Originally Posted on Pacific Business News by Alexander Lugo

Utah-based Areté Collective began construction on 20 units in the first phase of its Turtle Bay development in May after hitting a delay late last year.

Areté Collective purchased 65 acres on Oahu’s North Shore for $43 million last year from Blackstone, planning a high-end development next to The Ritz-Carlton Oahu, Turtle Bay resort. The project will eventually include 100 resort residential units and up to 250 hotel units in coming years.

Getting there has proven to be a challenge in the generally anti-development North Shore community, which has spoken out against the project. But Areté CEO Rebecca Buchan argues that the challenge has worked to improve communication with the community, therefore improving the project’s outcome.

Before purchasing the land, Areté was originally tapped to design a completely different project for Blackstone on that same land. But Blackstone decided to not proceed with the project after it faced years of local scrutiny.

Areté has since scrapped plans to build on 100% of the land, providing more open green space, which Buchan said the company is also restoring.

“We’re removing the invasive ironwood trees and we’re re-sculpting the dunes that have been destroyed over the years,” Buchan said. “Ironwoods actually root down into the ground and the pine needles kill out any other species from growing. Once you [remove them], it’s amazing how the dune system will reflourish.”

The restoration efforts will help prevent further erosion on the beach, which is a big concern throughout Hawaii, according to Buchan. Similarly, Bellows Air Force Station, located between Lanikai and Waimanalo, has been removing its own ironwood trees for the same reasons.

Areté is partnering with the North Shore Community Land Trust on those ongoing restoration efforts, according to Buchan.

In order to proceed, the development project has had to tread carefully around community concerns regarding environmental impacts and potential traffic congestion. Working around that has led to some positive engagement between Areté and the typically development-averse community members.

“A lot of the local community has been upset that we’ve been taking down the ironwoods. When they’d walk through them they’d feel majestic without really understanding how they were contributing to the erosion of the shoreline,” Buchan said.

“We’ve hosted multiple community meetings. I’ve personally met with hundreds of community members to hear feedback from them to understand what they know about the environment. We hear cultural stories about what happened here before we owned the land. So all of those things have really just informed our decisions.

“All we really need to do is get somebody out there on a tour and when they can see what’s changed people are stunned and they become immediately supportive.”

The outcry over development goes back years before Areté even owned the land. In 2015, an agreement between the state and Turtle Bay Resort set aside 630 acres of land in the area for protection following some outcry over past expansion plans for Turtle Bay.

At the time, Turtle Bay Resort did push back on the concerns. But Areté’s approach is seeking to do the opposite and go with the flow by listening to the concerns and working with them.

While there was an initial delay in construction late last year, Areté has since moved forward on the development and officially broke ground in May with no further hiccups. The first phase will build the first 20 out of 100 residential resort units by 2027, according to Buchan.

No start date has been set for the remaining residential units or the hotel development yet.