The Battle to Save Waikiki Beach

But reengineering the beach in the future is only going to get harder. Studies and modeling show that the combination of thermal expansion and melting polar ice will cause a global, 3.2-foot sea level increase sometime between 2050 and 2100, resulting in twice as much coastal erosion in Hawaii as there would be otherwise. When this happens, today’s projects will seem futile. “We’re buying time,” admits Eversole, who also works for the University of Hawaii. “The beach won’t be here forever.”

Neither will the rest of Waikiki’s 1.5 square miles beyond the beach, at least not in their current form. As the ocean expands, water is expected to seep into Honolulu’s porous limestone geology, nudging up the water table and eventually inundating Waikiki’s dense thicket of roads, hotels, restaurants, shopping malls and condo towers. At high tides, water already sloshes out of some storm drains and pools in below-ground parking garages. If no action is taken, 6 feet of sea level rise would put Waikiki permanently under water.

As a result, some in Honolulu are envisioning far more radical solutions than groins — hollowing out the first few floors of buildings, for example; creating a Venetian-style canal system; or turning Waikiki back into the wetlands it once was. These ideas, if implemented, seek to save Hawaii’s most popular attraction, located on the island of Oahu, by totally reimagining it. They also steer right into some of the thorniest questions cities face today as they try to plan for costly realities that lie years, not just decades, ahead.

Virtually no one here in this deep-blue state denies the serious risk climate change poses to the islands, and there is widespread acknowledgement about the need to the preserve the $7 billion in economic activity that Waikiki generates annually. Yet, little agreement exists about what this future adaptation should look like and who will pay for it. The resulting battles — playing out not between the political left and right, but among city and state officials, environmentalists, hotels, landowners and locals — foreshadows a new phase in the climate debate: No longer are coastal cities arguing about whether warming poses a monumental threat, but about the best way to respond.

In Waikiki, Eversole’s plans have faced resistance from community members who fear that dumping more sand on the beach and building more hardened structures in the water will benefit hotels and developers with beachfront property at the expense of Waikiki’s famed surf breaks and natural beauty. These and other advocates for bolder, longer-term solutions like a more natural shoreline and adapted wetlands are facing off against hotel owners, politicians and others whose agendas have far shorter time horizons.

“It used to be, ‘Oh, OK, we’ll think about it later,’” said State Sen. Sharon Moriwaki, from her office in the Capitol building here, still largely deserted during the pandemic. “But now everyone knows that the science says you’re going to be underwater, and we have to figure out what to do about.” With nobody else stepping up to take action, last year Moriwaki assembled a working group, including Eversole, to design a comprehensive adaptation plan for Waikiki over the next two years that could serve as a model for other areas. This month, Moriwaki submitted legislation that, if passed, would provide $800,000 for the state to create the plan, which would then get implemented by the City and County of Honolulu.

Getting that money is likely to be the easy part. Those with a say and a stake in what happens to Waikiki include officials within the state government, which controls the beach and nearshore waters; leaders from the joint city-county government, which has jurisdiction over everything inland of the shoreline; the powerful tourism industry, including many hotels owned by companies outside the state; plus, Waikiki’s 30,000 residents. At this point, city and state officials have vowed to work together and solicit input from the community. But scientists and activists worry they won’t move quickly enough to make difficult decisions, while the debate over how to respond — short-term engineering fixes versus long-term adaptive measures, containing nature versus working with it — only festers.

Moriwaki acknowledges her team is still at the starting line. “There’s a lot of hands in the pot, but so far the pot isn’t cooking,” she says. “But at least now there’s interest. Before there wasn’t even that.”

For centuries, Waikiki was synonymous with water. With a name meaning “place of spouting water,” the area was fed by a dozen streams running down from the Ko’olau mountains to the northeast of Honolulu and into the ocean. In the 15th century, Native Hawaiians used this patchwork of wetlands to develop a productive agricultural system, growing flood-adapted crops like taro and raising fish in large stone-walled ponds. Later, Chinese and Japanese sugar cane and pineapple plantation workers used some of the land to plant rice and raise ducks. At the shoreline, generations of Hawaiian royals had their residences, and everybody — royalty, commoners, men, women, children — came to surf the waves, with both canoes and long, heavy wooden boards. Called “wave-sliding,” or he’e nalu, the pastime was about celebrating and connecting with the ocean.

