In Hawaii, Ryan W. Routh espoused lofty goals to help alleviate homelessness in a state with severe housing shortages and income inequality. His business constructed tiny homes at cut-rate prices, with a goal of providing a modicum of shelter for those struggling on the island of Oahu.
But Mr. Routh also seemed to lack patience for anyone who disagreed with him, based on interviews with local residents and his own writing.
Mr. Routh, 58, ran a business called Camp Box Honolulu, which aimed to cheaply and quickly build mobile homes small enough to avoid what his website called Honolulu’s onerous and “overloaded” permitting process, according to his website.
He lived for decades in North Carolina before he moved to Hawaii several years ago, a residency that was broken up by travel to Ukraine in 2023 to assist the war effort. His letters to the editor first appeared in the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in 2018, and state records indicate that he filed business paperwork for Camp Box Honolulu in January 2019.
In the small town of Kaaawa, Hawaii, neighbors this week described him as a handyman who was often eager to help in the community, though many said they never really got to know Mr. Routh.
David Stant, 61, who lived down the street, described Mr. Routh as a nice but quiet man, while Mr. Routh’s partner, Kathleen Shaffer, was more extroverted. Mr. Routh was a skilled builder who renovated his own home largely by himself and built tiny homes in the front driveway, Mr. Stant said.
Another neighbor, Raymond Correa, 58, described Mr. Routh as “straight up.”
“If you needed help, he’d come help you, bring out his nail gun and start going at,” Mr. Correa said. “I never knew if he was a Republican or Democrat.”
Charles Aipia, 78, lived a few houses down from Mr. Routh and Ms. Shaffer. He said he sometimes had the couple over for karaoke, and Mr. Routh often helped with repairs around town, once repairing a leaky roof for Mr. Aipia’s former wife.
But he also described a dispute in which Mr. Routh recently used a hose to spray a dog that belonged to Mr. Aipia’s granddaughter because it was barking in her yard.
“He soaked all the bedding and everything, the dog was shaking, soaking wet,” Mr. Aipia recalled. “He didn’t apologize to my granddaughter.”
“After that, we didn’t talk,” Mr. Aipia said.
Nonetheless, Mr. Aipia said that he would never have thought Mr. Routh would be a suspect in a possible attempted assassination. “Something must have snapped,” he said.
In 2019, Mr. Routh, as the owner of Camp Box, told the Honolulu Star Advertiser about his efforts to build shelter for homeless residents. From 2018 to 2020, he provided roofs and floors for tiny homes developed by the nonprofit HomeAid Hawai’i, according to a statement from the organization’s executive director, Kimo Carvalho.
“He was not compensated, and no complaints were recorded during his time with us under HomeAid Hawai‘i’s previous leadership,” Mr. Carvalho said.
On its website, Camp Box advertises a menu of bare-bones structures: $1,500 would get customers a 4-foot by 8-foot tiny home with a door and two windows. For $2,500, they would get an 8-foot by 8-foot tiny home with electricity.
But the site warns that the Honolulu city government doesn’t allow small structures to have hard wiring without a permit. As a result, it says, the electrical wiring is categorized as “a free bonus that is not guaranteed in any fashion.”
A “Customer Relations” page includes a 9,703-word explanation of Camp Box’s philosophy, signed at the end by “Ryan Routh.” The essay at different points portrays customers who ask about the quality of his work as “cheap,” “selfish” or “greedy.” He warns customers that they may find imperfections in the structures: Uneven floors are inevitable, he insists, and nails or staples may protrude from walls. He tells customers that his crews clean up only when time permits.
“We focus solely on an economical product that is created fast and efficiently with little or no profit, and while our units, through mass production get more refined,” Mr. Routh writes. “Perfection is nothing that we will ever guarantee, so griping and complaining about anything is not allowed!!!!!!!”
In some sentences, he professes a kind of altruism: He claims that he neither expects nor needs to make money from the enterprise and that his motivation is to provide housing for his neighbors.
But he also lamented the state of the American work ethic. And he railed against government bureaucracy, and the idea that those who complain dictate too much of how the world runs.
The voice mailbox for the business was full on Monday. According to the site, Mr. Routh ran the business with his son, Adam, who did not respond to a phone call on Monday.
Curtis Lum, a spokesman for the Honolulu Department of Planning and Permitting, said in an email that the office has “no record of any building permits or complaints relating to Ryan Routh and his Camp Box business.”
But Mr. Lum said the Camp Box website was inaccurate when it suggested that building permits were not required. He said that any structure intended for habitation requires a building permit, regardless of size, and that permits are required for any electrical or plumbing hookups.
At the address listed on Camp Box Honolulu’s website, along a stretch of busy highway in nearby Kaneohe, a vacant lot was surrounded by trees and bushes — and no signs of his business.
Kaiulani Clark, 57, who runs a coconut stand nearby and occasionally works at a plant nursery next to the vacant lot, said that Mr. Routh had not been at the site for at least two years.
When he was there, Mr. Routh worked with perhaps three other men at the site, Ms. Clark said. She only recalled seeing two homes being built, which she described as low-quality structures with crooked windows.
“He seemed like a shoddy guy,” she said. “He just never did finish anything.”
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