If you ask someone who doesn't live in Kaka'ako what makes the neighborhood tick, they'll probably mention the murals. Every February, they'll say, artists from around the world descend on the district and repaint the walls. It's the kind of fact that shows up in almost every guide to the neighborhood, and it's the kind of fact that stopped being true years ago.
The festival that built Kaka'ako's reputation as an open-air gallery, POW! WOW! Hawaii, doesn't paint here anymore. It moved. What's actually rewriting the neighborhood this year has nothing to do with wall space and everything to do with a coffee counter on Cooke Street, a burger joint changing zip codes, and a summer of utility trenches that are more annoying to your commute than anything you'll see on Instagram.
The Festival Left. The Murals Stayed.
POW! WOW! Hawaii started in Kaka'ako in 2011, a year after founders Jasper Wong and Kamea Hadar launched the first edition in Hong Kong and decided to bring the next one home. For roughly a decade, the festival meant one thing every February: international and local artists converging on the district's warehouse walls, turning a working-class industrial pocket into a rotating gallery.
That rotation stopped. According to Honolulu Magazine, the organization changed venues for the first time since its founding, moving its Hawai'i edition to Kalihi to paint murals at the Pālama Settlement community center. The festival has since rebranded globally as World Wide Walls, and its own Hawaii chapter page states it plainly: after nearly a decade painting the walls of Kaka'ako, the festival now paints in Kalihi.
Plenty of neighborhood directories and promotional pages haven't caught up to that. You'll still find copy describing an annual February gathering in Kaka'ako as if it's ongoing. It isn't. What you're looking at when you walk past the Naupaka mural at SALT or the honu on Cooke Street isn't a piece that gets refreshed on a schedule. It's a fixed layer of neighborhood history, painted between 2011 and roughly 2023, that nobody is actively adding to from inside the district anymore. The murals aren't gone. The engine that used to renew them is running somewhere else now.
Cooke Street Is Where the Actual Turnover Is Happening
If murals aren't the thing changing week to week, storefronts are, and Cooke Street has had two real ones this year.
Kooks Coffee started as a food trailer at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa about a year ago. In mid-March 2026, owners Dani and Nick Mitchell, a husband-and-wife team who surf at Canoes, opened a second, brick-and-mortar-adjacent location at 575 Cooke Street, open 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Saturday. The menu carries over from the Mānoa trailer: the Dawn Patrol, a toasted macadamia nut latte made with fresh Lā'ie vanilla beans, and The Nanner, a housemade banana milk latte, alongside an ube latte called Ubae Watch that started as a summer special and got popular enough to stay on the year-round menu. The shop uses Honolulu Coffee Co.'s Lokahi blend as its base. Mitchell told Aloha State Daily the Cooke Street spot has let the business connect with people who never made it onto campus for the original location.
Then there's Chubbies Burgers, which closed its Kaimukī location in February 2026 after announcing the move the month before. In late July, the business confirmed on Instagram that it's opening at SALT at Our Kaka'ako, though no address or opening date has been set yet. At the old Kaimukī spot, the '50s burger ran $10.75 and the crispy chicken sandwich was $11, numbers worth keeping in mind if you're wondering what the new location might charge.
| Business | Previous chapter | Kaka'ako status | What's on the menu |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kooks Coffee | UH Mānoa food trailer, opened ~2025 | Open since mid-March 2026 at 575 Cooke St | Dawn Patrol, The Nanner, Ubae Watch |
| Chubbies Burgers | Kaimukī, closed Feb. 2026 | Announced for SALT at Our Kaka'ako, no date set | '50s burger, crispy chicken sandwich |
Neither of these is a headline-grabbing opening. That's the point. This is the texture of a neighborhood actually changing, one lease at a time, not a festival calendar with a fixed date on it.
The Construction You're Actually Living Through
If Cooke Street feels different lately for reasons that have nothing to do with coffee, that's the other half of the story. Hawaiian Electric infrastructure upgrades began construction in March 2026 and are continuing in and around the district's Increment II blocks, according to the Our Kaka'ako master plan page. Some buildings in the area are being partially demolished to allow for underground utility improvements, and the work is hitting the streets residents actually use to get around:
- Ala Moana Boulevard
- Koula Street
- Auahi Street
- Cooke Street
- Coral Street
The stated schedule is weekdays, 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., though the plan notes some nighttime and weekend work may happen as the project moves forward. If your walk to Kooks Coffee has taken a detour this summer, this is almost certainly why.
Why the Digging Leads to More Buildings, Not Fewer
The construction isn't random maintenance. It's groundwork, in the literal sense, for the next phase of what Kamehameha Schools calls the Kaiāulu 'o Kaka'ako Master Plan.
Increment I, the four blocks already built out, gives a sense of scale: 1,336 residential units, of which 456, or 34 percent, are workforce and affordable housing, plus more than 184,000 square feet of commercial space and over 50,000 square feet of open space. That's what produced Keauhou Place and Keauhou Lane on Block A, 400 Keawe and The Flats at Pu'unui on Block B, The Collection on Block E, and SALT along with 680 Ala Moana on Block F.
Increment II is what the current utility work is clearing the way for. Block C, called Kahuina, is a Stanford Carr Development project anticipated to break ground in 2026 with 861 residential units, 60 percent of them workforce and affordable housing, and 42,000 square feet of commercial space. Block G, Kaliu, is a ProsPac project also targeting a 2026 groundbreak, with 294 market-priced homes and another 42,000 square feet of commercial space. Block D, Waiakoa, is a joint project from Koa Partners and Castle & Cooke Hawai'i aiming for 2027, with roughly 1,032 homes and 60 percent affordable housing. Block H is still waiting on a developer to be selected.
None of that construction happens without the underground utility work finishing first. So the orange cones on Cooke Street this year are the prerequisite for the next round of buildings opening in 2027 and beyond, not an isolated inconvenience with no connection to anything else.
The Neighborhood You're Actually Living In
Put it together and the story of Kaka'ako in 2026 looks different from the one most guides tell. The murals that define the district's visual identity are inherited, not renewed. The festival that painted them moved to Kalihi years ago, and there's no indication it's coming back. What's actually moving the neighborhood forward is quieter: a coffee shop that outgrew a food trailer, a burger joint relocating after a closure, and a utility project that's clearing ground for roughly 2,200 more housing units across three blocks over the next two years.
If you've lived here long enough to remember when Cooke Street looked different, none of this is a surprise. If you're newer, this is the difference between reading about Kaka'ako and actually living inside its rhythm, the one where the big art event you heard about already left, and the small stuff, a new latte, a new burger, a new trench in the road, is what's really telling you where the neighborhood is headed next.
If you're thinking about what any of this means for your own place in Kaka'ako, whether that's timing a sale around the next phase of development or just understanding how these changes affect your building's value, SoldBySong knows this district block by block. Expect better. Schedule your free market consultation.
