Waikiki's Wicked Problem with Climate Change - and How it Will Solve Hawaii's Housing Crisis.

Contemplate Hawaii's gem of the Pacific, Waikiki Beach. Now contemplate it flooded all the way to the Ala Wai Canal on the other side of Waikiki.

Here's how sea level rise (SLR) works during a storm: Take the sea level, add in the tide, then add in storm surge and then add in the rainfall and rising groundwater that comes with massive rainfall during a storm. And there you have it.... scarier than a B-rated horror movie. Since Waikiki is currently only 3' above sea level today, imagine the level when it rises a foot or two and then add in waves and massive rainfall. Yup - we are buried in water.

Hawaii in particular faces its share of high winds, hurricanes, torrential rain, flooding, and high surf to name a few stressors. Many of us believe that our sea level is rising. Chip Fletcher, PhD 's data taken from multiple locations around our islands point to this possibility. Whether you believe it or not, enough convincing data points exist to convince politicians that the seriousness of Sea Level Rise is real. As for Sea Level Rise (SLR) itself we don't know exactly when or how high it will go, but Hawaii as a state passed a law saying that we must consider SLR (specifically a height of 3.2 feet of rise by 2100) for the present time in our planning for all kinds of events including the design of buildings and infrastructure. In a few months, funding competitions for grants to solve the SLR "wicked problem" will emerge and it will be "all hands on deck" for different groups to assemble, collaborate, and work through solutions. Since the funding will emerge via Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, every other societal issue will be tied to solving this problem... And rightfully so. The problem starts with the sea and ends up affecting every aspect of our lives. Let's connect the dots and perhaps hint at a solution that can have massive implications for our future. Particularly for housing.

In addition to human behavior, my training is to think in terms of the lifetime of a building and the civilization we live in. It goes beyond human life and lives through generations. So the year 2100 or roughly 77 years from now is not really a stretch to think about Waikiki underwater. But after several years of thinking about this problem, it occurred to me and to many other architects and civil engineers that our infrastructure is under serious threat by climate change. Wastewater and drinking water in particular. Everywhere in the world, sewer systems are NOT closed systems. They leak a lot, and during severe events like heavy rainfall, the sewer system is inundated by rainwater causing sewer treatment plants to overflow. Overflows of raw sewage are often common in many parts of the world - even first-world countries like the USA. And it includes us as well... right here in Hawaii-nei. If you visit or live in Hawaii, we worry about brown-water alerts. The ocean is tested for bacteria growth after large rainfall events. I will say no more. The real problem we face is that these events will happen more often and quite possibly be permanent when the sea level rises.

Now a 5-year-old would say, "Why don't we just get rid of the sewer system? Then we won't need to worry about pollution and spilling into the ocean?" Perhaps the solution is that simple. Since wisdom comes from diving into the details, let's do that. Getting rid of sewage means that we don't put poop or dump blackwater into our sewer lines. And the only way to do that is to treat sewage as close to the source as we possibly can. If we treat sewage at a local or building level, this leads to reducing, and in the long run, eliminating sewer lines running beneath our streets. Now what would a world without any utilities beneath our streets be like? Yes, as a civil engineer and architect, the only word I can think of is... "wow!". No polluted oceans during storms, no traffic due to closed streets for upgrading sewer lines, and no sewer line connection for buildings.

Hold that thought...so now let's shift over to housing in Hawaii. When someone wants to build on the island of Maui, there is a moratorium based on the supply of potable water. It's sort of a natural and administrative way of controlling the velocity of real estate development. In Honolulu, we have a similar unintended (i think) moratorium, but it is based on sewage capacity. Sewage capacity and our ability to treat it is the way we control growth in Honolulu. When the prospect of building any type of building (including tiny ADU's) in Honolulu arises, the primary issue is always water supply and the capacity to treat wastewater. The secondary issue is fire access. These measures keep us safe, sanitary, and healthy. When housing is proposed, the problem is amplified because - hey let's face it, more bodies living in a place means more poop, and more lives to save in a fire, or rescue in a disaster. We need to supply water, and treat people's waste - or we're done for!