The area’s transformation into a commercial center began around the turn of the 20th century, shortly after Hawaii became a U.S. territory. In 1906, Lucius Pinkham, a businessman from Massachusetts who became president of Hawaii’s Board of Health, concluded that Waikiki’s drainage and mosquito issues were “deleterious to public health.” In a letter to the rest of the board, he argued that the population of impoverished Hawaiian, Chinese and Japanese farmers wasn’t the best option for the area, describing them as “a class of population that limited means force onto undesirable and unsanitary land.” Instead, he wrote, Waikiki needed a population like the one that had emerged in Los Angeles and other Southern California towns — people “of private fortune, who seek an agreeable climate and surroundings, and who expend large, already-acquired incomes.” In Pinkham’s view, these wealthier (and, yes, whiter) people from the mainland would allow Waikiki to become an “absolutely sanitary, beautiful and unique district.”

With plenty of solid land for development, homes quickly began popping up. When passenger air travel to Honolulu was made widely available in the post-World War II era, high-rise hotels to house Waikiki’s growing numbers of visitors became a fixture of the skyline. Amid these changes, Waikiki’s surfing culture endured and was exported to the rest of the world by gold medal Olympic swimmer Duke Paoa Kahanamoku, who grew up in Waikiki and mentored a generation of “beach boys.”

One of them was the late George Downing, a pioneer in big-wave surfing and the design of surfboards. “My dad literally grew up on this beach and spent much of his life working to protect Mamala Bay,” said his son Keone on a recent afternoon, a view of Diamond Head Crater rising in the background.

A tanned 68-year-old and former professional surfer, Downing has become one of Waikiki’s most prominent voices arguing that the state’s current climate adaptation efforts favor hotels, tourists and wealthy property owners, not the natural environment once cultivated by Native Hawaiians and beloved by locals. In Downing’s view, Eversole’s plans to build four new T-shaped groins in front of the Sheraton, Halekulani and Outrigger hotels threatens several of Waikiki’s most popular surf breaks; when waves hit the groins, energy refracts back out into the ocean, leading to smaller, weaker breaks. He claims that after the Royal Hawaiian groin was built 18 months ago, it turned the nearby Canoes break into a “mush burger.” Downing believes that instead of “throwing rocks in the water” to hold in sand and slow erosion, the state and Special Improvement District Association should replenish the beach with regular, small-scale pumping of sand back to shore as it naturally washes out in the waves, perhaps monthly and at night, when it won’t be intrusive.

“I really like Dolan — he has a conscience,” says Downing, who runs Save Our Surf, a small but well-connected advocacy organization he took over after his father’s death. “[But] if he’s successful in building these groins, the hotels are the only ones that will benefit, creating a higher value for their properties when they get ready to sell.” (Eversole, himself a surfer, readily admits Waikiki’s visitor destinations are a priority — “We can’t kill the golden goose,” he says — and while he has heard concerns about the Canoes break generating shorter rides, he considers such changes subtle and short term.)

On Maui, a similar proposal for beach widening by the State of Hawaii and the hotel industry also is encountering opposition from community members, many of them Native Hawaiians who worry about long-term impacts on coral reefs and fishing, as well as short-term disruptions to canoe racing. Several people have promised to “stand in front of bulldozers” to stop the project, arguing that hotels and condos should start making plans to retreat inland. For now, Downing isn’t calling for a similar exodus in Waikiki, in part because the hotels have nowhere to go; slightly smaller than Maui, Oahu houses more than six times its population, a total of just over 1 million people, 350,000 of them in Honolulu. Longer-term, though, he wants to see policymakers and industry leaders adopt strategies that seek to work with the ocean, rather than hold it back.

