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

Abstract

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.