Laie has always been a model, walkable "live-work-play" sustainable community, long before it became a popular planning concept.

However, Hawaii’s shift to a global marketplace has driven home prices far out of reach for most of the state’s working families, including Laie’s and those of nearby areas.

Here the housing crisis creates acute overcrowding, or worse, painful splitting of long-time families, between here and the mainland, making the "live" in our live-work-play community become near impossible for working families.

It’s also undermining the foundation of the region’s cultural, historical, educational and economic drivers, including the Brigham Young University-Hawaii and the world-famous living museum, the Polynesian Cultural Center.

Laie, together with its rich culture, special heritage and unique offerings, has been a significant part of the island’s fabric for 150 years.

Bill 47 in the Honolulu City Council helps to preserve that legacy into the future by shifting unbuildable existing housing designations to the Laie-Malaekahana area. Existing housing designations are either downwind of the sewer plant, on steep slopes, in low-lying flood prone areas requiring multiple stream crossings for access, or hem in the university.

The former makes affordable housing impossible, the latter threatens BYU-Hawaii’s long-term viability.

The Laie-Malaekahana housing designation in Bill 47 is on non-food-bearing agriculture-2 land that is flat and gently sloped, and conducive to affordable housing for our area’s working families.

To eliminate housing from the proposed Koolau-loa Sustainable Communities Plan (KSCP), as contained in Bill 47, is to remove the "live" in what has always been a self-sustaining, live-work-play community. This unfairly shuts the community out of the process.

With no affordable housing options in Laie or Koolauloa, our workforce would be compelled to the less sustainable live-drive-work-drive-sleep model.

Why not sustain an existing live-work-play community by simply carving out a fraction of Oahu’s needed 24,000 units to provide desperately needed housing to keep working families living in the country?

The proposed KSCP includes 875 housing units in Laie-Malaekahana over the next 25 years, and calls for 50 percent of them to be affordable.

Based on well-established workforce housing programs elsewhere, we have identified a solution that could cut home prices roughly in half, and provide a housing preference for local workforce residents.

The KSCP housing designation in Laie-Malaekahana sets aside less than 1 percent of the moku’s acreage to help its families remain and thrive.

We have yet to see a better plan.