Hilo area subdivision history and statistics (Mountain View, Volcano: sales, real estate, houses)

[Fredesch]

Where can I find information on the subdivisions and neighborhoods on the east side of the big island? When I look at a google map of the area or a map showing property boundaries, I can't get a feel for why stuff is laid out the way it is, what percentage of lots are still owned by the developer and why some developers thought spaghetti lots were a good idea? Also hard to know stuff like which areas have HOAs and how active is the HOA?

Likewise, in Hilo I don't know how old each neighborhood is and if the lot sizes are consistent or all different shapes, wether there are neighborhood groups or HOAs.

Also why is development north of Hilo so different from development in Puna. Are there general rules about which areas are fee simple and which not? The next time I visit the big island I want to get a better idea of which areas would fit us better, I am becoming aware of frogs, lava zones, rainfall, vog and elevation but would like to get an idea of the history and personality of the areas as well.

[leilaniguy]

Read the book "Land and Power in Hawaii" by George Cooper. It goes into detail on how it happened and why. Spaghetti lots are the cheapest way to develop land because of less road frontage, (can't sell roads). To find out about HOA's you will need to contact the particular subdivision's office or website. Much of the land north of Hilo was in sugar cane until the 1990's and is still in large parcels.

[Fredesch]

Ordered the book from Amazon. Makes me wonder how wide the spaghetti lots are? At some point you would think it would hurt the marketability of the lots.

Thanks for the info on the area north of Hilo. If that area is no longer in sugar what are the owners doing with the land now?

[OpenD]

Well, much of the land in Puna was in sugar, too. Mountain View and Glenwood and Pahoa were all loading stops on the sugarcane railroad, and one of the big old mills is still visible in the Kea'au area.

Look for the name Shipman in your reading. Dating back to the monarchy, the Shipman family owned a huge portion of Puna, and still has large holdings. The Shipman Company HQ is right on the highway in Kea'au, and they operate a large business park on the other side. The family also owns a grand large mansion and grounds behind steel gates in Volcano, which was their summer place.

I've heard that what they didn't sell they largely planted in eucalyptus trees, to stabilize the soil long term. Now there is a plan afoot to harvest the eucalyptus wood to burn to generate electricity. There's even a pilot project to gasify the wood and other biomass in a giant microwave oven. But mostly the land is just fallow, waiting for that big boom that never comes.

[OpenD]

Originally Posted by Fredesch

Makes me wonder how wide the spaghetti lots are? At some point you would think it would hurt the marketability of the lots.

100' wide by a 1/4 mile long = 3 acres, approximately. You can carve 10 of them out of a 30 acre block.

Spaghetti lots have also been a feature of rural Maine and Vermont real estate, and are known as bowling alley lots in some areas. They are (supposedly) attractive to people who want cheap land for farming. As the sugar industry declined, some thought the plantation workers would be interested in starting truck farms... as many did... and paranoid people "fleeing" the mainland and wanting to build subsistence farms on the cheap would like them... and spaghetti lots allowed carving up the blocks without having to clear and build new roads, which are expensive, so the smaller lots could be sold cheap.

The concept has had limited success, as you can see.

[Razzbar]

Orchidland Estates was formed in 1958 (first phase, anyway). It is "Orchidland" or "Orchid Land", but NOT "Orchidlands" as Google labels it. My 2 acre lot was 125x686. Most lots are 3 acres. When I first "surveyed" my property, I was one pin off in the back, so I wound up first building more on somebody else's property than my own. A LOT of people have made that mistake, and I'm sure still will.

The first lots in Orchidland sold for $250 per acre. The deed to my property was a royal patent, with the owners going from Kamehameha V, >> Rudy Tong >> Herbert Shipman >> Royal Pacific Development corp >> (somebody) >> me. One thing people don't appreciate about the subs is that they have solid titles, thanks to His Majesty.

Shipman operated a ranch, and the orchids you see all over Paradise Park, Orchidland, and up into Hawaiian Acres are the result of aerial seeding in the early 1950s. They were intended to be cattle food, and turned out to be a good choice for an introduced plant. They survive the frequent brush fires quite well.

In the sixties, real estate offices on Waikiki would sign people up for a free air tour, and then sign people up. Not quite buying sight unseen, but pretty close.

They remained pretty much empty until the mid seventies when pilgrims flooded in from other islands and the mainland to grow pot. They wrecked the roads, but built a lot of houses. The Alaska pipeline also financed quite a few houses.

