There will always be a little corner of the American public imagination reserved for Chinatown. Whether the word evokes for you the stereotypical mystique of opium dens and gambling halls, or the gritty restaurants and garment factories that fueled generations of working-class immigrant families, Chinatown, as a cultural idea, seems to endure through the generations as a place of wonder, chaos, and cultural hybridity. But the real, brick-and-mortar Chinatown is vanishing rapidly, as its people, traditions and cultural life are swept away by what some call "development".
The Chinatown where I spent much of my childhood, in Lower Manhattan, was a messy jumble of street hawkers, sludgy outdoor fish markets and streaming New Year's dragons; it was crowded, smelly, hectic and, to a kid, overwhelmingly vast. Today, I see the Chinatown of my youth dwindling fast. It seems, on the surface, to be happening for all the "right" reasons: the neighborhood is "cleaning up", children of immigrants assimilated and moved away, there's no longer a need for an old school ethnic ghetto in the bowels of Manhattan. But when I peer behind the curtain of what purports to be a vindication of the American dream, I see real estate moguls and politicians slowly unraveling a community's social fabric.
While gentrification has invaded many low-income areas in New York, its impacts are perhaps most starkly apparent in this neighborhood, which began over a century ago as a ghetto for mostly male migrant laborers, and has over the past generation morphed into one of the city's hottest real estate markets. That transformation has come at the expense of the people and institutions who have anchored generations of Chinese American heritage. As immigrant families are expelled through mass evictions and spiking rents, in their wake comes an onslaught of white young professionals, forming a hyper-commercialized cityscape that billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg has championed. Big property values, little character.
A recent study of three Chinatowns in Boston, New York City and Philadelphia starkly maps out gentrification's effects in crowding out once tight-knit ethnic communities.
The census-data analysis, published by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, found that in all three Chinatowns, the Asian share of the population dropped steadily between 2000 and 2010, while the white percentage rose. Meanwhile, family households have faded away as richer singles have snatched up properties: the proportion of family households in Boston's Chinatown, for instance, has tumbled from 73% to 47%. Median housing values in the three Chinatowns now exceed those of their respective cities' overall. In New York, particularly, activists point out that the real estate boom has coincided with the shuttering of small businesses, as old customer bases are displaced by affluent professionals with (save for the enterprising foodie contingent) decidedly less of a taste for homemade tofu and spicy pork jerky.
But all this development is revitalizing the neighborhood, right? Actually, the new capital comes at the expense of families who have over the years contributed much more than cheap rents. They spent what little they earned on their friends' restaurants or nail salons, or invested in their own. They donated volunteer labor with their churches and schools. And like the old Jewish and Puerto Rican enclaves that flourished nearby, brought cultural richness to some of the poorest corners of the city.
Much of this displacement is perfectly legal. Despite nominal protection from New York City's rent stabilization laws, landlords can easily harass residents to give up their apartments, or building owners may justify evictions by citing illegal subdivisions of shared apartments (which, housing advocates note, went conveniently unnoticed before property values started soaring). So-called "inclusionary zoning" plans, which apportion shares of low and high-end housing, often become a pretext for building luxury developments that ultimately squeeze out low-rent residents.
As longtime residents are pushed out to more remote, often more economically and socially isolated parts of the city, the old neighborhood's spirit dissipates. Mom-and-pop stores, like the dry-goods business my father started in the 1970s, yield to tourist vendors of cheap Oriental tchotchkes. Streets once crowded with grandmas haggling over vegetable prices become festooned with shiny sedans. The new "cleaned-up" Chinatown takes on the antiseptic veneer of a wax museum.
Of course, the old Chinatown had plenty of problems. I don't necessarily miss the gang warfare or the stench of rotting sewage, and tourism brings welcome traffic for local stores. But the material improvements are eclipsed by a deeper absence – the loss of a sense of collective ownership. Before Chinatown was a hot real estate prospect, locals claimed the beautiful and ugly parts alike as, well, everybody's mess. Though most immigrants were too busy earning a living to play politics, the community did seed many community organizations and activist movements that advocated for affordable housing, better social services, and fair labor conditions for exploited workers.
That's the Chinatown that I fear is vanishing: not the "exotic" caricature of Hollywood studios – that will live on in the public mind. And it's not even the physical trappings themselves. It's the sense of security and solidarity that emerges when a group of people defy hardship to build power.
All is not lost yet. Today, a new crop of community activists are demanding more inclusive, democratic urban planning policies that empower local residents and advocacy groups in land-use and business development decisions. They're advancing a new concept of community development, based on local resilience, working with traditional neighborhood institutions like small family businesses and historical family associations that have long served as cultural pillars.
Protecting Chinatown isn't just an exercise in "cultural preservation"; it's a civil rights struggle. Demographic trend-lines may change, but one thread of neighborhood history remains unbroken: the value of holding on to your roots.