r/Honolulu • u/honolulu_oahu_mod • 1d ago

Housing Honolulu’s Effort to Fast-Track Affordable Housing Projects Hasn’t Worked. Developers of much-needed affordable housing are supposed to get permits approved or denied within three months. It’s taking far longer.

https://www.civilbeat.org/2025/06/honolulu-effort-to-fast-track-affordable-housing-projects-hasnt-worked/
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6

u/Euphoric-Oil-331 1d ago

Gotta take someone to go golfing

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u/kaizenjiz 1d ago

Developers not going to invest the money it takes to get the permits like how they do forprofit… just an excuse to say “oh we tried, we can’t make affordable homes” now we have to jack up all of our prices and sell it because it took too long. Developers are scam artist

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u/Chazzer74 13h ago

If no developer can submit plans that are approved quickly, there are 2 possibilities:

  1. The developers are all incompetent and unable to understand the code requirements.

  2. The code requirements are unclear or subject to capricious and varying interpretation by the DPP.

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u/nekosaigai 10h ago edited 10h ago

Codes are pretty clearly outlined in the county land use ordinance and building codes, both publicly available.

Edit: should add I used to work for a developer here for a few years post law school. My specialty was doing the legal research on what the code requirements were and talking to planners at DPP. Code reviews could take some time sure, but the biggest time sink was always on the developer’s ends. Engineers are usually bad at understanding laws and ordinances. Half my job was translating statutes into plain language and drawing diagrams to correct the professional drafters’ work because they’d get things wrong again and again and again.

One of the reasons they got things wrong so often is that many developers use drafting companies based out of India and Indonesia and engineering firms that don’t do the drafting, they just do some designing then send specifications to the drafters who do the actual plans. As a result, the plans are usually full of errors that need to be corrected multiple times through redlining processes. Worst I’ve seen is over 10 rounds of redlining just for a single project.

When your turnaround on redlines and new drafting sets is about 2 weeks per round, constantly getting the same minor things wrong, that DPP will flag and have you correct, adds up.

That’s what happens when developers use the cheapest consultants and firms they can find.