Castle & Cooke Hawaiʻi’s Koa Ridge in Central Oʻahu is well on its way to becoming one of the island’s newest residential neighborhoods.
The development has reached this stage after years of delay. The legacy local company is already thinking about what comes next.
So far, Castle & Cooke Hawaiʻi has built some 24,000 homes in Hawaiʻi, including Mililani which was started in 1958 and completed in 2008.
Now it’s in the midst of building Koa Ridge on 576 acres between Mililani and Waipio. When completed, the neighborhood will consist of 3,500 residences.
It will also have a commercial development business park, health care campus, park, school, community center — and 7.5 miles of bicycle and walking paths.
It’ll take another 10 years or so to complete the project, by which time Castle & Cooke will have spent some $2.5 billion to develop it.
Overseeing this is Vice President of Residential Operations Garret Matsunami, who sat down with PBN for an interview about the status of Koa Ridge and what comes next.
He joined the company in 2003 after a career in public service, including as a civil engineer with the Honolulu Board of Water Supply.
There have been some challenges for the project through Covid — for example, windows that meet Hawaiʻi hurricane standards have been taking 26 weeks for delivery — but so far, families have moved into 230 homes.
Matsunami says the company is working up plans for other land that it owns and hopes to have something specific it can unveil around 2025 or 2026.
While Castle & Cooke owns land on the North Shore, its future, he says, is more likely to be in vertical rather than suburban development, moving into the urban core and around rail stations.
