Barely two weeks as chief of the city’s new Office of Strategic Development, Sandra Pfund is working to fast-track housing on city property, especially for homeless people who need "wraparound" mental-health and social services, and for working folks who could benefit from transit-oriented development of affordable housing along the coming rail line.

Making headway will require constant collaboration with all who might be affected by such development. Pfund, whose title is Strategic Development Officer, brings experience as a team builder, having worked for the state on master-planned communities on Oahu, Maui and Hawaii island, and helping facilitate construction of the University of Hawaii medical school in Kakaako.

According to a news release from the city, the OSD was established as an ad hoc agency working directly for the managing director’s office "to immediately address the lack of overall planning and management of the city’s real estate portfolio, which has existed since the Department of Housing was eliminated in 1996."

Coordinating complex plans is right up her alley, since "I’ve worked in project management primarily throughout my career," said Pfund, who comes to the city from the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, where she was a land development administrator since 2010. Previously, she was chief executive officer for the Aloha Tower Development Corp. and before that worked on numerous development projects for the state.

Born and raised in Honolulu, Pfund graduated from Kalani High School and the University of Hawaii, earning a master’s degree in public administration. She and husband Roy Pfund, a vice president at Roberts Hawaii, have one son, A.J., a college freshman in Seattle.

The busy family doesn’t have much free time, so savors "just doing simple things like walking the dog and spending time together," she said.

QUESTION: You just started this job, so maybe we could just start by talking a bit about the scope of it. What do you hope to accomplish?

ANSWER: I’m very excited to be … doing basically what I think of as project management of important projects for the city. The mayor has a great vision … and with TOD (transit-oriented development) there’s a lot of opportunities. So there’s a lot of catalytic projects that the mayor and the City Council would like to go forward with and my job will be to look at the projects and try to have those implemented.

Q: Just coming in, what are you looking at and saying, "OK, this is where we’ve got to focus right away?"

A: One of the first priorities is Housing First, which is the homeless sheltering project. There is funding appropriated by the City Council and those funds need to be expended. It is such an important issue for the city that that’s where my first priority will be.

Q: What is the source of the funding?

A: There is about $42 million appropriated. The funds are in GOB, or general obligation bonds, capital improvement funding, for construction and development of Housing First opportunities, and then there are other funds … that could be given as subsidies for affordable housing units.

Q: (The latter) are like rental vouchers that go to landlords?

A: Yes, run through a contractor …. But I’m focusing more on the expenditure of the GOB funding. Looking for opportunities … for Housing First.

Q: So is that multi-units, a lot of units at a time at one site? Or one person at a time gets a place?

A: The mayor’s approach is for scattered-site development, which we totally support because we want to not heavily impact any one particular neighborhood. So we’re looking at things like rehabilitation of existing city projects. … Also, the city has a lot of property that we can look at (to refurbish or develop with private partners). So I’m going to methodically look through all the city-owned properties. I think they’ve identified, even along the rail route, 417 acres of city-owned property.

Q: So how many people, in terms of human beings, with that amount of money, $42 million — how many do you hope to house eventually, and how quickly do you think you’ll be able to house them?

A: Well, $42 million, and some of that again is for the vouchers, so there’s less than that, maybe $30 million in the capital improvement project budget, so that doesn’t go very far if you are trying to build from scratch. If you were to build a brand-new project, you’re looking at $150 million for condominiums, so we’re not looking at that level of construction. So I am wanting to look at properties the city already has, that could be renovated to stretch those dollars as best we can. So that may include existing properties that are maybe underutilized. Maybe it’s that not all the units are up to par or there are areas in buildings that we could refurbish and create additional units. I think that would bring units on faster and be the best utilization of the funding.

Q: Any specific properties that you can talk about yet?

A: Well, I haven’t really gotten into those specifics. I’ve been in the position about two weeks. But certainly I’ve looked at some of the Chinatown properties. But again, it’s not to create a lot of (new) housing, but (focusing on sites that) … might be underutilized or there are existing units that are not serviceable at the moment, that need major repairs.

Q: And there’s already a large homeless population there, impacting the neighborhood, living on the streets.

A: What’s really important to emphasize is the wraparound services (that are a key component of the Housing First model). That’s really important with the homeless population, that they are available to that neighborhood to ensure that getting into a home will also connect them to the support services they need to transition to the housing unit.

Q: So how does this new office kind of meld with what the city is already doing, like with Jun Yang, (executive director of) the Mayor’s Office of Housing (which focuses on low-income groups)? Are you working together? Or are you separate? What’s the organizational structure look like?

A: The Office of Strategic Development will have an asset-management side and a development side. There’s good synergy with Jun Yang and his program. He would be working foremost on housing policies and working the profiles of housing needs for the city. We’re on the implementation side. So as projects become identified as potentially synergetic with the housing policies, we will work together in a collaborative way to help bring those projects to implementation.

Q: So housing for homeless people and low-income rentals is mainly what we’ve been talking about. But part of your job also involves regular development, right?

A: Yes. Thanks for asking that. Some people might ask, "Why not just be the Housing Department then, if that’s your focus?" But it’s actually more than that. It’s also to look at development in general, particularly … at the TOD sites. Because, again, the city owns a lot of the property along the rail stations. We will look at catalytic projects within that two-mile radius of the stations. HART will definitely be in control of those rail stations, but there’s a lot of opportunity around that to create walkable communities, with biking and the intermodal connections between the stations and buses. So if we work with the city properties and try to put in some innovative projects there, that will spur economic development.

Q: And are we getting anywhere with that? We’ve heard now for a long time about TOD … and we see the (rail) starting to rise out in Ewa. What’s the timeline for related housing? Are we several years off?

A: I think that we as a city would definitely want to be ahead of the game before these rail stations start coming our way. One of the reasons this office was created was knowing that the rail is on its way, so let’s look at trying to implement these catalytic projects in these rail areas. So that when they’re here, we’re not going to be behind and people get off the train to dirt.

Q: So it’s about getting ahead of the train?

A: Yes. This office will be trying to achieve that. Because all of the (city) divisions and departments are busy doing what they have to do on a day-to-day basis and we need to really focus on the projects that are deemed to be priorities. … We have a statistic that something like 24,000 units are needed for housing (on Oahu), of which 75 percent are people who make 80 percent and below of the area median income. So the TOD strategy with the city-owned property, a big part of it will be affordable housing — to allow families of that level and below to live near these rail stations, to reduce their cost of transportation and to … live where they can go and shop and do things within a vibrant cityscape.

Q: Anything else you want to talk about as you get going in this new job?

A: I think I would want to say that our office will be primarily project management of these important projects, but it’s going to require team effort, and so a lot of the departments will be involved in being part of that, as well as stakeholders in all of the areas that we’re going to be looking at. Collaborative effort is the key.