From his small wooden porch overlooking Kalihi, James M. Rodrigues Sr. watches the sprawling community that grew up around him buzz through its daily routine: Traffic crawls along clogged thoroughfares, construction cranes appear and leave just as quickly.

He remembers when his father used to do the same thing — just sit quietly from the family's vantage point and watch Kalihi grow.

"The changeover is so great," said Rodrigues, 75, whose family moved into Kalihi Valley in 1942.

Back then, Rodrigues was 10 years old and Kalihi was a quiet, sparsely populated outpost of Honolulu, where immigrants found affordable homes and friendly neighbors.

Over the past 65 years, rapid, largely unplanned development brought parks and schools, thriving businesses and industrial districts, and a diverse mix of families into Kalihi.

It also spurred a host of persistent, urban headaches — from crime to overcrowding.

And at least since the 1960s, those social ills have defined Kalihi for many on O'ahu — a stigma city officials are moving to overcome with a new plan for revitalization similar to one started in Chinatown last year.

It is not the first revitalization project to come into Kalihi.

There was a short-lived movement in the 1960s to clean up the community. The 1990s brought the Weed and Seed program, which toughened sentences for those committing crimes within its boundaries and strengthened community activism. Former Mayor Jeremy Harris also tried to clean up Kalihi, spending $2 million on streetlamps and sidewalk repairs on North King Street.

The newest city revitalization plan centers on community consensus: The city wants to involve as many Kalihi players as possible in talks about their community, and then get those same people to produce some results with projects or partnerships.

"We want to hear from them to see where these ideas can take us," said Ann Chung, city director of economic development. "The goal here is to facilitate the community and the businesses to really empower them to look at some good ideas that will help revitalize that area."

As for the city, its role in the process is largely as mediator — and as one of the players. And just as in a similar effort in Chinatown, city officials say they're not interested in spending lots of money on beautification projects.

Instead, the city has pledged to look at what services — from bulk trash pickup to graffiti removal to pothole repairs — it can bolster in Kalihi. The community could also get priority in some long-term public works projects, including road, crosswalk or sewer upgrades.

Since February, city officials have been meeting with Kalihi community and business groups about revitalization. The meetings will culminate in an economic development summit this month at Farrington High School.

ETHNIC TENSIONS

The revitalization project comes as Kalihi residents and business owners are seeing fewer serious crimes in their community.

But some worry the trend won't last.

"It's a bomb ready to explode," said Lynn Vasquez, who has lived in Kalihi all her life.

The active community leader and Mayor Wright public housing resident said she worries about tensions between different ethnic groups, tensions that are bubbling in Kalihi and show no signs of dissipating.

They only appear to be getting worse, she said.

Vasquez said fights between gangs of youth from different ethnic groups are a common occurrence just outside her housing complex — so much so that she and other Mayor Wright residents helped introduce a measure that calls for more security guards at the project.

The bill is moving through the state Legislature.

Though Vasquez says she is optimistic about the city's revitalization project, she also has concerns about whether it will work as planned.

Is it possible, she asked, for the diverse resident and business populations of Kalihi — the immigrant and low-income populations, newer, middle-class arrivals and the business owners along North King Street, Nimitz and Dillingham highways — to come together?

Kalihi-Palama is home to about 40,000 people, and about 18,000 people live in Kalihi Valley, according to 2000 Census figures, the most recent available. The community has the state's largest concentration of public housing projects and a higher-than-average percentage of families in poverty.

According to the University of Hawai'i Center on the Family, about 27 percent of families in Kalihi get food stamps, compared to 12 percent islandwide. Also, about 27 percent of Kalihi children live in poverty, compared to 14 percent islandwide, Census figures show.

Despite the discouraging social welfare statistics, officials are quick to point to the downward trend in serious crimes since 2002.

In 2005, the latest year for which Honolulu police statistics are available, there were 5,670 serious offenses in the community.

By comparison, there were 7,219 serious crimes in 2002.

"I've seen an improvement, but it's a constant challenge," said Maile Kanemaru, executive director of Weed and Seed, the federally funded program, which began in Kalihi in 1998.

Kanemaru said the recent crime trend is heartening, but she stressed it must be constantly sustained with community campaigns.

A revitalization project, Kanemaru added, just might do the trick.

BUSINESSES WILLING

Meanwhile, Kalihi business owners say they don't expect revitalization to produce sweeping or immediate results. But many do hope it addresses persistent concerns, like illegal dumping.

Even small steps, they say, could deter crime and bring out some of the beauty of Kalihi — found in historic buildings and churches.

And, they say, they're willing to help.

The Kalihi-Palama Health Center has already declared a war on graffiti and is encouraging its neighbors to do the same. Every week, the nonprofit paints out tags on its buildings along North King Street.

And every week, more return.

"We'll keep painting over it," said Doris Segal Matsunaga, health center community relations and health education director, with a shrug.

Matsunaga, who started at the nonprofit in 1997, says the neighborhood has slowly improved over the last decade. During her early years at the center, she said, drug dealing was rampant — and blatant — along North King Street. Today, dealers are harder to find.

Jimmy Chan, whose Hawaiian Chip Co. is just down the street from the health center, said he mostly wants the city's brand of urban revitalization to rid the community of its decades-old stigma.

Or at least ease it a bit.

"Sometimes you worry it gets a bad rap," said Chan, whose taro and sweet potato chips are cut, fried, seasoned and bagged in a small factory hidden behind a coffee shop on North King Street.

ROADS IN BAD SHAPE

For residents, the current discussions provide a chance to bring up decades-old infrastructure concerns. Rodrigues, whose family moved to Kalihi Valley from Makiki, said much of the development and growth in his community over the past six decades was welcome.

New people came in. New businesses, too.

But, he said, the city didn't keep up: Roads were poorly maintained or not upgraded to withstand increased traffic. Urban greenery and pedestrian safety were largely an after-thought.

"At one time, this was all single-family homes," Rodrigues said, waving his hand over the view of Kalihi from his porch.

Rodrigues can see just about the entire community — all the way to the ocean — from his home, and he is fond of telling the history of Kalihi by pointing out landmarks bulldozed long ago.

But it is what he can't point out from his high perch that scares and saddens him: crime, grime, graffiti and illegal dumping. "Every city got good and bad," he said.

The good can still be found on his quiet, one-lane street in Kalihi Valley, where neighbors know each other by name and are included in each other's family photo albums.

"We look out for each other, too," he said, smiling.

Reach Mary Vorsino at mvorsino@honoluluadvertiser.com.