Growth of the village, Part 2
Around 1960, the pace of development in Volcano picked up dramatically as part of a wave of subdivisions that was sweeping across the state, and through the Puna District in particular. Between 1958 and 1968, more than 6,000 lots, carved out of former ranch land, were being offered for sale within a few miles of the original village area at prices so low they spurred a land rush from investors on the U.S. Mainland and other islands.
With names like Mauna Loa Estates (893 lots), Hawaiian Orchid Island Estates (245), Royal Hawaiian Estates (1,640), ʻŌhiʻa Estates (756) and Fern Forest (2,570), these subdivisions more than doubled the number of plots available in the Volcano area. Several early buyers recall hearing about the newly available cheap land from friends and rushing to buy multiple lots sight-unseen. “My friend called me up and said ʻJust do it’ so I put down a couple of thousand dollars and bought several lots without even looking,” recalls one.
Artist Ira Ono says he and other artists were attracted to the Volcano by the idea of inexpensive places to live and rent studio spaces.
“I’m from New York but had landed in Maui in 1968. By 1979, though, Maui got discovered, artists like myself could not afford to own land there anymore,” he said. “I heard of this mountain town, Volcano Village where land was cheap and there were some artists there. The first land I bought was on 12th Street in Mauna Loa Estates. A half acre for $6,000, $1,000 down and $75 dollars a month and it could be yours.”
That was typical of what was happening all across Hawaiʻi Island, and Puna in particular. In their seminal book, “Land and Power in Hawaii” George Cooper and Gavan Daws document how swiftly the idea of land ownership took hold among middle-class investors. In 1958 two Mainland businessmen, Glen Payton and David O’Keefe organized a Hawaiʻi corporation called Tropic Estates, which bought 112,000 acres of land between Kurtistown and Mountain View, cut up the land into 1,000 lots and began selling them for $500-$1,000 with terms as low as $150 down and $8 a month. “The lots sold spectacularly well,” Cooper and Daws reported.
That success touched off a speculative land rush unlike any other seen in Hawaiʻi, with several dozen subdivisions being approved one after the other by the county, including five that blossomed between the 22- and 25-mile markers along Highway 11.
All of subdivisions built in the 1960s followed the same pattern: “The purchase of sizable acreage in what up to then had been remote areas of little or no real economic value, subdivided into house lots on which no one ever actually built homes,” Cooper and Daws wrote. They came without any other improvements at first: no county water, no electric lines and few, if any, paved roads. Cooper and Daws, noting that there was a nearly indistinguishable line between investment and speculating, estimate that one Big Island family in four put money into one of the new Puna subdivisions, but even so, Big Islanders bought fewer than 12 percent of the roughly 63,000 lots sold islandwide by 1975. And most of them never built homes on their land.
“Each New Yeas Day, we would take a walk through the area and count the number of new structures. Usually, for the first few years, it was just two or three homes going up,” remembers Bonnie Goodell, who bought her property at the back of ʻŌhiʻa Estates and lived without neighbors for many years.
“There were so few people back then, that parents would use the roads through Mauna Loa Estates to teach their kids how to drive,” says David Manuel, who grew up in the area. “And when we got a little older it was the place to go and have drag races.”
In 1970s, one visitor from Hilo, decided to explore the backroads of the Volcano subdivisions after a disappointing trip to see Kīlauea Volcano.
“There was still plenty of time left to the afternoon, so as we were returning to Hilo, we decided to explore some of the intriguing subdivision roads leading off to the right. The first ones were in good condition so we rolled alone merrily, looking for blackberries. But apparently neither people nor blackberries have taken up residence in these wild acres,” Helen Shiras Baldwin wrote in a letter published in the Hilo newspaper.
“The farther we went, the taller the ʻōhʻia lehua trees became and the more varied the native growth. Pllo, ʻōlapa, kopiko, kāwaʻu, and other native trees appeared with increasing abundance. Tree ferns became-more plentiful, too. The good road stopped suddenly at a quarry with road-making machinery in it resting for the holiday. Either the roads are to be repaired or new ones put in. There are plenty of old ones which need fixing as we discovered during the rest of our explorations. So down one road, across to another, and up and down we went. But all the roads ended blind against the forest or else against a crossroad so long untraveled that pink melasoma bushes and gunpowder trees several years old and taller than a tall man had grown up in the roadbed. Other roads, especially those nearest the Volcano, had been travelled recently, some so recently that wheel marks showed. One led to a Cymbidium nursery still in the process of expansion. This and the quarry were the only signs of recent human endeavor.”
All that began to change in the early 1980s when the subdivisions saw a building boom.
A 1983 survey of homes to update Volcano community emergency locator maps used by rescue and police department found that there had been an almost 20 percent increase in the number of homes constructed in Volcano in the previous 18 months. With no street addresses in place, officials used the maps to locate homes on unnamed streets and out of the way locations. Community leaders then put a grid system over the Volcano residential areas, pinpointing all houses from Fern Forest to the golf course area. The biggest increases were on the makai side of the Volcano highway where out of a total of 3,747 lots, there were 99 houses in January 1982 and 66 more by mid-1983. Out of the total 585 houses in Volcano in 1983, more than 10 percent of them had been built in the previous 18 months.
The final expansion of the village began late in the 1970s when Bishop Estate opened up land for development near the Volcano golf course about two miles past the entrance to the Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park.
In many ways, the new subdivision, called Volcano Golf and Country Club Estates, was an outlier. Set on the leeward flank of Kīlauea’s summit, it is just a few miles from the rest of the village, but usually is sunnier and drier, warmer in the daytime and cooler at night. Its dominant trees are koa, not ‘ōhi’a; the biggest invasive species problem comes from imported fava trees, not the Himalayan ginger that’s rampant throughout other areas. It is built on old ranch land and, for the most part, its homes tend to be newer and a little bigger than in others areas. Its streets are laid out in broad, suburban-style loops, rather than the grid-like system found elsewhere in village. While the rest of the village lies within the Puna district, the golf course area is part of the Kaʻu district.