Chinatown: The Last Frontier
by Amy Zimmer
October 2004

Old meets new where East meets West: Chinese-themed buildings surrounded by newer, "loftier" structures.

The year is 2015, and the place is Chinatown. There’s a sleek, new pan-Asian cultural art center on Canal Street with a Japanese film retrospective in one hall and a Chinese opera in another. An ornate floating Chinese restaurant is docked in front of the luxury spa/hotel that defines the East River’s now-iconic waterfront. The “Pacific Rim” office district is buzzing with trade deals brokered with Asia, and the garment factories housed in the nearby Fashion Space are the hot places where New York’s up-and-coming designers bring their sketches and stage their runways. The Second Avenue subway stops right in the heart of it all, and there’s plenty of parking.

But where is the man who sells egg cakes from his cart on Grand Street, or the woman who sells international phone cards in front of a store on East Broadway, or the kids who skip out on their ESL classes and hang out at the cybercafes? Where are the Chinese immigrants who’ve made Chinatown the bustling enclave that it is?

Community groups that work with new immigrants, like CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, and the Chinese Staff and Workers Association, have their own ideas for Chinatown development that include retaining manufacturing and restaurant-worker jobs, improving the existing dilapidated tenements and creating new low-income housing, and securing health protections for people in Lower Manhattan affected by dust from Ground Zero. These groups would like the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) to funnel some of its remaining funds for these projects. But the LMDC seems more attracted to projects that attract tourism and business, and so far, it’s been very receptive to the eight-part Rebuild Chinatown Initiative (RCI) developed by the 30-year-old nonprofit Asian Americans for Equality (AAFE), which emphasizes cleaning up the streets, beautifying the waterfront, and attracting business and culture to the area.

The two competing visions yield one central question: How “Chinese” will Chinatown remain amid the development boom? The cultural center, Pacific Rim office campus, and Fashion Space are just some of the proposals put forth by the RCI, released this past April after two years of consensus building by the AAFE. While RCI has become the darling of the planning community and the power brokers, some community groups worry that many of the immigrant families, many of whom live below the poverty line, may soon be priced out of the area.

“We’re not advocating for or against the plans,” says Hyun Lee, an organizer with CAAAV. Instead, she says, “Our concern is, who is this ultimately for?”

Despite the massive job loss in Chinatown’s garment and restaurant industries, there are still some jobs left in the area, and even more important, the job centers that send people to work around the city, the state, and beyond are based in Chinatown, as are Chinese-language social service agencies, so new immigrants continue to seek apartments in the neighborhood. “What we need here are jobs and housing,” says Lee. “The cultural center is great if it’s free, but it’s unclear if it’s for the community.” Lee also wonders whether a white-collar plan like the Pacific Rim will help the low-wage workers who have lost jobs.

One of the lead RCI planning consultants, John Shapiro of Phillips Preiss Shapiro & Associates, doesn’t dismiss these concerns. Though uncertain about the initial push for white-collar jobs, he adds, “I’ve had to put aside my own assumptions. Someone says to me, ‘So you think Chinese people can’t move up the ladder?’ There’s no reason we can’t have both job sectors.” And there’s no reason that everybody couldn’t or shouldn’t enjoy a beautified waterfront. “The whole vision,” says Shapiro, “is to position Chinatown as a major national hub on the East Coast.”

But Hyun Lee’s primary concern about RCI is how it would be implemented and whether there would be protections for current residents should improved amenities lead to higher property values and increased rents. Gentrification has already started in Chinatown, and CAAAV is working with the Urban Justice Center to figure out ways to protect low-income tenants, which is particularly thorny in the neighborhood since the actual leaseholder of an apartment often rents space out to others. There are many families living doubled or tripled up, and there’s a highly transient workforce moving in and out of rooms.

So far, most of RCI’s plans remain in limbo. The initiative’s proposal had requested $80 million from the LMDC, but the corporation has been less than speedy in allocating the remaining $900 million of the nearly $2.8 billion of post-9/11 federal aid. According to LMDC board member and deputy mayor Daniel Doctoroff, “It’s important to present clarity of what Lower Manhattan is going to look like as the city attempts to lure tenants downtown.”

The LMDC has adopted some of RCI’s suggestions in its Chinatown Circulation Access Study, which looked at the busy Chatham Square intersection and the Park Row street closure as well as parking and bus traffic problems. In conjunction with the city’s tourism marketing association, NYC & Co., the LMDC launched Explore Chinatown, a $2 million campaign creating street maps and kiosks to bolster the area’s businesses and make for more tourist-friendly visits. The LMDC also has given a few million dollars to renovate neighborhood parks as part of a $25 million Lower Manhattan park beautification effort.

