Contesting the right to the city under scarcity: the case of Micronesians in Hawaiʻi’s public housing

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on how residents of public housing in Hawaiʻi view residents from Micronesia, a geographic region of Oceania. Drawing on in-depth interviews with an ethnically diverse sample, we show how public housing residents stigmatize Micronesian community members. Some respondents described Micronesians as unfairly gaining access to a highly limited supply of affordable housing, potentially displacing Native Hawaiians and other “more deserving” local residents. Others shared racist views of Micronesian youth, as unruly and violent, with irresponsible or culturally “other” parents. Our work, therefore, shows how respondents implicitly claim a “right” to housing by recruiting alternative narratives of need, belonging, and deservingness; narratives that sometimes leverage the stigmatization of other groups. Many individuals, in other words, see the “right to the city” as a zero-sum game. These findings prompt us to reimagine classic frameworks of housing justice within the “right to the city” literature to account for differing narratives of belonging, including those of Indigenous people and international migrants. We argue for an expansive vision of housing justice that is attentive to the local and global consequences of empire and colonialism, as is visible in the racialization and stigmatization of Micronesians in Hawaiʻi’s public housing communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Public housing
• justice
• race and ethnicity
• colonialism
• Hawaiʻi
• Pacific Islanders
• Pacific Islands

Acknowledgments

Data collection was funded by the Department of Sociology at UH Mānoa, the Hawaiʻi Public Housing Authority (HPHA), and the HCRC Affordable Housing Endowment. We greatly appreciate the work of Tamara Edwards, Amanda Rothschild, Katrina Shuping, Brandon Soo, and Mark Willingham, Jr. for help with research design, fieldwork, data collection, transcription and coding.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In this paper we use the term “COFA residents” to refer to individuals from COFA nations (the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Republic of Palau), which are also referred to as “Freely Associated States” (FAS). Citizens of these nations are sometimes referred to as “FAS citizens” or “COFA citizens,” but we use the term “COFA residents” to reflect their tenuous inclusion in the U.S. polity, including their restricted access to federal benefits and their lack of a pathway to full U.S. citizenship.

2. Here we echo Nitasha Sharma’s (2011) article “Pacific Revisions of Blackness.”

3. After 1996, COFA residents were granted access to Med-QUEST (state funded Medicaid) until Governor Linda Lingle restricted access in 2009, an action that was subsequently litigated by civil rights groups. Litigation temporarily required the state to restore Medicaid coverage to COFA residents. However, later in 2015, after winning a court appeal, the state of Hawaiʻi  again shifted low-income COFA residents away from state funded Medicaid, this time to private insurance via the Hawaiʻi Health Connector and then Obamacare (with the exception of pregnant women, elderly or the blind) (Hofschneider, 2019).

4. These tabulations are for race “alone or in combination.” Alternative tabulations for race “alone” categories are: White (25.4%); Filipino (14.4%); Japanese (13%); Native Hawaiian (6.2%); Chinese (4.1%) (DBEDT, 2018, from ACS 2011–2015 5 year ACS).

5. DBEDT estimates that 0.5% of Hawaiʻi’s population are Chamorro/Guamanian, with other Micronesian Pacific Islander groups’ population characteristics not tabulated in this report.

6. HUD administrative data groups Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders together. However, statistical portraits of Hawaiʻi typically separate Native Hawaiians (alone or in combination with other race/ethnic identities) from Pacific Islanders.

7. Specific national origins are hidden for respondent anonymity.

8. Specific national origins are hidden for respondent anonymity.

9. We expected that convenience sampling might lead to a bias toward unemployed residents, but this did not occur. The unemployment rate among the sample discussed here was about 27%, which is similar to the rate we found in a randomly selected sample of residents in other public housing sites. Also, while our convenience sample is not necessarily representative of Hawaiʻi’s public housing population, it did include respondents from the major ethnic and racial backgrounds represented in Hawai’i's public housing.

10. Approximately half of Native Hawaiians now live outside of Hawaiʻi (J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, 2007).

11. See Andrade (2016) for a discussion on the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA), and Kauanui (2007) for one on the Department of Hawaiian Homelands and the federal Hawaiian Homes Commission Act.

12. See J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (2018) for discussions of Hawaiʻi as an occupied Hawaiian nation as well as a settler colonial state.

13. First held in 2019, and now in 2020, hosted by the Bishop Museum.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nathalie Rita

Nathalie Rita is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She received her MA in Sociology from Florida Atlantic University. Her research focuses on transnational migration, globalization, and ethnicity particularly in urban contexts.

Jennifer Darrah-Okike

Jennifer Darrah-Okike is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She conducts research in the areas of urban sociology, urban development, race/ethnicity, and inequality. She has studied community mobilization against urban development, as well as linkages between local identities and land politics, in Hawaiʻi. She also conducts research on dynamics of residential segregation. She received her Ph.D. from Brown University and was a post-doctoral research associate at Johns Hopkins University before joining the University of Hawaiʻi.

Rachel Engel

Rachel Engel is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She received her BA from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Her research interests include the study of race and ethnicity in global and comparative perspective, with special focus on colorism in Southeast Asia.

Philip Garboden

Philip Garboden is the HCRC Assistant Professor in Affordable Housing Economics, Policy, and Planning in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning (DURP) and the University of Hawaiʻi Economic Research Organization (UHERO) at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. His research focuses on how landlords, developers, and poor families respond to domestic housing policy. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology, a Master’s in Public Policy, and an MSE in Applied Math and Statistics from Johns Hopkins University.