Paul Kay

Paul Kay carries two business cards. There’s his white classic model with the blue Kamehameha Schools seal, identifying him as "director of real estate development, Commercial Real Estate Division, Endowment Group."

But he’s growing increasingly fond of the colorful "Our Kaka‘ako" version carried by the team he heads, overseeing the redevelopment of Kamehameha’s nine blocks in that district. It depicts a corrugated steel, rusty frontage of a warehouse on one side and his unofficial job title, "The Maestro," on the other.

Kamehameha most recently has partnered with Alexander & Baldwin Inc. on The Collection, a $200 million complex where the old CompUSA building still stands. Last fall the mixed-use renovation of Six-Eighty Ala Moana was unveiled. Its studios and one-bedroom units rent for $1,050-$1,400 a month.

Kamehameha’s vision for its part of the district had been dubbed Kaiaulu o Kaka‘ako, but was rebranded with the friendlier "Our Kaka‘ako," now painted on the Auahi Street mural near a newly opened visitor center. In a live-work-play environment, Kay said, you want people with a sense of ownership.

Folks still like suburbia, but the time lost in traffic has bolstered the attraction of a more urban lifestyle, he said.

"You’re not really living the promise of what suburbia was supposed to provide," Kay said.

The Saint Louis School graduate, 49, had a town upbringing not far away, but also cited his own commuter experience, shuttling his kids here and there.

"Sure, I had my four walls, and I had my picket fence and my grass. But grass, when it dies, you can grow new grass, and the fence, when the paint peels you can repaint it or replace it.

"How do you recapture time that you’ve lost, every day? You can’t," he said. "It’s the one thing you can’t replace. … I think that resonates strongly with the local resident."

QUESTION: How would you describe the concept of the next project, The Collection?

ANSWER: What’s really clever about what A&B has done is that they have created, just like their name suggests, a collection of different kinds of products, all within the same envelope, on that block.

So they have a product in a tower configuration, they also have condominium flats, and those will be running along Ala Moana Boulevard, and those are studios and "ones." They also have an urban townhome concept that they’re building around the edges, on the South Street side and the Auahi Street side. You’re familiar with brownstones in New York? It’s kind of like that.

Q: Skinny, vertical townhomes?

A: Yeah, side by side. Each one is an individual unit, and they’ll have parking from the back side. …

If you think about most of the condominium projects that you see around town, really it’s tower configurations. Or, if they’re low-rise, they’re apartment flats. This collection of different types of urban living product is really different ….

Q: What is your relationship to A&B in this project?

A: We’re not partners in the traditional sense. We’re more like partners together in executing this broad master plan vision that Kamehameha Schools has come up with.

So governing that vision, we’ll have an overall charter association that governs what can be done in our nine-block master plan area. …

Nested within that are design guidelines that Kamehameha produced. And those design guidelines help to inform the individual guest builders about the kinds of things that would be consistent with the overall vision of the community. … So when they do their plans, they bring it back to us, and we take a look at it and we cross-check to make sure it’s consistent with that broader vision.

But we’re specific with those guidelines, and I made sure that they were guidelines as opposed to a big thick book of requirements that you have to do. There’s a place for those, I suppose, but not in Our Kaka’ako. Because when you do that you end up with products that look and feel the same, from block to block, and house to house. You’ve seen that.

We really want to have something that is an eclectic blend that communicates with each other, that works with each other but is definitely different from each other. And their designs really do just that.

Q: What are you going for, with this design? To give it the look of a community that grew up spontaneously and not a redevelopment?

A: The answer is a yes and a no, with The Collection. The Collection is one expression of what we’re trying to do throughout the community.

The room you’re sitting in now is another expression of that. This whole block that we’re sitting on now, bound by Keawe on that side, Coral Street behind me, Ala Moana Boulevard there and Auahi Street on this side, is a block that we’re adaptively reusing. We’re taking old structures that have had a life in the past, with a variety of uses, and we’re reusing them and repurposing to serve a new function within this community.

