“Chinatown Is Not for Sale”: Chinatown Community for Equitable Development in Profile

Cheers erupted over the banging of drums each time the announcement was made — in English, in Spanish, and then again in Cantonese. The president of the Hillside Villa Tenants Association, Rene AlexZander, told the crowd gathered in Chinatown on Sunday, May 26, that landlord Tom Botz had agreed to extend the expiring rent control protections “not for one year, not for five, but for ten more affordable years.” The news was a stark reversal of the notices issued to residents in recent months that warned them their rents would increase by 100 to 200% in June. AlexZander called it “not just a great victory for the Hillside Villa Tenants Association, but a great victory for the community of Chinatown, and for everyone facing displacement from their affordable housing in the city of Los Angeles.”

Now, however, some Hillside Villa residents have received direct eviction notices, and their struggle continues in the midst of a broader ongoing battle for Chinatown, Los Angeles. Perched on the edge of downtown, Chinatown is a hotspot for gentrification pressures. More than 90% of residents are tenants and more than half of households earn $20,000 or less per year. NOlympics coalition partner Chinatown Community for Equitable Development (CCED) is organizing to keep residents in their homes and secure greater community participation in determining the neighborhood’s future.

Alex Zander’s May 26 announcement took place at a “Chinatown is not for sale” march led by CCED and attended by Chinatown residents and allied organizing groups. The main target of the protest was a proposed 725-unit market-rate housing and retail development, named College Station after the adjacent metro station. LA’s city council gave the development project the go-ahead in March with zero requirements for affordable housing units. CCED has been quick to point out that, since 2015, the district’s city councilor Gil Cedillo has received at least 27 donations from Atlas Capital Group employees to a sum of $18,400, according to the records of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission. The corporation’s employees have also made donations to the campaigns of city councilors Marqueece Harris-Dawson and Jose Huizar. On May 6 CCED launched legal action against the City of Los Angeles on the basis that the development fails to meet Measure JJJ requirements for affordable units in developments with zoning changes or amendments to LA’s General Plan. The group is also calling for “a moratorium on all developments until there is a community plan that benefits all low-income residents that includes the preservation of all expiring covenants and an expansion of low-incoming housing in Chinatown.”

CCED formed in 2012 out of a campaign to keep Walmart out of Chinatown. Not only did residents fear the store would be a harbinger of rising real estate prices and displacement, but some felt disrespected by insensitive outreach and PR tactics by the corporation, from English-language petitions residents didn’t fully understand to false narratives about an absence of existing grocery stores in the neighborhood. The store ultimately opened in mid-2013 (before abruptly shutting two and a half years later due to Walmart’s nationwide cutbacks). But the campaign against it sparked new alliances and highlighted the urgent need for forward-thinking organizing to ensure the neighborhood continued to serve working-class immigrant families.

Today, the group’s platform articulates that the “rent is too damn high,” declares that “we will not be moved,” and calls for healthy and habitable homes, extended and expanded senior housing, “100% truly affordable quality housing,” and “real accessible community resources.” The emphasis on “truly” affordable housing is a recognition of how the term “affordable housing” has been manipulated and misused in Los Angeles and other cities. The platform argues that “Affordable Housing rent costs based on the Median Area Income of LA” — estimated at $69,300 for households in 2018 — “are not affordable for Chinatown” where the median income hovers close to $20,000. CCED insists the county “redefine the formula for affordable housing based on the area’s income” because “we want affordable housing to be affordable for Chinatown’s residents.”

The local leaders and other participants in CCED are all volunteers. They are an intergenerational group, ranging from organizers in their twenties to elders who have been active in the community for decades. Those older participants, CCED organizer Katie Wang explained in an interview, have been able to draw on longstanding ties in the area to effectively mobilize their neighbors. Twenty percent of Chinatown’s population is over 65 years old. This age group is often the most in need of truly affordable housing and Chinatown’s convenient public transit access to amenities; it’s also the group most at risk as gentrification intensifies. Wang recalled feeling inspired by one older tenant leader who recently mobilized his peers to support the Hillside Villa Tenants Association on the basis “we should go and care because this could happen to us.” The Chinatown elders “have a lot to say, and they have a lot of power and resilience,” Wang said. Meanwhile, many of the younger CCED organizers share a love for the Chinatown that their families took them to as kids — what Wang described as a unique “long-term relationship with this place.”

