingly haphazardly scattered in four sections, but 75 percent of the space was left open.

Unlike the Hawaii Community Development Authority's plans for Kakaako, Parkchester had 20 playgrounds, a baseball field, basketball courts and more than 4,000 trees.

The complex was designed to encourage a middle class to grow and live in New York. Much of the housing was reserved for public workers. My father, a World War II vet, and a high school teacher, settled us in an apartment with a fireman's family in the unit on one side and a policeman on the other.

Instead of streets, the project was networked with pedestrian walkways, there were no cars and we kids were left out after school to race through the complex.

A study of the project done by Anne Calder at Wesleyan University (http:// goo.gl/TuEPpY) described how the red brick buildings were "lightly ornamented with terra cotta figures on the corners and carvings over the entranceways.

"The whole place stands as a crucial reminder that it is possible to build housing on a mass scale and not lose touch with what we like to call human values," Calder wrote.

Parkchester went through some rough times, passing through owners who did not take care of the apartments.

Today, some 70 years after the first renters moved in, the apartments are in something of an ascendancy.

The streets bordering the project are still filled with shops and restaurants and schools.

The changing ethnic makeup of New York is mirrored in the Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian, Italian, Polish, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Burmese and Cambodian faces of the residents.

The rents range today from $1,010 a month for a one-bedroom to $1,625 a month for a three-bedroom apartment.

Real estate agents call it a "walker's paradise" with a 95 percent "walkability rating," one of the highest in the city.

The described Parkchester as "something of a planning phenomenon" at its inception.

The effort to support a middle class and not speculators, to understand that open space is not found in warehouses, that parks have real trees and public art graces fountains and the outdoors, make Parkchester all that Kakaako is not -- and that is very frustrating.

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at [email protected].

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