American Savings Bank’s new $100 million, 11-story headquarters in Chinatown stands in stark contrast to the collection of homeless people whose tents are pitched on a sidewalk a block away.

But the look of the area is already changing following the bank’s eight community cleanups and a major upgrade it supported at Aala Park across the street and in surrounding areas.

American Savings President and CEO Rich Wacker said during a media tour Friday that relocating the bank’s headquarters to 300 N. Beretania St. will improve communication among employees by moving them from five sites into one location. He also said the community should get an economic boost by the bank’s decision not to put in a dining room, thereby encouraging its 650 employees at that facility — out of 1,200 in the company overall — to venture into the community for lunch and after-work camaraderie.

“We have a break room but we don’t have a kitchen,” he said. “We want people out in the community getting lunch at the restaurants, doing pau hana outside. Six hundred and fifty people walking around this area can only help spur more economic development.”

Wacker said the bank began looking for a new headquarters about two years before it purchased the property for $12 million on Nov. 24, 2014, from Pacific Constructors LLC. The bank broke ground in February 2017, and construction on the 373,000-square-foot building ended last December.

“We looked around for the best available space to do something of the scale that we wanted to do, and we looked at existing office space because we were reluctant to bring more office space into downtown, which is already saturated,” Wacker said. “But we couldn’t find something that gave us the scale that we have, to create the open environment that we have, that gave us the parking, that gave us the ability to create the right environment and be near downtown. So this became the optimal choice for us.”

Once the bank decided on Chinatown, it embraced the community with 8,000 hours’ worth of cleanups that involved painting, removing graffiti and picking up trash in the area. A ninth cleanup is scheduled for May. The bank, working in conjunction with the Honolulu Police Department, the City and County of Honolulu and the Department of Parks and Recreation, donated security cameras for Aala Park’s restroom that was renovated and now is locked at night. Recent improvements made by the Department of Parks and Recreation also include repainting the Aala skate park, resurfacing its basketball court, installing a new softball backstop, refurbishing the kids’ play area and opening a dog park last month.

There already are 75 employees working in the building with “the full wave,” starting Monday with 60 employees brought in every other day, Wacker said.

While the bank won’t have a dining room, it appears to have everything else. Among its amenities are breathtaking views of the ocean and the mountains through “view dynamic glass” that is electronically controlled to be tinted when the sun is at its brightest and becoming a natural view when the sunlight fades. There are open-floor plans and workspaces to encourage team collaboration, a central staircase to provide easy access between the floors (for those who don’t want to take the elevator), a Starbucks coffee hui on each of the three employee floors (eighth, ninth and 10th) and private phone booths for employees to make personal phone calls. Employee workspaces are equipped with controls to raise or lower the desks along with red and green light indicators to let co-workers know whether they are busy or free to talk. The seventh floor has a 4,500-square-foot lunchroom with two outdoor lanai, an arcade and relaxation rooms.

The first floor has a full-service branch (its 50th statewide), an ATM, customer parking, an art gallery featuring local artists, a community multipurpose room and an employee fitness center with locker rooms and bike storage. The second through sixth floors are for employee parking while the 11th floor is unoccupied and designated for future use.

Even though there are only 450 employee parking stalls — 200 shy of the number of employees expected in the building — the bank has gone green by coming up with an alternative to accommodate and reward the employees while helping the environment.

“We have what we call our green benefit so if you want a parking spot, you pay 75 bucks a month,” he said. “If you carpool, we’ll pay you 60 bucks a month, and if you don’t take a spot and you take public transportation, you get 125 bucks a month, so the spread from driving with your own spot to taking public transportation is almost 200 bucks a month. So we had people elect what they wanted. We had about 350 people take parking spots, and we had the rest take either the carpool or the green benefit. Net-net it’s a wash because what people pay for the parking pays the benefit, and everybody has what they want.”

As part of its consolidation, American Savings put its downtown Honolulu office building headquarters, which is next to its main branch, and its Mililani serv­ice center on the market. The 12-story, 60,000-square-foot downtown building at 915 Fort Street Mall, which is part of the Financial Plaza of the Pacific, was listed at $13.5 million, and its 30,000-square-foot center in Mililani Technology Park was listed at $9.3 million.