Sugar was never grown in the subs. They have no soil. Beware the Puna "old timers" who tell you about some lot in the subdivision that has "deep soil". What "deep soil" means is that you can get a whole shovelful if you know where to stick it in. It's all relative to the lot down the road, where you couldn't scrape up a bucketful in an hour. The official soil surveys classify it as "extremely stony muck".

When I first went shopping in 1972, most real estate agents I spoke to kinda dismissed the subs for various reasons. BUT they cost about 1/10 per acre as much as anywhere else in Hawaii. I went around the Hilo area asking people why the land in the subs was so cheap. Answers ranged from too hard to dig a cesspool to ghosts to bandits. I was baffled how so much land could just be more or less ignored in a state with longstanding housing shortages. When I moved into Orchidland, I put the 4th mail box on the highway. There were maybe 10 households in the entire subdivision. We all knew one another, watched out for one another, had work parties, and were better than friends. Then the pot growers brought their hush-hush culture, and it eventually lost the pioneer spirit we had at first.

[Fredesch]

Thanks Razzbar, that is great insight into orchidland.

[terracore]

Most spag lots are either 100', 120', or 150' wide, depending on the subdivision.

Square lots do exist in virtually every subdivision, however you will pay a premium for them. It will be about the same price to buy 2 or 3 adjoining spag lots.

What most people don't "get" until they actually shop around here is distance from a lot to paved road. A lot of people think "only a mile from pavement" like its a good thing, but these aren't nice, graded gravel roads like you encounter elsewhere in rural USA. They are generally 1 lane suspension busters that in places require you to inch along at 5 MPH or less even in a 4WD. A mile or few of these types of roads and it will take you longer to get to the pavement than it takes you to get from the pavement to town. Generally the longer the distance from pavement to the lot, the cheaper the lots are, and the creepier your neighbors are going to be. I've seen some pretty remote places where the building material of choice is tarps, fences are decorated with pig bones, and that tune from "Deliverance" seems to always emanate from the ether.

[Razzbar]

Terracore is definitely right about the roads. You don't need 4wd because they're tire-chewing rock, not mud. Other than that, they suck, and are a major downside of living in a Puna sub -- depending on how far you are from the pavement, and whether the road is a traversal, or a mauka-makai road. The former tends to be less rocky and more muddy, the latter can be a riverbed.

When I first saw Orchidland road in 1973, it was actually quite beautiful. It was graded red cinder, 60 feet wide, with grass that was mowed once a month. There were two ruts in the middle beginning, but you could just breeze up it in an ordinary car at 45mph. Within a year, all the grass and cinder had gone. Torn up and washed away, leaving a riverbed. In places, I'd bring my truck to a full stop and then slip the clutch to get over some bumps. I understand it's mostly or all paved now, but there are still sections in the subs that are very rough. Not so rough that you need 4wd, but almost.

Square lots are much better than strip ('spaghetti') lots because they provide more useable area. It's not just the convenience that the shape provides with everything being nearer to everything else, it's that if you build, there is a setback requirement, so that 125 foot wide strip shrinks by 20 feet over its entire length. Do the math, and you'll see that it take more fence to enclose a strip lot. It has a longer perimeter, and all along that perimeter is a border subject to setback. You share more frontage with your next door neighbor, and your next-next door neighbor is just 125 feet away. Also consider a driveway that goes to the middle of the property is going to be much longer, eat up more square feet, cost more to build. Square lots are simply easier to use than strip lots, although there are some interesting things you can do with a strip lot that you can't with a square one, such as make a long garden walkway to get lost in. Or drive golf balls. You just have to consider what you want or need. All things considered, I'd prefer a square lot most of the time, but not if it costs twice or three times as much. Strip lots aren't all that bad. They're just -- really skinny at times.

[OpenD]

Originally Posted by Razzbar

Square lots are much better than strip ('spaghetti') lots because they provide more useable area. It's not just the convenience that the shape provides with everything being nearer to everything else, it's that if you build, there is a setback requirement, so that 125 foot wide strip shrinks by 20 feet over its entire length.

Right, but setbacks only apply to structures. If you are farming, you can run your cultivation or pasture or whatever right up to the property line. There are definitely a lot of drawbacks, but the low price per acre is what sells people on them.

Although obviously that particular sales proposition wasn't the huge success it was meant to be.

One workaround that I've seen several examples of... since a driveway is not subject to set-back requirements, creating a driveway with an easement to the back half of the property along one property line, and then splitting the lot across the middle yields two cheap acre-and-a-half lots out of one cheap 3 acre spaghetti lot.