The Standing Lesson

Every one of us knows a building the island has given up on. We slow as we pass it, or worse, we have stopped seeing it at all. And all the while it teaches everyone who walks by a short lesson that repeats every day: that the rules we wrote to protect one another are not enforced, and that care, here, is wasted. Children learn it on the way to school, their parents on the way to work. It is a curriculum nobody chose and nobody can leave.

Consider what happens when someone finally tends the ground. In Philadelphia, researchers cleared and planted neglected lots, left others untouched, and followed the people nearby. Passing a greened lot, their hearts beat slower.¹ Their depression eased, and by no small measure: down 41.5 percent, and 68.7 percent in the poorest neighborhoods.² Clearing the trash without planting did nothing; the tending was what reached them. Because the lots were chosen at random, this was not troubled people seeing more ruin. The studies were done on the mainland, so it is the pattern that carries here, not the number: cared-for ground cares back.

How does a building reach a person? Not mainly through the fear of being robbed. In a survey of 2,482 residents, visible neglect fed mistrust, partly by leaving people feeling powerless.³ And that mistrust was not aimed at a government office. It was aimed at the neighbors, at one another. Being robbed explained only about a tenth of the link between disorder and anxiety, anger, and depression. The rest was this: people were reading, in the standing ruin, a daily notice that harm is permitted. The old fear was that neglect breeds crime; that mostly came apart, and the truer harm proved quieter, tracking not with crime but with the health of the people beside it.⁴

None of this shows up on a ledger. It is what settles in a man who has painted his house every few years and kept his yard for the private pride of it, until one morning he looks across the road, at the ruin no one tends, and wonders why he bothers.

And a building is never only a backdrop to a childhood. Following 495 children from infancy to age six, researchers found that a run-down home tracked with small delays in how they grew and with poorer health, and that neglect in the neighborhood, abandoned buildings among it, tracked with trouble in how they behaved. The harm reached them largely through their mothers, through a mother's worn-down spirit, and even loving care could not fully shield them.⁵ What we leave unrepaired does not stop at the property line. It reaches the youngest, who cannot yet say what is wrong.

Which brings us home. Some buildings here have stopped being buildings. Others never stopped; they are still open for business, visibly falling into disrepair, year after year with no one fixing them. The Lieutenant Governor, who chairs the Islandwide Beautification Task Force, has called the old Sherwood Hotel in Tumon the biggest eyesore on Guam.⁶ Public Works has watched more and more people shelter inside these derelict walls, with nowhere better to go.⁷ In 2021, of the first 28 notices sent to owners, exactly one answered.⁸

That last number invites an unkind reading, and the unkind reading is almost certainly wrong. Many of these buildings, the task force believes, belong to owners who live far away.⁸ Others sit inside tangled estates, or unfinished probate, with no one holding authority to act. Demolition is dear even for an owner who means well, which is why the government itself says it cannot carry the work alone.⁶ The failure here is not of the heart. It is of the machinery.

And Guam carries a danger Philadelphia does not. Before every storm we are told to tie down anything the wind could lift.⁹ The Sherwood was broken open by Supertyphoon Pongsona in 2002, took more from Mawar in 2023, and stands open still.⁶ The wind does not ask who holds the deed, or whether the room beneath the roof is empty.

The empty ones are the fewer. The greater number are lived in and worked in: the walkway rail bleeding rust down the wall below, the stairwell where the concrete has begun to crumble. People climb those stairs every morning.

Nor is the neglect only on private land. In 2024, 18 of Guam's 41 public school campuses could not pass their health inspections in time to open in August, for want of upkeep, of workers, of inspectors.¹⁰ Where the buildings are ours, we could not meet the standard either, and it was our own children left waiting at the doors.

