Coming Back Home

I have been away, in South Korea, and wrote almost nothing while I was gone. That was on purpose: staring at a problem too long is its own kind of blindness, and I had been staring at this island's problems since we came here in 2024. The rest did not take. Whatever else I meant to turn my mind to, it went back to Guam uninvited and stayed on one question I could not put down. What would it take to make this a place where a person willing to work can afford a home, feed a family, and build a life that lasts?

The complaint that follows a person everywhere on Guam is not imprecise. Everything costs too much: the rent, the power bill, the cart of groceries that would have run half as much on the mainland. Residents have been saying so for decades, and they are right. What is less often said is that this island is not short of the things it needs. It is short of whatever turns those things into a life a family can afford.

Well over twice as many CHamoru live in the fifty states as on Guam itself.¹ There are more sons and daughters of this place in California and Washington and Texas than in the villages their families have occupied for generations.

The reasons are not mysterious, and the researchers who have tracked CHamoru migration name the same few: education, employment, family, and military service.² What the record describes is less a people drawn away than an economy that could not hold them. Some who left have come back. Far more have not, and for many who might, the cost of returning has climbed out of reach.

That is not an ache I grew up with, and I will not pretend to feel it the way a family does when the seat at the table stays empty at Christmas. But whatever else the phrase improving quality of life on Guam is meant to mean, it must eventually mean that the people of this place can afford to live in it, and that the ones who left can afford to return. The people were never what this island lacked.

Two culprits are usually named for the cost of living here, and the anger behind both is earned. I went looking expecting to confirm it, and found that neither carries the weight we have placed on it.

The Jones Act is real, it is unfair, and it is worth fighting on principle. But Guam is already exempt from its American-built requirement, and the law touches nothing arriving from Asia.³ Manila lies 1,600 miles off; Los Angeles is nearly 6,000. Were shipping protectionism the reason for our prices, our Asian neighbors would already be undercutting them.

Anyone who has watched the Business Privilege Tax compound through an importer, a wholesaler, and a retailer has reason to resent it. Yet the one time the rate was rolled back, in 2004, prices did not follow; the consumer price index moved the other way.⁴ There is a serious case for a lower BPT. Relief at the grocery store is not a promise it has ever kept.

Both would have been easier to repair than what lies beneath them.

What lies beneath is a term most of us met once in a classroom and never considered again. Economies of scale: the more of something produced, the less each unit costs to make.

Guam is 30 miles long and 9 miles wide, and no one lives far from the ocean. Yet roughly 73 percent of the seafood eaten here is imported.⁵ A company running hundreds of boats with freezers aboard lands a pound of fish for a fraction of what one man in a 24-foot boat can manage. Nothing in that reflects on the man in the boat. He is not lazy and not doing it wrong; the numbers have been against him a long time. Close to 90 percent of our food arrives for the same reason.⁶

Housing is the same trap, and the one that cuts deepest. Every board and bag of cement arrives by ship, the labor pool is thin, and the codes are demanding, as they must be where typhoons and earthquakes are not hypothetical. A mainland developer raising 500 homes at once spreads his fixed costs thin enough to price a house a working family can reach. Guam's entire housing stock stood near 51,000 units at the 2020 count.⁷ That volume has never existed here. Then the buildup arrived, and landlords began setting rents against the Department of Defense housing allowance, roughly $2,205 a month for a single service member.⁸ For a family without that allowance, which is most families here, the market has moved out of reach.

It is the same wall a CHamoru family in San Diego meets when they begin pricing out a move home.

If the obstacle is scale, the answer must be scale. A fixed cost grows cheaper for each household only when divided among more of them. The asphalt plant costs what it costs whether it serves 500 miles of road or 50,000; the water line runs the same price whether one house draws from it or forty. Those bills are already being paid here. They are simply split too few ways.

Guam therefore needs more people, and the objection comes fast: an island that cannot house those it already has is a strange place to invite more. True, and it is why sequence matters. Population arriving ahead of housing bids up the rents of those already here, which is what the buildup has done. Population arriving with housing does the opposite, since each added household divides the fixed bills further and makes the next house cheaper than the last.