“Just because we’ve screwed up Waikiki with all these man-made structures doesn’t mean we have to keep screwing it up,” says Downing, a former land board member at the state’s Department of Land and Natural Resources and current member of the Hawaii Tourism Authority board, who says he has the ear of Gov. David Ige. Eversole says the state has received north of 150 negative comments about the upcoming groin project from community members and various groups. The influential Surfrider Foundation, for example, said in its comments that because T-head groins have “significant impacts” on ecosystems, marine life and surf breaks, it prefers “less intrusive” designs.

When I met up with Downing last month, he was eager for me to see a recent project he considered to be a lost opportunity. On Waikiki’s quieter Diamond Head side, past the strip of oceanfront hotels and along a pedestrian path abutting a public park, we stood on a newly installed platform of concrete pavers. Part of a walled structure originally built as public baths in the early 1900s, this rectangular extension from the walkway had been damaged by decades of pummeling from the waves.

“This was a perfect place to experiment with what happens when you let the water go where it wants to,” Downing said. “You’ve got no hotels or buildings in the way. Take out the wall and let the water bring the sand and the beach up into the park.” Instead, the City and County of Honolulu hired a contractor to rebuild the walls, place additional sand inside and lay the concrete pavers on top, creating the visual effect of a short, sloping sidewalk to nowhere.

A person with knowledge of the project said there were several roadblocks preventing serious consideration of a beach cove. The city, this person said, didn’t want to lose its investment in the rebuilt pedestrian promenade on top of the wall, while the Kapiolani Park Preservation Society, which protects the large public park nearby, does not want to see any park land lost, the group’s president told me. The city’s Department of Design and Construction did not respond to requests to comment for this article.

For Downing, this so-called Queen’s Beach project — in which multiple entities clung to the status quo instead of looking at the bigger picture — is the kind of business-as-usual, quick-fix solution he believes is all too common in Hawaii and that has left the entire stretch of Waikiki Beach pockmarked with crumbling pieces of groins, walls, semi-exposed drainage pipes, century-old foundations and useless stairs — all eyesores on this once untouched land. “Nothing ever gets removed, and there’s no long-term vision,” he says. “We’ve got to start doing things differently.”

The stench was overpowering as Judith Stilgenbauer stood along the banks of the Ala Wai Canal at the northern edge of Waikiki last month. “That’s awful,” she said, quickly walking in search of a less pungent spot on the sidewalk. “Smells like it might be coming from the sewer.”

Stilgenbauer, director of the landscape architecture program at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, eventually concluded that the smell was likely due to the city’s recent dredging of trash, muck and sediment from the bottom of the canal. In Pinkham’s original design, the Ala Wai had two outlets to the ocean. Budget shortfalls and concerns that the current might transport debris toward the hotels prevented the second outlet from ever being built, resulting in still, fetid water that requires periodic cleaning. “This whole canal could be something really beautiful and interesting if we do this right, something that appeals to both tourists and locals. People could feel good about coming here,” she says.

If anyone has offered the kind of long-term vision Downing and others have called for, it’s Stilgenbauer. While Downing and Eversole are focused on the best way to preserve Waikiki Beach largely as it is, Stilgenbauer, another member of Moriwaki’s working group, is an advocate for what would perhaps be the most radical way of dealing with climate change here and elsewhere: nature-based solutions, an approach gaining traction in cities like Boston, New York and Norfolk, Va.

In a 2020 report, conducted in partnership with Hawaii’s state planning office, Stilgenbauer and a team from the university envisioned a phased approach for turning the Ala Wai and an adjoining golf course back into a version of the wetlands they once were. Sketches show people strolling and jogging along promenades elevated over marshlands. Families take photos from rectangular viewing platforms, while birds flutter overhead. At the city-owned, decreasingly used Ala Wai golf course on the northern edge of the canal are basins to collect stormwater for irrigation, a wetland education center, facilities for basketball and beach volleyball and a restoration of the agricultural practices Pinkham did away with: fishponds, taro fields and breadfruit orchards.