These LMDC projects—focused on infrastructure, cultural amenities, tourism, and anchoring financial investments—are what city planner Petra Todorovich at the Regional Plan Association calls “status quo economic development.”

In contrast, “we were hoping this would be a real effort [by the LMDC] on how to retain and improve jobs that really do make sense and how to provide other options for the jobs that leave,” says David Dyssegaard Kallick, from the coalition of the Labor Community Advocacy Network. “This should be an exciting opportunity, and there’s money to do this, but it’s bottlenecked at the LMDC.”

Luxury lofts advertised in Chinatown, October 2004. Photographs by Brian Molyneaux.

RCI can point to its Fashion Space component as one such project promoting or retaining job growth in New York’s dwindling manufacturing economy. Developed with the Garment Industry Development Corporation (GIDC), UNITE, and the New York Industrial Retention Network, the project would create an “incubator space” for upstart designers—a one-stop shopping area that would have everything from cutters and seamstresses to a showroom. As Kevin Chu of GIDC explained, the industry is trying to reposition itself from big orders (since those have long gone overseas) to quick turnaround and high-end niche markets. Thousands of garment workers have lost their jobs since 9/11. Chu says there were 246 garment factories in the area prior to 9/11; after a recent door-to-door campaign, he located 153. Chu is currently looking for a few buildings where Fashion Space could convert a few floors to house about 60 garment factories. The Fashion Space, says Chu, would anchor 2,500 jobs—mostly seamstresses and sample makers—and an additional 1,200 in the community to fill positions at grocery shops where the workers would shop, for example.

This proposal, which asked the LMDC for $25 million, was submitted in April 2003, but the RCI has yet to hear a response. So far, the City Council has awarded $1.5 million in seed money.

“Obviously, in the initial phase there won’t be any job growth,” says Chu. With cheaper labor overseas, he’s under no illusion that the industry can ever be as large as it once was. “First we need to stop the bleeding and stabilize industry.” Factories want to remain in Chinatown because it’s where the workers are, says Chu. Even some factories that have moved to Sunset Park in Brooklyn are trying to relocate back to Chinatown, where it’s easier to find labor, he notes.

The industrial buildings in Sunset Park—the fastest-growing Chinese community as people are priced out of Chinatown—are prime spots for garment factories, but they are too spread out, making it inconvenient for workers to get to. These factories are also less convenient for workers coming from Chinese communities in other parts of Brooklyn, like Flatbush, Williamsburg, Sheepshead Bay, and Bensonhurst. Even workers in Sunset Park sometimes find it easier to hop one of the cheap minivan transports or the subway to bring them to Chinatown.

Wing Lam, an organizer at the Chinese Staff and Workers Association, explains that Chinatown is a more attractive place for immigrants to work because of the abundance of social service agencies, hospitals, schools, and housing all within walking distance to jobs. “If something happens to your child at school, you want to be working nearby,” Lam explained. He agrees that the labor force exists in Chinatown. But he does not think the Fashion Space goes far enough in restoring and preserving the garment industry. It’s more of a concession to preserve the flavor of what Chinatown is known for, which in this case is garment work.

The biggest force pushing out garment industries right now is the pressure from the real estate market, as factory spaces are undergoing renovations and transforming into luxury co-ops or office space. (The large factory owners who own their buildings benefit from this more than the small-time owners.) As zoning laws for the manufacturing region of Lower Manhattan are changing to allow for other uses in these buildings, landlords are seizing the opportunity to get higher rents. Bill Lam, a real estate developer who used to own garment factories, remembers when most buildings on Centre Street north and south of Canal bore the telltale sign that they housed garment factories inside: smoke coming out of an exhaust pipe. Now there’s one building with one floor that’s being used for a factory. “The smoke used to come out from every building around here,” says Lam, but later in the year you’ll probably see this building changing the use, and I believe in the next 10 years there won’t be any manufacturing in Chinatown.”

Lam says the only way garment factories would be able to afford the current rents is through government subsidization. Talking like a real estate agent rather than a garment factory boss, he discussed the high ceilings and large windows of the buildings in the manufacturing zone and talked about how centrally located the neighborhood is, explaining that the manufacturing days are over. “This is like using a Mercedes to deliver baked goods.” Lam should know; he drives a Mercedes.