A major component of the group’s activities is supporting site fights where residents are at risk of displacement, as at Hillside Villa. In the case of eviction, some of the lowest-income residents would be at risk of joining the city’s unhoused population — a population that has increased approximately 16% in the City of LA between 2018 and 2019. In these site-specific fights, building tenant leadership is a priority and CCED volunteers are careful to follow the direction of residents. The organization also advocates for the interests of low-income immigrant residents in other specific issues affecting Chinatown, such as the attempt of a charter school to move into the neighborhood’s unique dual-language public school, and the shuttering of a local multilingual hospital in 2017.

With so many specific threats facing residents, CCED’s work can sometimes feel like rushing from one fire after another in an attempt to put them out. “We’re often really focused — there’s these fights, there’s these landlords, and we need to be on the ground right now,” Wang reflected. But, she added, the team is working on more long-term strategic planning too. With gentrification pressures weighing hard on the Chinatown community, that planning involves identifying “other forces that are going to cause more change to come.” With its reputation for accelerating real estate speculation in host cities, the Olympics stood out as one such force. As a result, the group signed onto the NOlympics coalition in September, 2017.

Organizers have also conducted strategic mapping and research that helps them reflect on how to “get in on the conversation early” and “be proactive” in the bigger picture campaign to stop gentrification, Wang said. CCED has mapped the rent controlled buildings and Section 8 housing deemed most likely to be in the crosshairs of future development projects, as well as a growing number of art spaces and more than 50 new developments proposed for the neighborhood. The names of the relevant developers and landowners are fast becoming a familiar list. So, too, are the names of the Business Improvements District (BID) leaders. CCED and other local groups have criticized private security hired by the Chinatown BID for harassing unhoused folks and street vendors. Although street vending has been a long-time asset of Chinatown’s cultural and economic life, it does not appear to have a place in the BID’s designs for the neighborhood. Meanwhile at a Hillside Villa demonstration back in March, a BID security officer sporting a red ‘Chinatown District Safety’ shirt paused on his bike to take photos or footage of the protesters marching by.

In contrast to the disproportionate influence wielded by the Chinatown BID, CCED wants the area’s traditional residents to have more of a collective say. Community meetings in which residents discuss their vision for Chinatown have been a part of CCED’s work since its formation. To reach more residents volunteers go door-to-door, checking in with neighbors and letting them know about CCED’s meetings and walk-in office hours. Office hours represent a more mundane element of CCED organizing but one that is essential for its community-building efforts; volunteers have been able to help residents translate everything from daily mail to unusual notices from their landlords.

Unsurprisingly, language justice is central to CCED’s approach. Describing “planning processes that are inaccessible to low-income non-English speaking residents” as “discriminatory in effect,” CCED insists residents “have the right to participate in all community planning and be heard!” Accordingly, the group facilitates interpretation at all its meetings and protests. At the recent Hillside Villa and “Chinatown is not for sale” marches, CCED provided attendees with flyers with protest chants written in Cantonese, Spanish, and English: Shouts of “The people united! Will never be defeated” transitioned to “El pueblo unido! Jamás será vencido!” and “人 民 團 結.” And in addition to its attention to language justice, CCED situates its work in the context of broader racial justice struggles. Organizers open events by recognizing the indigenous Tongva community on whose land Los Angeles was built, and material on the group’s website stresses the importance of fighting anti-black racism “in solidarity with Black and Brown struggles.”

Solidarity is strong in Chinatown. In addition to the Hillside Villa Tenants Association, the May 27 rally featured tenants from 651 N Broadway, the Bartlett Hill Tenant Association, and Inquilinos Unidos de los Cinco Puntos in neighboring Lincoln Heights, and the protesters paid further tribute to the successful resistance of the senior citizen residents of Metro Senior Lofts. As they cheered for each other on Sunday, they were celebrating not just Hillside Villa’s rent control extensions but the fact that collective organizing made it happen, and a growing sense of possibility for what else grassroots power can accomplish.

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