Honolulu Skyline passengers may notice something different on their morning rail commute: more than half-a-dozen planter boxes full of growing tomatoes, eggplants, scallions and sweet potatoes, among other edible plants.
Native ku‘uli, ’ākia, ’ohai, ʻākulikuli and kī can be found close by, planted on Thursday by a group of volunteers from the city and nonprofit sector as part of a nascent program aimed at making free food available in public spaces.
The planting represents a paradigm shift for Honolulu, and possibly the state. Local authorities have long avoided growing edible plants and trees because of legal fears – mostly liability — over things like falling coconuts, fruit theft or slippery mangoes on the ground.
But now Honolulu is vying for a $1 million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies to flip the script, as one of 50 cities globally identified as finalists of the Mayors Challenge, in which the organization calls on cities to reimagine the services they provide.
For Honolulu, that means intermingling food, housing and transit by increasing food access for commuters in public spaces. The model is a prototype, one Honolulu Office of Economic Revitalization Director Amy Asselbaye says has been informed by public demand for more food trees and public gardens throughout Oʻahu.
Government-sanctioned urban gardening and food tree planting had been nixed over concerns about who will oversee, tend to and harvest the plants, as well as who might be liable and who will benefit.
County departments have welcomed the change, including the parks department, Asselbaye says. Ultimately, she said, the goal is to transform the transit stations into food hubs, where commuters could take an ʻulu or some kī leaves for dinner instead of worrying about the price of groceries.
“We want to create that possibility,” Asselbaye said, “and see how residents respond to it.”
Earth Innovation ’s Kima Wassel Hardy, a consultant for the city, says the project illustrates that food doesn’t have to be only grown by farmers in far-flung fields, but can be made readily accessible and available in different settings. And the plants have environmental benefits too.
At the pilot stations in Kapolei and Waipahu, patches of grass and shrubs have now been replaced with native plants better adapted to West Oʻahu’s drier conditions. There’s going to be “less weed whackers, less leaf blowers, more harvesting and, hopefully, more community engagement,” Wassel Hardy said. “This is still the ʻāina, even if it’s covered in asphalt.”
Meanwhile, the county has teamed up with westside feeding initiative ʻElepaio Social Services to run a mobile food pantry and will host a farmers market during peak commute times, to increase access to food among commuters.
“People have been talking about this for years,” Asselbaye said. “We’re going to prototype how we do this and we’re not going to try to set too many rules while we figure it out.”
Community-driven efforts to grow food in urban spaces are not new to the islands, though most have failed to take root due to concerns they would become unwieldy.
The state has arrested people for planting food trees several times in the past, while other efforts on Oʻahu have resulted in community groups overseeing food forests on state lands, such as an ʻulu and coconut grove in Kahaluʻu led by Sen. Brenton Awa.
But it has taken more than a decade for Honolulu to warm to the idea of planting food forests or having publicly available food for residents, with years of failed attempts to get official permission. Friends of Kamaliʻi Park in downtown Honolulu were among the first to try, as the Department of Parks and Recreation shut the idea down despite funding and support from then-Councilwoman Tulsi Gabbard.
Hawaiʻi food systems planner Hunter Heaivilin, whose 2014 master’s thesis centered on urban agriculture, found in his research that a complex web of ideas and policy hurdles, including liability concerns and zoning restrictions, sat in the way of growing food on up to 10,000 acres of viable land in urban Honolulu.
“The concern, in those conversations, was that the food trees would be ‘an attractive nuisance,’” Heaivilin said.
The state has recognized the potential of urban agriculture, including in a 2013 bill encouraging state housing developers to include urban gardening programs into affordable housing projects. That law, Act 202, has largely been ignored, Heaivilin says.
Since then, even with state and federal support, community-driven urban gardening initiatives have mostly misfired, including in Kakaʻako where a community garden project stalled in 2018.
Despite the delay, Heaivilin is applauding the new development, hoping it will pave the way for more projects to increase access to food across urban Oʻahu.
Community organizations have meanwhile continued to find workarounds to increase access to food as well as cultural and community connection.
One such initiative, run by Grow Good Hawaiʻi, has several projects centered on distributing and cultivating food trees statewide, including in people’s backyards, while also troubleshooting for residents across Oʻahu. The process is intended to help food security within communities while mitigating the effects of climate change.
Gov. Josh Green in January dubbed 2025 the Year of Our Community Forests, a move intended to increase awareness of the need to promote the conservation and care of forests – both urban and rural – throughout the state.
Lawmakers passed a bicameral resolution last session urging the state Department of Land and Natural Resources to work with the community to look after forests on public lands.
Part of that, according to state urban forester Heather McMillen, has been workshopping solutions to longstanding concerns about liability and care for the trees and their fruit. A solution hasn’t been found yet, she said, but community buy-in will be central to any resolution.
To be sure, state forest reserves already have wild food available for residents to forage after obtaining a free permit, and the state forestry division’s Kaulunani Urban and Community Forestry Program is promoting urban forests and forested areas on the urban-rural borders of Hawaiʻi.
McMillen, who leads the program, hopes the resolution will lead to permanent funding moving forward that’s dedicated to urban forestry, perhaps from the state’s new green fee.
The Kaulunani program calculated urban trees provided $90 in environmental benefits per tree. For every dollar spent on tree care, the tree provides about $3 in benefits — including pollution removal, rain interception, carbon storage and electricity savings. As of 2023, the program had injected $4.6 million into more than 450 forestry projects.
Across the islands, municipal trees store over 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide, remove 3,340 tons of CO2 each year and mitigate 35 million gallons of stormwater runoff each year, while playing an important role in cooling the urban environment.
“We know it’s going to get worse. We need more trees, more canopy and even shrubs,” Grow Good founder Paul Arinaga said. “None of this is rocket science.”
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This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
