Are Chinatowns Disappearing?

From AALDEF:

Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) held a briefing webinar to launch its new report on the dramatic gentrification of Chinatowns in Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia in the past three decades. The report, Chinatown Then and Now, contains some of the first-ever land-use data collected on the three largest Chinatowns on the East Coast.

“Chinatowns have provided the city’s immigrants with support networks and affordable housing for over a century,” said Bethany Li, staff attorney at AALDEF. “Gentrification and ongoing redevelopment projects, however, threaten to destroy the sustainability of these once-thriving immigrant communities.”

AALDEF, in collaboration with community partners, academic institutions, and hundreds of volunteers, spent a year recording data, block-by-block and lot-by-lot, in order to document the existing land uses in the three Chinatowns. This first of its kind report reveals current commercial, residential, and industrial patterns in Chinatowns that shed light on the importance of these neighborhoods to immigrant communities and highlight spaces of particular vulnerability to gentrification. Read more…

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