What would happen if Chinatown disappeared? Imagine San Francisco's Grant Avenue without the souvenir stores, Chinese restaurants, grocery stores and other businesses lining the street.
Gone would be the housewife bargaining with the butcher in Cantonese. Gone would be the exotic smells (some wonderful, some of questionable origins). Gone would be the kung-fu students and their dancing dragons and fire-crackers to chase away the evil spirits. Gone would be the dim-sum and herbs sold in little shops.
UPDATED: April 16, 2019 for clarity and new photos.
Also, gone will be the homes, jobs and businesses of thousands of immigrants, elderly living on limited incomes and long-time families who make Chinatown their home, their cultural and emotional Mecca.
It is ironic that like the other ethnic enclaves such as the Little Italy's and Manilatowns, the Chinatowns that were formed as a result of racist attitudes towards the Chinese, discriminatory laws and real estate practices are now in danger of disappearing because those racial "ghettos" are now being eyed as attractive places to live. Chinatowns are in close proximity to city attractions and most importantly, they offer relatively cheap living accommodations.
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| The entrance to Grant Avenue, San Francisco, USA |
The culprits: landlords and developers aren't satisfied with the low rents and see an opportunity to lease the units to people willing to pay higher rents or razing the old residential hotels like the International Hotel for fancier, more expensive condos or apartments.
The victims: The Chinese elderly and newly arrived immigrants who find the familiarity of the food, language and community as a refuge from the larger society. Most importantly, the residential hotels offer affordable rent. and who still find the relatively low rents or low price of the older residential hotels, a bargain compared to other ritzier parts of the cities.
The gentrification of the low-rent ethnic enclaves are just too noticeable to be ignored anymore.
"Local governments drove areas of accelerated gentrification and have encouraged and assisted the gutting of Chinatowns," said a report conducted by Asian American Legal Defense Fund focusing on Boston, New York and Philadelphia. "
Government policies have changed these traditionally working class, Asian, family household neighborhoods into communities that are now composed of more affluent, White, and non-family households. From the expansion of institutions like universities and medical centers in Boston, to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s massive rezonings promoting development in New York, and the government’s encouragement of luxury condominiums and casinos in Philadelphia, local governments have dramatically transformed what these immigrant neighborhoods look like."
“We’re slowly being gentrified out of existence,” said University of Massachusetts professor Andrew Leong, who coauthored a 2013 report on Chinatowns. “You’re talking about displacement of those kinds of people that have rented from these unattractive units for decades.”
In Boston, only 46 percent of Chinatown residents are Asian.
According to some estimates, only 300 Chinese live in Washington DC's Chinatown. A new development project would eviscerate the heart of Chinatown. That is in the middle of fight between the low-income tenants and preservationists vs. a big development firm who wants to do away with the Section 8 housing and build condominiums that would sell for $800,000 each.
In San Francisco, the financial district encroaches on Chinatown.
Across the country, the landlords of the low-rent residential hotels, long the backbone of living units in San Francisco's Chinatown, see the possibilities of higher profits. High-salaried tech workers who are attracted to the city can't find enough housing in the city with one of the country's highest cost of living.
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New York City's vibrant Chinatown. |
The story is repeated in New York's Chinatown where now, the majority of residents are non-Chinese and the residents and merchants are fighting off gentrification of their neighborhood.
In cities like San Francisco and New York which have rent regulations - the landlords can't raise the rents until a unit is vacant. So some landlords or managers are trying to make life difficult for the long-time tenants: citing them with minor infractions like hanging laundry out their windows, putting up unpermitted Chinese New Year decorations or changing the locks on the doors while tenants are out. In essence: make life so miserable that the tenants move out.
“I’ve never seen a situation where they just don’t even file the papers, they just change people’s locks. That’s almost unheard of,” tenants rights attorney Alex Lemieux told a KQED reporter.
Even after many of the Chinatowns, especially in the larger cities, have become tourist attractions and important sources of revenue by contributing to the economies of the host cities, Chinese/Americans still can't avoid returning to them for celebrations, worship or to visit with friends. It is a place that they still consider home, even after they've moved to the suburbs.
For the newly arrived, Chinatown serves as a way station of comfort and familiarity as they become accustomed to the customs of their new country. Many families have stayed put for generations because ... well, because its home. Services like banks and healthcare are steps from their door. Friends and family are nearby. They know the grocer by his first name. And jobs in the restaurants, small businesses and garment factories, are right around the corner.
Some argue that the young people and start-up companies will be what saves the Chinatowns that we've all grown up with. But that argument sounds counterintuitive.
The historic Chinatowns are not going quietly. They have their supporters. There are efforts to preserve the neighborhoods and their affordable housing. There is no way San Francisco will allow Chinatown to disappear. The Chinese New Year Parade alone brings in millions of tourists and untold dollars to the city's coffers. Mayor Ed Lee cut his legal teeth fighting for the International Hotel in the 60s and 70s and he has issued warnings to landlords trying to evict tenants by harassment.
At a recent rally in Washington DC, Micahel Kane, NAHT’s executive director of the National Alliance of HUD Tenants, said: “What the (developer) is doing amounts to ethnic cleansing: removing communities of color from the city to make room for a high-rise.”
“This is not only a struggle to save our homes. It’s a struggle to save our cities, to save the principles of inclusion, community, justice, and values that we all reflect,” Kane added.
In Boston, a Chinatown Land Trust is submitting buildings to the National Register of Historic Places which would put up barriers to any attempt to tear down the structures. “The city is committed to preserving Chinatown,” said Sheila Dillon, Boston’s housing chief and director of the Department of Neighborhood Development. “It’s a wonderful neighborhood and the city is better for it.”
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Life goes on in the alleys of San Franciscco's Chinatown. |
The housing market growing influence on the U.S. Chinatowns comes at a time when immigration from China and the rest of Asia is the highest it has ever been surpassing immigration from Mexico. Movement to the suburbs or neighboring cities have taken a lot of pressure off the traditional Chinatowns and new enclaves have developed outside the historic Chinatowns.
Zoning tactics, rent control laws, tenants rights groups and sympathetic politicians are doing what they can, but will those strategies and allies be enough to beat back the opportunistic landlords and market forces nibbling away at what have become American institutions? I don't know. The question I posed at the beginning still needs answers: What if there were no more Chinatowns?
I do know that if something isn't done, all we'll be left with are some old buildings behind a Chinese gateway -- newer perhaps, the smells and chatter of Mandarin mixing with Cantonese and English will be gone - but they'd just be empty shells with no heart or soul.
FOR MORE INFO: Google "Saving Chinatown" or "gentrification of Chinatown" and you'll discover that the phenomenon happening around the world: in Riverside, CA, Honolulu, Vancouver, B.C. and London.
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