Here the problem closes its hand on itself. The 2020 Census counted 153,836 residents, down 3.5 percent from a decade earlier.⁹ The cost of living, the housing shortage, and the narrow job market are precisely the conditions that drive away the growth that would relieve them.

That is the deadlock, and what is easy to miss is who stands on the other side of it. Guam need not recruit strangers: more than 168,000 CHamoru live in the fifty states, many with family here, many who have said plainly they would return if the numbers worked. Housing built for returning families is not charity extended to a diaspora. It is the shortest road out, and it happens to be owed.

In November 1962, Typhoon Karen left roughly nine in ten of this island's buildings destroyed or badly damaged. Within weeks, before the debris was cleared, the Legislature created a public authority and charged it with putting people back under roofs.¹⁰ Guam did not wait for a market to assemble itself out of the wreckage. It built the instrument and used it. The question worth asking is not whether this island can do such a thing. It is why it stopped.

That authority still exists. The Guam Housing and Urban Renewal Authority today mostly moves federal money, and when it opened its Section 8 waiting list last January, so many families applied that 1,800 had to be selected by lottery.¹⁰ Vouchers add no houses; they move money into a market with too few units in it, lifting the very rents they were meant to offset. The same habit governs the roads, where contractors pave in a market too small for real competitive bidding and the same broken stretch waits years for its turn.

Meanwhile the ground sits ready. The CHamoru Land Trust administers about 20,000 acres, roughly 15 percent of Guam, set aside for residential leasing, with thousands of families in line and some waiting since 1995.¹¹ Much of it stays empty because a lease is not a house. Someone must still finance the structure, run the water line, and pay for the sewer connection, and a single family paying for a single hookup pays the worst price in the world for it.

So the land is here. The people who would fill it are here, or a plane ride from here. What is missing is the thing that turns one into the other, and we have spent 60 years declining to build it.

Where there are too few customers for private firms to serve them and still earn a living, an old answer applies: the government does the work itself. Guam already accepts this. Power and water come from public agencies, not because either is run beautifully, but because no private utility was ever coming to serve 52,000 customers at a fair price. That line was drawn once and left where it sits, without much inquiry into whether it belongs further out.

I do not have the program worked out and will not pretend otherwise. What is striking is the pattern: services bought again and again from markets too small to supply them competitively, and the resulting prices then treated as facts of nature rather than as consequences of how the buying was arranged. The alternative is not exotic. It is a government that owns the equipment, employs the crews, lays the infrastructure, and builds directly, at cost, as it already generates our power and pumps our water. At cost means no profit, and that is the point rather than the flaw: the reason no private builder is doing this work is that at our size the margin is not there to be had.

No one has put the real numbers on the table: not the cost of owning the paving equipment against what is paid to rent the work out, nor the cost of building at volume against another decade of vouchers chasing houses never built. Those figures could be produced. The Department of Public Works and the Office of Public Accountability are placed to produce them, and the Legislature is placed to ask. Nobody has. That is the whole of the request. Run the comparison and publish it, so the argument can be about something real rather than about prices accepted as weather.

The skepticism this will meet has been earned honestly and at close range. This island has watched public money vanish into projects that never delivered, and no one should be asked to set that aside. Nothing along these lines survives without procurement that withstands daylight. Building public capacity and holding it accountable are not two arguments but one.

Somewhere in California tonight there is a woman who was born in Yigo, who has a good job and a mortgage and children who have never seen the village their grandmother grew up in. She has considered coming back more times than she has said aloud. So far the numbers have never worked.

Every family here knows a version of her: the cousin who did well off-island, the classmate who left the summer after graduation, the sister whose name surfaces at every gathering followed by the same sentence about how she would move back if only she could. A house is never only shelter. It is grandparents near grandchildren, and a village keeping the people who make it one. Making the numbers work for her is not a side benefit of sound policy. It is the entire project.

The ground is prepared and the people are willing. What remains is to build.