“You have to start thinking beyond the beach and shopping malls and have a discussion about how we undo some of the colonial damage that’s been done here,” says Stilgenbauer, a German native who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, before moving to Hawaii. “We have to get over this idea that we can play God and engineer our way out of all of these problems.”

Not included in the report are Stilgenbauer’s ideas for a series of soft-shored, Venetian-style canals that would replace selected streets and a floodable, “living shoreline” at Fort DeRussy, a large, grassy, oceanfront beach park owned by the Army and located between the Outrigger Reef hotel and Hilton Hawaiian Village. Such “green infrastructure,” she says, would allow water to flow through safely, increase biodiversity, and help Waikiki live with periodic or even constant flooding. Moriwaki, at least, has offered provisional buy-in. “Judith is really hot to trot on this, and she sort of scares everyone. But I think we do need to start 50 years out, then work backwards,” says the state senator. After years of joking about the idea, Eversole, too, is an advocate for a canal system, albeit a more limited version.

But whether any of Stilgenbauer’s dramatic concepts will get adopted and paid for, at a time when Moriwaki’s adaptation bill has yet to receive even bare-bones funding, remains a wide-open question. As evidenced by the Queen’s Beach baths project, even small projects face an array of obstacles, and require state, city and oftentimes federal approvals. Moriwaki said this week that, amid increased attention on climate change in the current state legislative session, the prospects look good for her bill to create an adaptation plan — though Hawaii still faces other, more immediate issues, including a lack of affordable housing, homelessness, traffic, a beleaguered light rail system and stalled plans to boost local food production.

On Honolulu’s City Council, political will exists, at least at the moment, to take on these challenges. “It’s up to political leadership to do the hard, long-term thinking,” says Tommy Waters, the council chair, whose district includes Waikiki. “I want my kids to be able to enjoy a beautiful Waikiki, to be able to paddle out there and surf, so I have a vested interest.” For the first time, four Native Hawaiians sit on the City Council, Waters being one of them. He envisions the area becoming gradually more elevated as hotels are rebuilt or undergo renovations in accordance with new flood-resilient building codes, which are under development at the city’s Department of Planning and Permitting, though at a slower pace than he and others would like. Structures in the lowest-lying areas, or those that can’t move up or don’t have the financial resources necessary to do so, such as residential condos, Waters says, should be repurposed as some version of Stilgenbauer’s floodable green spaces, with buyouts and other assistance given for relocation.

He knows such ideas won’t be an easy sell among his constituents, however. Honolulu’s community boards have proven themselves vocal and well-organized. In late 2019, a group of residents in neighborhoods directly inland of Waikiki successfully fought an Army Corps of Engineers’ plan to address what is effectively Waikiki’s third source of potential flooding. Along with an advancing shoreline and groundwater inundation, a possible 100-year storm in the upland valleys would send water rushing into Waikiki, causing an overtopping of the Ala Wai Canal. The Army Corps plan, which had been in the works for nearly two decades, faced opposition because it lacked community input and included large detention basins in residential neighborhoods and 4-foot, view-spoiling wall extensions along the canal.

“People generally don’t like change,” says Katherine Hensky, a member of the Waikiki community board. “The attitude of a lot of people is: ‘Nothing is going to happen to me, and if it does, I’ll deal with it then.’”

Perhaps the biggest player in the politics of climate adaptation in Waikiki, which represents 8 percent of the state’s economy, is its tourism industry. Its contribution came into particularly sharp relief during the early days of the Covid pandemic when tourists disappeared and Hawaii’s unemployment rate surged to almost 30 percent, among the worst in the nation. Hotel owners and operators, for the most part, have not spoken publicly about sea level rise in Waikiki, and nearly every one of the nine companies I contacted for this article declined to comment. The real estate company Park Hotels & Resorts recently had an extensive report completed about how an advancing shoreline will affect its large, oceanfront Hilton Hawaiian Village property, but Moriwaki says the company has opted not to share it with her. (A Hilton representative said the hotel is “committed to operating and growing sustainably.”)