If a building unit can treat its own waste, then the need for civil infrastructure shifts from a centralized distribution model (sewer lines under our roads) to a decentralized distribution model where sewage is treated at or nearest to its source. The cost of centralized infrastructure can be about 10x's the cost of the building itself, so this is a significant cost. My source of this information came from Tom Gentry (famed Hawaii developer and speed boat racer) himself when I worked for him nearly 30 years ago. If we reduce the cost of the infrastructure, then the price of the project can also go down. Most of us think about reducing the cost of the "bricks and mortar" part of a building project. We try more affordable materials or reduce the size of the home entirely... but we're focusing only on 10% of the overall cost. The other 90% (the infrastructure cost and related soft costs) can have a dramatic effect on the cost of housing. I believe that with the right collaborative effort within our community, we can crack the nut of creating buildings that can provide waste treatment, water recycling, and power generation to the level of pure self-sufficiency. Hence the term, "self-sufficient" buildings.

Self-sufficient buildings are resilient. When an earthquake knocks out the power to the island, and a storm floods our sewer systems, or the ocean enters our hotels in Waikiki, people need to be evacuated... unless they can survive in place because they have water, waste treatment, and their utilities and energy powered by their own means... on their own land and roofs...above the flood line. How fast can you "bounce back" if you were self-sufficient? Pipe dream you say.? FEMA and Hawaii State Emergency Management Agency (HI-EMA) don't think so. They approved a BRIC grant to study this - because they know it can be a real game-changer during a crisis... Particularly if you have one related to Climate Change.

Now if we merge the ideas of self-sufficient buildings with reduced infrastructure costs, we have a formula to impact housing. Can we do it quickly? Probably faster than other solutions. Remember the moratoriums mentioned earlier? Because these systems don't require government-sponsored design and construction of the infrastructure beneath our streets, developers will be able to build housing many times faster... perhaps ten times faster than we do now... We won't solve the housing crisis immediately, but it will be solved much sooner. Imagine not having to wait for Hawaiian Homelands Homes for a generation. Or imagine buildings and homes that supply no pollution into the ground... at all?

Yes, building self-sufficient buildings means touching as lightly upon the land as possible. No digging except for foundations (these can be removable), and no polluting our water tables or groundwater. And even the water that is recycled, captured, and held on-site, will be used for a multitude of purposes:

1) irrigation - we can use the water for solving the food security problem with interior and exterior gardens. Imagine if the entirety of our urban buildings actually grew food.

2) drinking water - water distribution is a great concern in the face of SLR. Storing and treating water to potable levels using evaporation or other means within a building can keep a building's occupants safe, happy, and independent.

3) Fire-fighting - Water in large quantities can be used for use for fire sprinklers and firefighting. Did you know that Dole Plantation's fire sprinklers are connected to a reservoir water source?

4) Thermal regulation (internal and external - large stores of water are an incredible resource for regulating extremes in temperature. It can be used as thermal mass to absorb and dissipate heat, improving thermal comfort within buildings as well as being used for evaporative cooling. Stored water in larger areas such as roofs, gardens or retaining ponds can significantly affect whole micro-climates.

Naturally you are saying - why can't we do this now? There is a slew of policies and regulations that were created when we assumed that our wonderful, centralized water treatment systems were the "bomb". That there couldn't and shouldn't be anything better. We believed (back in the day) that modern civil engineering practices of moving water through pipes and concrete canals were the most efficient way to move water... which we are now learning might not actually be true when you consider other environmental factors. The policies in place promote this type of "efficient mentality" which doesn't take into account factors like heat islands, water retention in smaller localized areas, and other sustainable practices. We have a lot of work to re-design policy in order to get us to this new vision.... Or we can declare an emergency as Governor Josh Green has done. Over time, we will adjust and update policy to these new practices... but in order to move with a long-term purpose - so that we stay on course, it might be best to establish a longer vision that reaches into the far future to guide us.

So there is promise and hope. We will solve this housing crisis by allowing better personal, de-centralized infrastructure solutions. In turn homes, entire neighborhoods, and whole cities will be self-sufficient and food secure. FEMA will breathe a sigh of relief, the EPA will stop fining us for dumping sewage, our beach goers will return to the water, and being off-grid will no longer be an outlier, but the primary system instead. We will adapt to climate change, and we will leave the planet better than how we entered it. And as the Cub Scouts say, "Leave No Trace".

Stay tuned for future articles where we discuss stormwater, power, and recycled sewage and how they all could work together in a self-sufficient building system. Then we'll tie this to buildings from extreme climates, our own cities, and to off-planet communities. It's all part of evolving with climate change so that we can someday be self-sufficient in any environment on and off-planet.

Hale Takazawa is the founder of the AIA Honolulu's Design for Risk & Resiliency Committee

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