(POSTED 3/22/07)
Actually, if you have an extra $5 million lying around, it’s easy to be almost anything you want – including a purchaser of a unit (well, the smallest unit) at Everett Dowling’s Maluaka condominium project at Makena, in south Maui.
Dowling has said that the project will win LEED silver certification (LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a program of the U.S. Green Building Council). Solar panels will generate power for the common areas. Carpets won’t out-gas. Storm water will be used for landscaping. You get the idea.
But how green will the project really be? Last November, when the Maui Planning Commission was considering the project, for which Dowling was seeking a special management area permit and special accessory use permit, commissioner Diane Shepherd called it a “horrible, horrible” project. (The permits were approved on a vote of 5-2.)
Jennifer Stites, who is Dowling’s person in charge of “green” development, said the project will consume about a third less electricity and a fifth less potable water than a similar project would consume using conventional designs.
Does that make it green, though?
If the energy consumed by a “conventionally” designed luxury unit is, oh, say three times what a house in the low-rent district of Maui would use, then even Dowling’s “green” designed condos would still use twice as much as a smaller, more modest house. More likely, the energy consumed in a luxury 5,000-square-foot unit will be five times what a 1,000-square-foot house would use.
That’s not counting the energy overhead that attaches to second-home developments, such as this one. When owners come and go to Maui from their primary residences overseas several times a year, the carbon emitted to the atmosphere by those flights is going to be many times more than what a local resident generates when he or she hops an inter-island flight to visit an auntie. And never mind if the luxury home-owner’s second car (or third, or fourth) is a Prius.
Owners of units in Maluaka get automatic membership in the “exclusive Club at Maluaka.” Club services, listed on the Maluaka website, include “access to private jet fractional program” (running on biodiesel, no doubt), “full beach services,” and a “highly trained, professional Hawaiian staff” (what is a “professional Hawaiian”?).
To see the full list of wretched excesses, visit http://www.maluaka.com
— Patricia Tummons
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