Letter from Pahoa / It’s already happened to thousands of small towns across the country: A highway bypass is built around a town, ostensibly to speed up traffic. The property where the bypass diverges from the old highway suddenly becomes prime commercial real estate. Shopping centers are built, creating a traffic bottleneck. Commercial chain stores move into the shopping centers and compete with local merchants. Downtown, cut off from the flow of traffic, slowly dies.

It’s a scenario that some Pahoa residents worry is facing their town.

They’ve already seen the bypass go through, cutting less than five minutes of drive time and leading, literally, to almost nowhere: Kalapana and Kaimu, the only villages of any size below Pahoa, were obliterated by lava during the 1990s. Then one shopping center was built, containing a supermarket and a Subway but otherwise mostly locally owned businesses. Now construction is underway on a second center, called Woodland Shopping Center, whose announced tenants include a Burger King, a KFC and a full-sized Longs Drugs. At 28,000 square feet, the Longs isn’t huge by Honolulu standards, but by Pahoa standards, it’s enormous.

Some residents fear the new center will change the small-town nature of the community forever. They’ve formed a new organization, Protect Pahoa, to protest the development. As this story went to print, they were posting protest signs and planning an anti-shopping-center rally and sign-waiving along the Pahoa Bypass on June 16.

They’re not alone in their concern. In a nation of cookie-cutter shopping malls and strip cities, many Big Island villages have made a marketable virtue out of their individuality. No other town could be mistaken as Pahoa. The same goes for Honokaa, Hawi, Volcano, Honomu and Naalehu. Each of these communities has kept its local architecture; with few or no chain stores, and have developed unique blends of local businesses to to attract tourists. Hawi and nearby Kapaau have brought their downtowns back from the dead with a mix of locally-owned art galleries, restaurants and boutiques. Honokaa has added antique shops to the mix. Holualoa and Honomu have become “art towns” full of small galleries; Volcano has developed a reputation for its arts and unique bed and breakfasts.

Fast food, slow food

For Pahoa, the key has been restaurants. Not the fast food kind. The good stuff.

Most of Downtown Pahoa fits into two blocks: Wooden buildings that look like a Wild West movie town, complete with false fronts and covered boardwalks. The town developed a Wild West reputation during the 1970s and ’80s, when it became a counterculture Mecca, a paka lolo-growing hub and a welfare center.

But during the 1990s, the town began to experience a renaissance. Local chefs discovered that downtown Pahoa’s historic buildings and cheap rents provided the opportunity to open the restaurants of their dreams. Pahoa has transformed itself from the place to go for a wild Saturday night to the place to take your date for a fine meal, at a price average people can still afford.

For many, a nest of fast food joints at the town’s entrance is anathema.

“The first thing people will see when they come to Pahoa are these restaurants [Burger King and KFC]–is that how we want to be identified?” wrote Protect Pahoa co-founder David Sprigle, in a press release for the June 16 demonstration.

The disgruntled Pahoaites have found allies in the Slow Food movement, which supports the idea that healthy, well-cooked, meals from local, sustainable food sources are physically and socially healthier than commercial “fast food.” Slow Food Hawaii distributed the protestors’ e-mail press release with an attached note, observing that the whole movement had gotten started when Italian students protested the opening of a McDonald’s.

Real estate agent John McElvany, who handles the leasing for the new shopping center, views the slow food argument with skepticism.

“There’s fast food in all of the grocery stores,” he notes. “The junk food in some sections of the grocery stores is probably less healthy than what’s served at the fast food restaurants…You can’t put a tax on hamburger. People are going to eat what they want.”

For Sprigle, the argument is less of a matter of fast food vs. slow food than of local vs. corporate.

“They’re not considering our local needs,” he maintains. “They just want to make some money.”

Making money indeed played a roll in the choice of corporate chains for the new center. McElvaney says that a design with smaller shops was considered for the center, but that “There aren’t many local merchants with the capital to put in a shop at the rents that would be needed to put in a shopping center.”

Traffic and trees

Often, the development attracted by bypasses can exacerbate the traffic problem they were designed to solve.

“The traffic from Pahoa Marketplace to Highway 13 is treacherous at best, and it’s only going to be made worse by the opening of the Woodland Center as it is currently proposed,” Sprigle maintains.

McElvaney says that the center will be widening Old Pahoa Highway at its entrances and installing turn lanes. And he maintains that with the center’s shops will save some people from driving into Hilo, actually decreasing traffic on the Pahoa Highway, the only route out of lower Puna. Overall, he claims, the center will be a plus for traffic.

The flip side of that, however, may be more development pressure down the road. With both a full-service drug store and a supermarket available at Pahoa, a mere 20–45 minutes from the Puna coast, living in the now-largely-rural area could become more attractive for commuters and land prices could escalate in one of Hawaii’s last affordable areas–altering not merely the character of Pahoa, but all of lower Puna.

The other big objection is aesthetics. When native ‘ohia trees were bulldozed on the Woodland Center site, some residents joked that should be called the “Woodless Center.”

But McElvaney claims that the landscaping of the finished center will contain more native plants than were there to begin with, and that the buildings will be designed to be compatible with Old Pahoa’s 100-year-old facades.

What can be accomplished by a protest, when permits have already been issued and leases signed, is unclear.

Sprigle still hopes to influence the new center’s appearance and encourage more local tenants. But even if that fails, he says. “We want the movement to continue. We want to make sure when towns like Hawi and Honokaa are faced with development, that the residents are considered and that local merchants are given at least a chance.”