All Americans Should Want Chinatown to Stay Chinatown
An affordable housing crisis in American cities is tearing apart Chinatowns and hurting immigrant communities’ ability to fully contribute
For many Americans, “Chinatown” means little more than a variety of restaurant options for dim sum and noodles and waving fortune cats in the window. But for some Asian Americans — the Chinese immigrant founders, inheritors, and inhabitants of America’s Chinatowns — those unique cultural enclaves are home.
Chinatowns are emblematic of the cultural and economic centers that immigrant communities create and depend on to survive and thrive, and an important part of American history that we’re in danger of losing as these neighborhoods are dissolved. Unfortunately, we’re seeing more and more disappear as families are pushed out due to drastically rising rent prices. As these communities are broken apart, their capacity to flourish is threatened, as well as their ability to contribute to the economy at large.
As the fastest growing racial group in the nation, projected to make up the largest immigrant population in the next 50 years, Asians are becoming citizens in greater numbers across the country. Asian American communities new and old are crucial to our nation’s economic success. And as recent studies have shown, Asian Americans’ buying power is significant and continues to grow.
Cultural communities like Chinatowns are essential to that continued growth. As New York Magazine explained last week with a piece exploring the question “How Has Chinatown Stayed Chinatown?” ethnic bonds in these neighborhoods can produce resilient communities with businesses for and by community members, where existing businesses help new immigrant families settle and integrate, while supporting the elderly community members for whom affordable housing is also necessary.
But even in New York, which has largely resisted the fate that “has already befallen the Chinatowns of Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., which have been reduced to ethnic theme parks where longtime residents have been priced out and new immigrants no longer come,” the fight to preserve Chinatown as it exists against pressures to replace buildings with high-priced real-estate is on. Just last week, Chinatown and Lower East Side residents gathered to protest the construction of a new luxury tower and the city’s spending on tax breaks for the tower at the same time that community programs for current residents — senior centers, libraries and the like — are being cut.
In Boston’s Chinatown, an explosion of luxury housing has driven up rents and real estate values over the last decade, resulting in overcrowding, poor housing conditions, and evictions. While brick row houses in Chinatown have long provided affordable housing for immigrants, community members question whether they will serve the same purpose in the future.
Our capital city’s Chinatown has long been engaged in a losing fight to maintain its identity as the area becomes better known for its upscale restaurants and bars, shows and sporting events, and slick new condos and office buildings. About a year ago, residents of Washington, D.C.’s Museum Square apartment complex received demolition notices, offering residents the “option” to purchase the building for upwards of $800,000 per unit — an impossibility for subsidized housing residents, many of whom are elderly, low-income, and low English proficiency.
The bottom line for many of these communities is that losing their housing amounts to so much more than leaving an apartment building. Even after ethnic food markets give way to chain restaurants, some of the families that live in buildings like the Museum Square apartment complex have known each other for decades, and watched each others’ kids grow into adults. They know how to maneuver the area, and have community members nearby to help them if cultural or language barriers complicate a task.
For many of the immigrants who forged a community for themselves in the midst of a new city, being pushed out of their homes will mean being ejected from the city altogether into more affordable and unfamiliar suburbs where they don’t know their neighbors and don’t have the community support they’ve worked so hard to build. And separated from their communities, they are less able to contribute, culturally and economically, to the country they have adopted.
So communities are forced to fight back , both for affordable housing and to preserve their authentic cultural centers. In Boston, colorful flags reading “Housing,” “Reclaim,” and “Chinatown” in English and Chinese around Boston’s Chinatown last week were placed “to highlight the affordable housing crisis, particularly focusing on the displacement of residents from Chinatown’s historic row houses and calling for their right to remain in the community,” explained “R Visions for Chinatown” coordinator Jasmine Lee.
Today, 302 families of the Museum Square Apartments will rally with community members and DC residents and march through Chinatown to preserve affordable housing in D.C. If you’re a D.C. resident, you can come show your support between 4:30 and 6:30 p.m. Show our representatives that our Chinatown and ethnic communities like it across the country are an important part of our shared American history and must also be part of our future.
And if you need a reminder of some of the ways Chinatowns strengthen and improve our communities, here’s some bonus reading:
