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I built a house (with a permit!) in Hawaiian Acres in the early '80s which is almost forty years ago now. The roads were worse or in some areas basically non-existent. Especially in the back of the sub where it looked like a bulldozer had just scraped away the trees and what was left was the road. Road 8 was paved to almost C, Road 1 was paved about as far back. No mandatory road dues in Hawaiian Acres so not a lot of money to build roads.
No water (still isn't), electricity only at the very front of the sub and I don't think grid power has gotten completely to the back of the sub yet. No mail delivery nor mailboxes at that time, dunno if they put in a mail center yet. (Currently, a friend of mine in Puna is always complaining about the long wait times at the post office to get his mail, although that's in Pahoa. He never complained about the post office when he got his mail in Volcano.)
Phone lines were only in the front third to front half of Hawaiian Acres. This was way before viable internet and cellphones. Ham radio and CBs were big since you could call folks on the phone (party line phone, but at least a phone) at the front of the sub and they could relay a message via radio to folks in the back of the sub.
The houses were few and far between, especially towards the back of the sub. Even though it's forested, the trees are pretty skinny and sound still carries so you could hear other people and their generators, dogs, music, loud car exhaust, etc. Plus there was that wife/girlfriend who would call her boyfriend/husband home by firing off a .45 caliber. That has quite a distinctive sound and he was a brave fellow if he would head towards it. Smaller caliber such as a .22 was just folks shooting at feral pigs or tin cans.
There weren't any coqui frogs at the time so sometimes in the dead of night you could hear a very low rumbling which was lava going through lava tubes. That was surreal although I didn't find out what it was until I'd moved away.
There were a LOT of thefts until the neighbors banded together into a Neighborhood Watch. Crimes went from four to six hundred per month down to four to six. Using the CB, anyone could call for Neighborhood Watch to show up so you could have a truck full of armed people at your property within about five to seven minutes. It would then be a good idea to give them a gift after they fixed whatever your problem was. Beer was pretty much always acceptable. Any car that came into the area without a community sticker on the bumper would be followed around and someone would ask them what they were doing in the area. That was, though, around forty years ago, not sure if Community Watch is still active in that area.
Most of the houses were built out of whatever was available and the general economic level of the people living there was not very high, although considering the amount of pot grown there, everything else was. That was the main economic driver for a lot of the area until they started enforcing pot laws.
Getting in and out - especially from the back of the subdivision could take a half hour to forty five minutes so even just working in Hilo was an hour's commute. Plus, if you worked regular hours, thieves would know exactly when to visit your house. So, a lot of folks didn't work a 'regular' job. It was mostly a hard scrabble kinda place with quite a few 'interesting characters' who didn't quite fit into more civilized areas. There were what were thought to be folks in the witness protection program and/or Vietnam vets 'hiding' in the lots at the back of the sub but they didn't come out much. Most of the driveways in that area disappeared off into the underbrush with 'KAPU' and 'Keep Out' signs in front of them.
From Hawaiian Acres, I next built a house in Nanawale, this would have been the mid-nineties. Better roads within the subdivision, although the road between Keaau and Pahoa was a narrow two lane road without shoulders for a lot of it. All traffic past Pahoa had to drive through Pahoa which was really narrow and really slow and with cars parked in front of Cash & Carry and halfway blocking the road.
The lot I built on was about two thirds of the way back in the sub, so no pavement, power, water, etc. The roads going back in the sub were paved although with a lot of dips up and down. The side roads were graveled and graded. The lots were really tiny going from the three acres in HA to about 8,000 square feet or whatever size they are in Nanawale. Had to put in a septic system instead of a cesspool because the lots are much smaller. FWIW, though, the lots in HA, even though they are three acres, it's 150' by 871' so you can still have a close neighbor even on three acres.
It was quieter in Nanawale, I think because people knew they were closer to neighbors so they weren't as loud. We live in town now with neighbors really close, but you never hear them because they know everyone is nearby.
Both HA and Nanawale had basically the same sort of 'soil' which was leaf litter over lava rock. If you want to plant a tree, a jackhammer is a good tool to choose. Not having a jackhammer, an o'o bar (about a two inch wide six foot long steel rod with a knob on one end and a chisel point or blunt chisel blade at the other) will work to dig into lava, but it's a lot of effort.
Nanawale at that time wasn't very built up and the house I built was the first on the block. Towards the front of the sub, they have a community center with a swimming pool. HA had a community building, but not a lot of community things there other than road meetings. Although, that was almost forty years ago, things could have changed.
I lived in HA for a few months about 10 years ago. I think the feral vibe you described is pretty much gone, maybe it still exists deep in. But one thing that hasn't changed is the roads. Of all the large subdivisions, they are the worst that I know of. There are a few roads going in that are paved and maintained by the county but the side roads are in poor condition.
It's funny what you said about the lack of telephone service. When I moved to Orchidland we could get telephone but not internet. For years Hawaii Telcom kept telling us there were no available "ports" for their DSL service. They refused to start a waiting list either, so the only way to get service was to call them every morning hoping that somebody who had DSL either moved or died and opened up a "port" and that you were the first to call that day. The subdivision never got wired for cable either so the only options were cellular or satellite. The irony is that with FCC grants Hawaii Telcom wired the areas without broadband with fiber and we went from having no broadband internet to having the fastest in the state.
I'm not aware of any subdivisions that don't have power available at every lot. HELCO wired them in decades ago and if the lot owners didn't pay their share to get hooked up it was an IOU to anybody who wanted to have power hooked up to that lot in the future. The fee varies by location but it's a few thousand dollars. A lot of the off grid folks are by choice because rather than pay the fee they would rather invest the money in their own solar / off grid solution. And considering the cost of electricity here, being off grid is appealing to a lot of people.