In June the Governor signed Public Law 38-127, and Guam had a property maintenance code at last. The thinking was that well-kept commercial districts matter to what visitors carry away; the condition of what a tourist sees, the Lieutenant Governor said, leaves a lasting impression.¹¹ That is true, and no small thing where so much of our living comes from tourism. It is a real step, though it does not take hold until June 2027.¹²

But the code reaches only the hotel zone.¹² Everywhere else, a building must grow dangerous before anyone can ask its owner to act. In the hotel zone, it need only grow shabby. The law guards the corner a visitor photographs. It does not guard the corner we pass twice a day.

A visitor holds an impression for a week. A family holds the building across the road for years, and holds it exactly where the research says we feel these things: in mistrust, in powerlessness, in depression, in a child who struggles to grow and settle. A building is never only its owner's business. The people who live in its shadow never agreed to bear it, yet they are the ones who pay. That is why upkeep cannot be left to goodwill; it has to be required, the way we require a driver to keep a safe car and a kitchen to stay clean, because the cost of neglect falls on everyone nearby. If a week's impression is worth a law, a childhood spent passing the same wall is worth as much. I do not think the hotel zone should have waited, and the villages should not have to.

A lesson can be unlearned, and the tools are already in our own law. A structure is unsafe, by the code's own words, when neglect or decay makes it a danger to the public or to the people inside it, a phrase written for the building someone still calls home. And an empty building is unsafe if it is left open to anyone who wanders in.¹² That last rule is the one Philadelphia adopted, doors and windows or a fine, and where enforced, ordinary crime and nuisance fell, though not gun crime.¹³ We have held these powers for years, and they reach every village, not only where visitors go.

The law even lets the government do the work and send the owner the bill. If the owner will not act within ten days, the building official is directed to have the structure mended or taken down, the cost fixed as a lien against the land. And painting, cleaning, or fencing needs no permit at all, so the cheapest fix is the easiest.¹²

Guam already has the authority. What it lacks is the plumbing. Today the cost comes out of the General Fund and is chased down afterward, so whatever is recovered vanishes back into the budget instead of paying for the next job; a standing fund that keeps what the liens bring back would close that circle. And a lien only helps if it can be collected. One tool for that sits unused: when property taxes go unpaid, the land passes to the government, and if the owner does not pay within a year, the government takes the deed, returning any value above the taxes to the former owner.¹⁴ People who abandon a building usually stop paying its taxes, and no one has counted how many lots the government could already claim this way.

None of this is really about buildings. It is about the man with the paintbrush, the child on the stairs, the family that has stopped believing the street will ever look cared for. The mechanics exist to give them one simple thing: the sense that someone is keeping watch.

Inspection can follow a model every driver knows. Each of us pays a licensed station to check our car, and files the result before the registration renews.¹⁵ Buildings could work the same. The law asks the building official to inspect every structure on Guam every three years, which the office has never had the staff to do.¹² But the statute already allows owner-paid tests and the hiring of licensed Guam architects and engineers.¹² Tie the certificate to the business license, and it costs nothing and frees our few inspectors for the buildings no owner will come forward about.

Extending the code past the hotel zone is the smallest step of all. It is written, it is passed, it reaches one district; widening it is an amendment, not a new law.

And the ground matters as much as the building. When New Orleans researchers tended both the empty homes and the lots around them, the neighbors' sense of belonging rose 83 percent.¹⁶ Sealing a building removes a danger. Cutting the grass beside it says something kinder, and says it to everyone on the street.

What those studies measured was never neatness. It was heart rate, and depression, and whether people felt they belonged, the health of a whole people, and we carry it in every village. Clearing and planting is work our mayors could begin tomorrow, and they already know which doors to knock on.

There is a Guam where the answer to a rotting building is a shrug, a lament about how little can be done. And there is a Guam where a fence goes up, the grass is cut, and a family across the road quietly changes its mind about the street it lives on.

The second costs less than we fear, and it begins with one decision: that keeping a building up is not a favor an owner may grant or withhold, but a duty owed to everyone who lives beside it. We ask that much of a driver and a cook. We can ask it for the places our neighbors call home, not because a camera might find them, but because they are ours.