Downtown Honolulu used to be home to the Big Five when sugar was king. Remember Liberty House, Kress, and Woolworth's? All added to the bustle, and then came others — Walmart, Longs, and Ross. Now all those chains have closed up and moved away.
The pandemic changed the workplace, and downtown is on the cusp of more change: new investment by local developers and a push to rebrand downtown as DOHO to revitalize the financial district for those who live and work in this hub.
Honolulu Councilmember Tyler Dos Santos-Tam, who represents the area, stopped by The Conversation to discuss a proposal making its way through the City Council to create a downtown business improvement district and charge property owners a fee. The money would go toward making the area more inviting.
"I get the sense that people recognize that downtown is at a crossroads. We're starting to see more office-to-residential conversions, more residents here. We're starting to get some businesses coming in and opening up new restaurants," he said. "It's a matter of making sure that everyone's ready for these changes that are going to come, and making sure that they are positive changes in the end."
The proposed district would stretch from Nuʻuanu Avenue over to Richards Street, bounded by Beretania Street on the mauka side and Nimitz Highway on the makai side — plus the block containing the Hawaiʻi State Federal Credit Union building.
"It has a five-year timeline. It will automatically renew if everything is going well. But there is a mechanism — if five years from now, we need another type of thing, or they need a different direction, that's something we can revisit. But to simply study the problem to death, like we do with so many things here in Hawaiʻi, that's not an acceptable answer. We have to at least try to make things better and get things going in the right direction," Dos Santos-Tam told HPR.
HPR also heard from Ernest Carvalho, the chair of the Downtown-Chinatown Neighborhood Board. He and the board are strong supporters of the bill and hope the proposed district will grow to include Chinatown.
"What happens in Chinatown affects downtown. What happens in downtown affects Chinatown," Carvalho said. "We would like to see them do a phase two, adding the businesses and doing the BID going all the way to River Street. So a lot of the businesses out in Chinatown want this."
"Our citizens deserve to be able to walk down the streets, feel safe, not feel afraid of being attacked, not being around people that are doing drugs. They want to see a clean environment where kūpuna can walk safely, our keiki can walk safely," Carvalho added.
Town hall meetings about the proposed district are on Tuesday at 12:30 p.m. and Thursday at 5:30 p.m., both at Pickles at Forté inside the old Walmart building.
This story aired on The Conversation on Aug. 11, 2025. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Sophia McCullough adapted this story for the web.