There's power to the back of HA and Fern Forest these days? Guess the areas are getting built up more and more.
Wasn't the County paving Road 8 in Hawaiian Acres weren't they as part of an emergency bypass thing back when lava was gonna eat Pahoa a few years ago? Kinda a cut through Ainaloa to the back of HA and then out to Volcano highway?
Way back when these big subs started, they got special dispensation to be created as long as the County would never have to pave the roads or provide water service. HOVE (Hawaiian Ocean View Estates, I think they may have evolved to just 'Oceanview' these days) finally got a water well a few years ago didn't they? The County wasn't required to put it in, but folks howled enough, I think it was? They'd been asking for about thirty years or so, maybe longer.
Eventually - maybe another thirty years or so? - the roads and water will be installed in the big subs, but all the folks who started the problem are way long gone. Currently, if you want to put in a subdivision of - what is it? Four lots? Six lots or bigger? - anyway, if you want to build a subdivision now you need to put in at least paved roads, sidewalks and streetlights. Also water meters or there's some sort of variance to apply for if water isn't provided.
Some of the plantation lots along the Hamakua coast were sold with water hookups not paid for yet back in the early 2000's or so. I think most of those may have cycled through by now. But there were a lot less of them than the no electric or not-paid-for-electricity lots in the big subs. The plantation lot electric hookups were originally done by the sugar company but were in place for HELCO to take over, I guess, but the water system was different somehow.
As for 'off grid' you can be that and be in town. We're attached to the grid but have one of those NEM contracts so we give Helco power during the day and they give it back at night so no battery bank necessary. There's a $20 a month connection fee but that's pretty much our entire monthly electric bill. HELCO, of course, doesn't have these contracts anymore (can't operate a business at a loss for very long) but this contract will stay valid until it is cancelled. It goes with the electric meter so even when we sell the house, as long as the new owner just takes over the contract and doesn't cancel it, it will remain viable. If we could, we'd keep the contract and move it to the new house, but that's not an option. It was economic suicide for HELCO to continue with the NEM contracts, but it did get solar kinda kick started. We're gonna list that house for sale in the next several weeks or month, should you want to move up the coast?
Are these sorts of things typical everywhere or are these just Hawaii things? I can't imagine how someone from the mainland or even one of the other islands can come to this island and get a lot of these things figured out right away. Let alone buying a house on this island over the internet or the phone without living here for at least a year. It seems to me that it is some sort of sheer chance that they don't fall into some sort of unknown pitfall.
Time after time we watch someone not-from-around-here buy a house or property with ideas that we know just aren't gonna work and it's kinda like watching a real slow train wreck. There was the nice young couple who bought fifty acres up near the front of Fern Forest and they were gonna build some sort of yoga retreat. Eventually the deep mud (foot and a half of leaf litter over a sheet of pahoehoe lava) and amount of thefts as well as the illegal firing range next door drove them away. They had also wanted to 'be away from it all' when they moved over and then found out they were too far away from everything.
We're currently watching some folks funded with mainland money biting off way more than they can chew over here. They want to be farmers, but the elevation they bought is too high for what they want to farm and they haven't found that out quite yet. No power, no water, no pavement, no real direct road access, it's through the neighbor's pasture since their on paper road is a gulch. A water truck can't get to them because the road is too bad and farming without water is always way more interesting than I'd want to try. We wish them well, but I sure wish they would have picked an easier spot.
We're currently watching some folks funded with mainland money biting off way more than they can chew over here. They want to be farmers, but the elevation they bought is too high for what they want to farm and they haven't found that out quite yet. No power, no water, no pavement, no real direct road access, it's through the neighbor's pasture since their on paper road is a gulch. A water truck can't get to them because the road is too bad and farming without water is always way more interesting than I'd want to try. We wish them well, but I sure wish they would have picked an easier spot.
Wasn't the County paving Road 8 in Hawaiian Acres weren't they as part of an emergency bypass thing back when lava was gonna eat Pahoa a few years ago? Kinda a cut through Ainaloa to the back of HA and then out to Volcano highway?
No, it was paved before then. Legends say that the county paved it because it was the only way emergency vehicles could access the entire subdivision without every 911 call resulting in a fatality or houses burned to the ground. Apparently people expect their property taxes to come with infrastructure and services. Since the county supplies no infrastructure, the very minimum they can do is respond if somebody calls 911 before the emergency "resolves itself".
I did a back-of-the napkin calculation on how many miles I've driven on our private roads (just within our subdivision) and compared it with our vehicle's MPG and amount of fuel tax paid at the pump. It comes to about $1200 over the last 10 years.
And yes, it does connect Ainaloa to Highway 11. The other alternate route is Pohaku in Orchidland connecting to Kurtistown near J. Hara.
It'd be nice to have Railroad going from Hilo into Parasite Park. That'd save a ton of folks having to go up to the Keaau bypass. Eventually, perhaps, they will get around to it. The amount of folks who live down one road is rather appalling. Even with the pass through Ainaloa and Orchidland, there's still too many places where there's only one road.
I've heard that PP and HA are two of the biggest subs in the united states. Almost side by side and no infrastructure.
Yup, your island is so busy that you don't get the opportunity to watch as many of these slow motion train wrecks. A lot of the newbies' thrashing around is just lost in the general busy-ness of everyone. Maybe a lot of them end up in Waikiki?
Most of the new ones here end up in either Puna or Kona, although that's a large majority of the population on the island here. Which, looking at the history of Puna, the low prices due to lack of infrastructure may be why.
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