For residents, there are daily splendors, sometimes spats, and a burgeoning sense of community that naturally blossoms where paths converge.
Art by Mitchell Fong
When I moved to Salt Lake City in 2019, I was lonely. Fresh off a master’s degree, I had followed my spouse there for his academic pursuits. We rented a one-bedroom apartment in a six-unit complex centered around a courtyard that had been built in the flurry of post-WWII housing. Out our front door and kitchen window was a unit with an identical floor plan in reverse.
I had a remote job, so I spent a lot of time at home, during which I got to know the neighbor across the way. Her cats bathed in the sun on the low wall fronting the courtyard while I sat on my steps. She told me stories of the restaurant she had owned around the corner, her career aspirations. I looked on as she fell in love. Eventually, we also got to know the quiet, brilliant woman who lived in the back unit and walked by with her bike everyday. We spent sun-soaked conversations talking about studies, the weather, the zucchini plants we were growing, which she watered when we were away. We became a small community. Then, one by one, we all moved out.
Upon moving back to Hawai‘i, my spouse and I found a rental with a surprisingly similar setup: a two-bedroom house in Pālolo Valley oriented around a single driveway shared by nine residential dwellings. Across this drive-way is a nearly identical house to ours, with the same small yard and a plumeria tree.
Similarly to the Salt Lake City move, I arrived here lonely — far from my parents and siblings’ families and spending most of my time at home with my one-year-old daughter. Also similarly, living across the way was a couple quick to welcome us. The husband spent afternoons in his covered driveway, listening to country music one day, Hawaiian the next. My daughter learned that if she brought him a flower from our tree, he would say, “Just wait!” and go inside, returning with a sweet treat for her. Slowly, he became one of our quotidian joys, a burst of conversation after a stressful tantrum, a bright moment in isolated days. His wife waved to us as she fed the birds when she got home from work and gave our daughter gifts on her birthday and holidays. My child, in turn, would stand at our open front door, waving and yelling “hi” to them as soon as she learned the word. One day when I was chatting with my neighbor, he shared that he had wanted to buy the place because it reminded him of his childhood home, a strikingly similar house among eight identical houses on a pīkake farm in Kaimukī. He fondly recounted spending afternoons roaming the area with the neighbor boys.
We also have more neighbors, of course. Along our shared driveway, there’s the man we speculate is a mechanic who always waves when he walks up the driveway from work or with his kids, who will play basketball with the entertaining, roaming toddlers of the woman residing next door to him; the lady who lives catty-corner and owns a café down the street; an enterprising, middle-aged duo who have lived the longest on our side of the driveway and bring us bananas from their yard; and our fence-sharing neighbors, who are wary of strangers and have two dogs they adore. Other faces blur, or are soon replaced by new residents.
Our home in Pālolo was built in 1927, according to Redfin. I imagine it was housing for people moving out of plantations into the city. The shared driveway setup is common, if not dominant, in the neighborhood. I have friends who live at the back of another such four-house, eight-residence setup a block away, and years ago, I briefly lived three streets away with a friend in a small house behind her parents’ house, behind which were two more houses where her aunty and grandma lived.
The orientation around a shared driveway creates a sense of intimacy, guaranteeing a limited number of neighbors you’ll see more frequently than those along a busy street like 10th Avenue, which we also abutt. You can’t help but recognize everyone who lives there and learn some of their quirks. It requires those who reside deeper to pass everyone on their way out to walk their dogs or to head to work, and those at the front to become a sort of sentry. Living along a shared driveway is a blessing, a curse, and a commitment.
“Cluster developments group dwellings together in order to make efficient use of infrastructure, provide common areas that foster unity, and preserve the natural landscape and open space,” contends a recent guidebook on planned development housing from the City and County of Honolulu. A compelling association it makes is with the kauhale concept, which a 2020 Puu Opae Homestead Settlement Plan prepared for Department of Hawaiian Home Lands identifies as a “cultural model of housing consisting of tiny home clusters and communal areas for cooking, farming, and gathering.” The primary benefits of kauhale, according to this plan, are contiguous open spaces that help conserve wildlife habitats and soil quality, reduced initial investment in roads and infrastructure and long-term maintenance costs, and proximity to neighbors, which means beneficiaries are more likely to coalesce as a community. (The concept is also reflected in the state’s Kauhale Initiative, a housing proposition for the islands’ homeless, inspired by community-based efforts like Puʻuhonua O Wai‘anae and Hui Mahiai ‘Āina.)
Of course, there is a legal responsibility of shared resources. Where we live, the mauka side of the driveway has a single, tight-fisted owner. On the makai side, each house is individually owned. When the time came to re-pave the shared driveway, our landlord refused. Just as community can blossom in these setups, grudges can build and suspicions can fester.
Yet, as a renter in Honolulu searching for shelter in an era of individualistic homeownership as a competitive investment, I fantasize about how this sort of housing lends itself to being more affordable and communal. Sure, there’s the dream of the home where you can’t hear or see anything by the waves and you aren’t bothered by others, but shared resources, whether a driveway, a courtyard, or farmland, could also make housing more accessible and manageable while encouraging a lifestyle of collaboration and communication. Shared property can, under a cooperative ownership model, even build resilient, independent communities. At the least, it can provide people who are often at home, from the elderly to the new parents, a sense of not being so alone. Life oriented around shared spaces cannot help but change as lives change. The splendor may fade, the familiarity wanes as people come and go. Or, perhaps, it can grow.