Gentrification and Chinatown

Roy Choi is one of the culinary stars of the 21st Century. You'd be hard pressed to find a chef who has done more to change the way people think about dining, particularly here in LA, but Choi himself has mixed feelings about the impact he had had. Trendy restaurants bring real benefits to a neighborhood, but these often come at a cost.

In this episode of Choi's Broken Bread.

Roy’s Chinatown restaurant Chego opened in 2013, which soon became the poster child for gentrification in the area. Roy explores what he would have done differently as he retraces his steps through some of the neighborhood’s beloved establishments like Hop Woo and Phoenix Bakery. He also meets newcomers to the neighborhood Pearl River Deli and Endorffeine.

While journalists discussing the housing crisis are contractually obliged to cite San Francisco, places like Chinatown go largely unnoticed which is the opposite of what would happen in any rational discussion. For reasons discussed before and certain to be brought up again, SF is one of the worst major cities in California to develop from an urban planning standpoint. Chinatown, on the other hand, is ideally situated.

Chinatown also provides a much more representative and sympathetic picture of the concerns over gentrification. Like Boyle Heights, Chinatown has already paid a disproportionate share of the price for LA's development. 

The first Chinatown, centered on Alameda and Macy Streets (now Cesar Chavez Avenue), was established in 1880. Reaching its heyday from 1890 to 1910, Chinatown grew to approximately fifteen streets and alleys containing some two hundred buildings. It boasted a Chinese Opera theater, three temples, a newspaper and a telephone exchange. But laws prohibiting most Chinese from citizenship and property ownership, as well as legislation curtailing immigration, inhibited future growth.

From the early 1910s, Chinatown began to decline. Symptoms of a corrupt Los Angeles discolored the public's view of Chinatown; gambling houses, opium dens and a fierce tong warfare severely reduced business in the area. As tenants and lessees rather than outright owners, the residents of Old Chinatown were threatened with impending redevelopment, and as a result the owners neglected upkeep of their buildings.[3] Eventually, the entire area was sold and then resold, as entrepreneurs and developers fought over the area. After thirty years of decay, a Supreme Court ruling approved condemnation of the area to allow for construction of a major rail terminal, Union Station. Residents were evicted to make room for Union Station without a plan for the relocation of the Chinatown community.

Chinatown was gradually demolished, leaving many businesses without a place to do business and forcing some to close. A remnant of Old Chinatown persisted into the early 1950s, situated between Union Station and the Old Plaza. Several businesses and a Buddhist temple lined Ferguson Alley, a narrow one-block street running between the Plaza and Alameda. The most notable of the surviving buildings was the old Lugo Adobe, having been built in 1838 by the prominent Californio family. Some decades later, the Lugo Adobe became the original home of Loyola Marymount University, and later, it was rented to Chinese-Americans who ran shops on the ground floor and a lodging house upstairs. Christine Sterling, who had brought to fruition the Olvera Street and China City projects, argued that remaining buildings of Old Chinatown were an eyesore and advocated successfully for the razing of all the remaining structures between the Plaza and Union Station.

We need more housing and places like Chinatown, Boyle Heights, and Watts are well-suited for development and densification. At the same time, residents of these neighborhoods have legitimate concerns. Framing the debate and a conflict between noble YIMBYs and villainous NIMBYs is not productive and it is enormously unfair.