It could soon be easier for West Oahu farmers to use retrofitted shipping containers or trailers to house their agricultural workers on their property under legislation passed unanimously by the Honolulu City Council on Wednesday.
Resolution 12-74 directs the city Department of Planning and Permitting to draft a bill allowing up to five temporary shelters for farm workers on an agricultural lot for as long as five years.
A city building official said shipping containers already are allowed as dwellings provided they meet the same building, housing and health criteria required of all other types of homes.
The measure would allow up to five units with a total size of no more than 1,600 square feet on an agriculturally zoned lot for up to five years, said Tim Hiu, acting Building Division chief for the Department of Planning and Permitting. The bill, as now proposed, is only applicable on agricultural lots of 2 acres or more and only in the Waianae district and a portion of the Ewa Plain.
Existing law says there can only be one dwelling on an agricultural lot anywhere on the island.
West Oahu Councilman Tom Berg said he introduced the measure to address both the homeless issue and the need for agricultural workers in his district, particularly in Nanakuli and Waianae. It is also a security measure to address criminal activity on agricultural lands, an issue that has garnered a lot of press recently.
"Maybe there’s tires being dumped, theft of crops," Berg said. "It covers everything."
John Rogers, owner of Affordable Portable Housing, said the law change would make per-unit cost of setting up shipping containers more affordable since the cost of a septic disposal system could be spread among three or four containers. Rogers said he is also working with city and state officials to allow for composting toilets and sand-and-gravel leach fields for disposal of shower and sink water. Those alternative forms of disposal would be more cost effective, he said.
A standard 40-foot-by-8-foot shipping container can house up to two adults and two children, said Rogers, who has helped set up dwellings on Hawaii island.
Such a container, which would be required to have a full bathroom and kitchen facility, would cost as little as $20,000-$22,000 to put up minus the cost of a stand-alone septic disposal system, he said. A disposal system could cost about $14,000 and accommodate as many as three or four dwellings, he said.
Henry Makanani, a Berg aide who is a fifth-generation Waianae flower grower, said his family’s Tina’s Nursery and Paradise Plants and Flowers often rely on disadvantaged people to help seasonally and sees the allowance of more shipping container dwellings as beneficial.
Councilman Nestor Garcia said he likes the concept of using shipping containers as temporary housing so much that he wants to introduce legislation in the Public Safety Committee that would allow such quarters during natural and man-made disasters.
The DPP’s Hiu said making a shipping container habitable and legal is not a simple undertaking. Besides the requirements already mentioned, the container must also have windows and doors, secure anchoring to a foundation that would be able to withstand floods and hurricanes, and likely insulation "because these metal boxes become very hot in the sun."
The Council on Wednesday also approved:
» Bill 53, which allows shop owners along the "historic Moiliili" section of South King Street to set up their merchandise in front of their storefronts, on final reading. Stand-alone peddlers would not be allowed.
» Resolution 12-206, establishing a process in Council rules that would allow for members to suspend without pay for up to a month a colleague found in volation of order and decorum, on final reading.
» Bill 57, requiring the Hawaiian Humane Society, as the city’s animal control contractor, to contact no-kill shelters before euthanizing animals, on the first of three readings. The measure now goes to the Parks and Cultural Affairs Committee.
» Bill 58, eliminating the $30 annual charge for bus passes issued to senior citizens and people with disabilities, on first reading. The bill now goes to the Budget Committee.
» Bill 61, which eliminates financial support for commercial recycling companies that dispose of recycling residue with the city. The bill now goes to the Budget Committee.