There will be some new construction as well. We’re going to be building a parking structure here (near Keawe and Auahi streets), where a building needs to be taken down. That’s really the only thing where a building’s going away and being replaced with a new one.

Q: Are these buildings here going to remain fairly low-rise?

A: Yes, everything on this block that we’re talking about is going to be low-rise.

So you’ll have a brand new product right across the street, which is The Collection. And then right next to it we’ll have this adaptively reused, very interesting type of retail concept. … It’s a retail operation, so it has to perform that retail function. But it has a broader function with regard to the overall community, which is a place for the urban community to get together and meet and talk, and share meals together. …

Q: So these places like Taste … ?

A: Yeah, and Paiko and R&D …

Q: They’re still going to be here?

A: Yeah. … Many of those were born here and really, we hope to create a place where they can have a life here for the long term as well.

Because they really are consistent with another aspect of the community vision, which is to create a place that is new and innovative and different, and allows people, individuals to express themselves. …

Q: Where is the parking structure?

A: This whole thing here (indicating on a map) would be a parking structure, and that’s also a demonstration of one of the things that we’re trying to do differently here. Because we don’t want the street scene to be dominated with parking structures, which is what you usually see in an urban environment. We want to make sure that parking structures … they’re necessary, but that they look different and feel different, and it’s more about the pedestrian at the street than it is the vehicles.

Q: Aren’t there more of these now — parking structures with screens to make them more decorative?

A: There’ve been some good examples and some headway in that area. We hope to take it to a new level. …

Q: Collectively, what are the Kamehameha properties adding to Kakaako?

A: Well, we do expect to have approximately seven towers when the whole thing is completed on these nine blocks. And that’ll comprise about 2,750 new homes. There will be thousands of new people in the district at some point in time. So I expect parking structures, in time, to become less critical — certainly for the residents because, again, they’re so well located. … Not just the lip service about being able to walk to where you work and walk to where you play, but literally they can do it. They’ll have grocery stores in here; they can walk to the grocery store to get their things on a day-to-day basis.

Q: What kind of grocery store would there be? An urban-style bodega?

A: We’ll probably have a blend of different types of approaches to it. Some of them will be small-format, full-service grocers. I think that you’ll have a collection of specialty grocers, like green grocers, where you just get your fresh vegetables. …

Q: Or an Asian market?

A: Yeah, exactly. I think you’ll have a collection of those in a variety of different sizes. … It’s too early to know exactly who it will be. But it’s one of the things we’re focusing on earlier rather than later.

You know, all planned communities have some special feature associated with them. Whether it’s a clubhouse or golf course, things of that nature; they’ve got their amenity. And the smart ones, the successful ones, always deliver that amenity, or at least a significant portion of the amenity, early, so people don’t have to wait for it to come.

Our special amenity is the street experience, and bringing a new sense of community to an urban environment. So in doing that, it’s the collection of places where people can gather that’s important. It’s the places that people can experience art and culture together that is the unique selling proposition.

But in addition to that it’s also the ability to service their day-to-day needs, such as get their groceries so they don’t have to drive miles and miles to do it. Really, our hope is that people are walking to the grocery store. So one of the things we want to do early in the game is bring in those grocers. …

Q: The reserved housing in the "affordable" range that Kakaako developers must produce: Yours would be rentals, right?

A: Some of them will be rentals. We like the rental model ourselves. It fits Kamehameha Schools’ playbook, if you will.

Q: How so?

A: Because we’re about commercial properties, we’re about leasing, we’re about renting, and obviously rental apartments fall within that nicely, where sale units do not.

And we also think that over the years it has been a lifestyle choice that has been really almost exclusively served by for-sale condominium projects where owner-occupants no longer live there, and then they rent their units out individually. There’s a few professionally managed rentals in town, but not a lot.

So we see a niche for that, for the people who by choice don’t want to buy and they want to rent, and in other cases the people who can’t buy, and so their only choice is to rent, but to give them a higher, elevated choice.