Rising Housing Costs
When the military buildup was first announced, I remember people speaking so positively about the idea that "Guam could be just like Hawai'i." That the buildup would usher in such a period of fantastic ti hongge'on na economic prosperity that we would move to the next level of our island existence, becoming Hawai'i! Guam has long imagined Hawai'i as a greater, better, more American and more prosperous version of itself. People from Guam have long passed through or visited Hawai'i and understood it not through the lens of a fellow Pacific Island, and a fellow occupied island, but rather as that fantasy American space. Hawai'i is rich because America has fantasies about it, and because it has such a large, famous tourist industry. People imagined that Guam becoming like Hawai'i, would mean that all the superficial and largely meaningless things that you see when you visit a place as a tourist, or as a clueless subject of American empire would manif