HONOLULU (AP) - An eccentric Japanese billionaire riled residents of a prestigious seaside street in Honolulu when he bought $180 million of property and then left houses and landscaping to deteriorate.
For years now, Kahala Avenue’s mansions sat among rubble-filled swimming pools, broken walls, remnants of foundation slabs and abandoned tennis courts.
But wealthy new owners are now moving in and fueling a revival, reports the Honolulu Star-Advertiser (https://bit.ly/1cV0KRE ).
“There is a renaissance going on, thank goodness,”?said Anita Bruhl, a 35-year Kahala Community Association member who despised how the tycoon treated his properties. “Now we’re going to have some beautiful homes go up with sane people.”
A year and a half after Genshiro Kawamoto, now 83, relinquished his properties to real estate investment firm Alexander &?Baldwin Inc., 20 of the 30 lots have sold for more than $100 million.
The wealthy new homeowners are reimagining the lots, pumping millions of dollars into construction and landscaping.
They include a professional poker player, South Korea’s wealthiest person, a car-racing money manager from Michigan and an Australian billionaire.
Kawamoto, a wealthy Japanese commercial property owner, snapped up the properties between 2003 and 2006.
In 2006, he announced a charity project: he said he would make the street less exclusive by removing walls, creating public gardens, converting some homes to art museums and providing nine houses to disadvantaged Native Hawaiian families.
“My focus in Hawaii is not about making money,” Kawamoto said in a statement at the time. “I?entitled this project as ’Kahala Avenue Mission’ to show my appreciation for Hawaii.”
Three Hawaiian families were allowed to live in homes for free.
But his visits to do the work were sporadic and eventually came to a full stop in 2013, when Japanese officials arrested Kawamoto for tax evasion and barred him from traveling overseas. He demolished nearly 10 homes, but he left some with broken windows and fetid pools.
Kawamoto merged his remaining properties into two mega-estates, filling them with dozens of statutes of muscled lions, nude Grecian bodies and pagodas. Neighbors called the display odd and tacky, and some believed he Kawamoto was trying to demean their community.
Kawamoto was unavailable for comment.
Steve Sombrero, president of a Hawaii real estate brokerage firm who helped Kawamoto sell his Kahala properties and recently met with the billionaire, said Kawamoto has paid of the taxes and said they were a subsidiary’s oversight.
“It’s all been paid off, but he’s waiting for the government to clear his case,”?Sombrero said.?”The court system in Japan is a very slow process.”
They tycoon’s travel prohibition is still in effect, and the Alexander &?Baldwin Inc. deal included a provision preventing Kawamoto from buying property on Kahala for a long time.
“If he does come back, you won’t be seeing him buying property in Kahala,”?Sombrero said.
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Information from: Honolulu Star-Advertiser, https://www.staradvertiser.com
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