The face of public housing may be changing in Hawaii, which could be a good thing, considering how ugly its face has become in recent decades.

A push to privatize subsidized housing for low-income families is beginning, and it could yield clear benefits: better-funded maintenance programs, more efficient management and redevelopment that would create communities that are more mixed and less likely to deteriorate into slums.
There’s a cautionary note, however. The planned redevelopment of Kuhio Park Terrace and Kuhio Homes, the state’s most distressed public housing projects, is viewed as a first step toward this brave new world in which the government role recedes in day-to-day management and even ownership.
But “recede” shouldn’t translate as “disappear.” Some of the officials steering the Hawaii Public Housing Authority are contemplating a future in which the HPHA closes up shop altogether.
First of all: The surface has barely been scratched on the agency’s Job One, which is the reduction in the backlog of repairs to the facility. The progress that has been made — water boilers replaced to restore hot water service and fire alarm installations that are nearly complete — falls far short of where it should be. The upgrade was supposed to be accelerated and still it drags on.
So the tone of the document, a draft of the authority’s goals and objections, seems positively utopian, let alone realistic. It starts with a “vision”: “Self-sufficient families living in units they own that were previously public housing. HPHA no longer in existence because the state no longer serves as a public housing landlord.”
Moving families toward homeownership and the state away from running public housing is a worthy goal, but it’s unlikely that the need for low-cost housing can be met fully this way. Once the units are sold, the affordable-housing resource is lost to those who can’t manage the financial means to buy.
Neither would the need for state supervision — seeing that available housing units are serving low-income families who qualify — would vanish. Just because state agencies have done a dreadful job of providing oversight for decades doesn’t mean that oversight is unnecessary.
More disconcerting is that recent efforts to bring the Kuhio complex up to liveable conditions have proceeded at a snail’s pace. HPHA has found a partner for the redevelopment in Michaels Development Co., a New Jersey company, and commissioned a “physical needs assessment” on KPT to help guide potential bidders.
The upshot is not positive. The document includes a long list of deficiencies to the site, structure, housing units and building systems at Kuhio Park Terrace. It runs the gamut, from peeling paint and exposed rebar at balcony edges to leaks in units, ponding and graffiti throughout.
Most egregious is the elevator situation, which has persisted for years; each tower now has one elevator working. Chad Taniguchi, HPHA executive director, said the first two replacement elevator systems are enroute from the Mainland, with construction to start later this month and last until May. The entire complement of six won’t be finished for a year after that.
This is simply excruciating. Residents have lived with such conditions for decades, largely because of funding cuts that drove the state to shelve basic maintenance and to property management that has been inattentive and inconsistent.
There is much in the state “vision” of a public-housing future to admire. Many low-income residential projects across the country have been turned over to private management and even ownership, with promising results. There are ways to keep housing affordable, through lease provisions and deed restrictions, even with a private landlord.
But there is a here-and-now need in public housing that is equally important. The state owes its current residents an accelerated pace in these long-delayed repairs. The rosiest forecast: construction of the redeveloped KPT will start in 2011 and will take a decade. People need decent living conditions now.
Finally, the state should not consider abandoning its role as monitor of subsidized housing programs. Things do go awry under private as well as public supervision. Government must remain there as an advocate for its needy citizens when the reality proves to be less utopian than the vision.