If recent events are any guide, the industry’s appetite for making — and paying for — decisive change might not be particularly high. Those defunct and dangling stairs at the Sheraton and the walkway leading to them have been blocked with an unsightly “Closed” sign for more than five years because of a stalemate over who should be responsible for repairs, Eversole says. The Sheraton, which owns the walkway, and the state, which has an agreement for public use of it, remain at loggerheads about both the funds and the assumption of liability in the event of a lawsuit. The walkway closed in 2016 after a visitor broke both her ankles (then sued) while trying to negotiate the makeshift sandbags placed between the sand and stairs. Now, anyone wanting to traverse the beach has to wind around the Sheraton’s infinity pool to bypass that section of the walkway.

Next door, the upscale Halekulani hotel has its own walkway problems. Although functional, the path leading across the beach, toward the Hilton Hawaiian Village, involves a circuitous walk around and across a mini-beach and then, at the end of the walkway, the navigation of a precipitous drop. Over the summer, the erosion of sand caused pieces of the public-access sidewalk connected to the walkway to shear off. On my visit in December, I watched people of all ages and athletic abilities as they attempted to scramble over wet, sandy, steep-angled slabs of concrete on their journeys across the beach.

In an interview at an open-air dining area at the recently renovated hotel he runs, Halekulani Corporation Chief Operating Officer Peter Shaindlin said he views it as the state’s responsibility (or the city’s, in the case of the sidewalk) to fix the walkways because of the terms of a public use agreement signed with the state’s Department of Land and Natural Resources in the 1960s. He also favors a comprehensive, multi-hotel solution, something Eversole says he is working on and which he hopes will be funded jointly by his employer, the Special Improvement District Association, and the state. “We don’t want to do anything that becomes a band-aid solution. We’re waiting to see what happens with the entire stretch,” Shaindlin says.

Although roughly half of the $5.8 million total cost of the recently completed Royal Hawaiian groin and beach widening projects that Eversole showed me came from hotels via the Special Improvement District Association, the state will likely need to step in as the leading contributor for future projects. Currently, the business association group collects just $1 million a year in assessments.

A longtime Waikiki real estate lawyer who didn’t want to be named because he isn’t authorized to speak about clients said he is concerned about an incompatibility between the interests of local community members, whose children and grandchildren will live on Oahu’s south shore for decades, and hotel owners, many of whom are short-term, mainland-based or international real estate or private equity firms. “These are people who are generally not going to hold the asset for more than 15 years, so they don’t need to necessarily think long-term,” he said. “My big concern is that one day the risk profile will become too high, and people will say, ‘I’m not going to invest in Waikiki anymore.’ When that happens, a lot of people will be left behind.”

Shaindlin says that the Halekulani Corporation, as an owner of multiple Waikiki properties for more than 30 years, is committed to the destination’s long-term vitality and interested in supporting innovative ideas. “For our guests, it’s already more about culture than sunbathing,” he says. “Some of them will actually call up the hotel and ask what we do with sustainability initiatives.”

In Stilgenbauer’s experience, support from the industry, though welcome, tends to be theoretical. She says when she meets with hotels, often on properties with critical infrastructure on lower levels and ground-floor lobbies bustling with shops and restaurants, there is little sense of urgency. “They say, ‘These nature-based solutions are fine, but not on our property,’” she says.

At some point in the not-so-distant future, these wait-and-see postures will no longer be viable. With the ocean advancing and the water Pinkham and Dillingham tamed a century ago now threatening to reclaim the landscape, Waters, the city council member, says he wants to see human ingenuity adapt Waikiki’s urban topography before nature does it first. Inevitably though, this will mean difficult and uncomfortable choices, especially for the tourism industry. “The hotels that don’t want to go along with the plan will just have to be dragged along,” he says, adding, “If we’re going to end up making hotels and the multinational corporations that own them angry, I’m OK with that.”