While the high-end development of Chinatown may not have begun in earnest quite yet, some people worry that the fusillade is imminent. Peter Kwong, Hunter College professor and author of The New Chinatown (1987), believes the attack on Chinatown is twofold. Because of gentrification, he says, the existing businesses are not filling the needs for the people who want to gentrify. And this means people are leaving, moving to Brooklyn or to the suburbs to follow the exodus of jobs.

For Kwong, the “authenticity” of a community—if there is such a word, he added—depends on people living, working, and shopping in an area, which is the present picture of New York’s Chinatown. “But once people start leaving or they’re too poor to eat Chinese food, once this critical mass of a consumer base is gone,” says Kwong, the area becomes devoid of its character. “A lot of Chinese building owners are refusing to rent to Chinese because they know they can get more from non-Chinese.”

Kwong doesn’t want to see the likes of San Francisco: “It’s all touristy and full of bad restaurants.” But it may come to that if restaurants and shops can no longer depend on a Chinese clientele, nor on a flow of non-Chinese regulars. “I witnessed the rise and fall of the new Chinatown,” says Kwong. “It’s depressing.”

Housing for low-income tenants remains a major concern for the area. It’s an old problem in this community, where immigrants, because of language barriers or illegal status, become easy prey for landlords, and it may be getting worse. “Key money,” a nonrefundable fee in addition to a security deposit, has been a long-standing tradition demanded by landlords. In 2000 the going rate was $5,000, according to CAAAV organizers who went on a door-knocking campaign to look at housing conditions. Today, they know families who pay $13,000 upfront for shabby apartments in rundown tenements. It’s a terrible burden, considering that nearly one-third of the area’s residents live below the poverty line.

CAAAV’s organizers found troublesome housing conditions—peeling paint, poorly lit hallways, untreated asbestos festering in the walls, bathrooms in hallways, bunk beds crowding little spaces. Conditions in Chinatown haven’t improved all that much since Jacob Riis wrote and photographed How the Other Half Lives over a century ago. By defaulting on repairs, landlords sometimes try to quietly push the low-rent tenants out; once these tenants leave, the landlords renovate and raise rents. Many housing advocates now spend every day in housing court translating for their clients.

The RCI doesn’t neglect housing. Shapiro explained that RCI would only build upwards if projects included mixed-income housing, and he mentioned a plan for a housing and community court modeled on a program in Red Hook that would provide translators for Chinatown residents entering arbitration with landlords. (Although the LMDC has embraced several RCI initiatives, Shapiro finds their support of this housing court highly unlikely.)

Again, community groups want more than mixed-income units. They want more than the typical 80-20 breakdown for market rate and affordable housing, and they want to change the rhetoric from “affordable housing” to low-income housing. Nowadays, “affordable” may mean $50,000 to $80,000, which advocates say is not affordable to most people in their community.

To fight for more housing, Wing Lam’s labor advocacy group has joined with other such groups, as well as religious institutions and small businesses, in forming the Lower East Side–Chinatown Consortium. The group also includes some garment factory owners, who in the past were targets of Lam’s antiexploitation campaigns but are now allies in the struggle for housing and jobs. The consortium, which bridges the Latino and Chinese communities, is looking at how federal funds are slipping through the LMDC’s fingers without the eastern part of Lower Manhattan getting what they think is its fair share.

The consortium has produced its own vision for the neighborhood that includes a heavy emphasis on health issues as a result of the toxic air caused by the dust and smoke at Ground Zero. The groups want a long-term health study and treatment program serving those living and working outside the immediate Ground Zero area, as well as health insurance for these folks, and they’ve started working with Bellevue Hospital’s asthma center on one such study and treatment program.

The groups also would like to see the LMDC residential grant program extended to 14th Street, to give some assistance to the thousands of low-income residents and small businesses shut out of the grants. The consortium is demanding government protections to prevent the displacement of residents in their communities, including preserving existing low-income housing and allocating rebuilding money for new low-income housing. And finally, they’d like to see job creation strategies and protections on the garment industry.

Bettina Damiani at Good Jobs New York agrees that the federal aid money isn’t flowing into the city’s East Side neighborhoods, and she’s criticized the LMDC’s West Side–leaning interests. According to a recent report her budget watchdog group put out, the majority of the $117 million in capital grants have gone to Tribeca and the Financial District neighborhoods, where the median family income is $110,000 compared to the Lower East Side and Chinatown, which have a median family income of $28,500. “We should be able to figure out how to address jobs and housing with about $2 billion,” says Damiani. “We’re not saying this is a magic wand, but it could put a dent in helping people benefit.”

Laine Romero-Alston, director of research and policy at the Urban Justice Center, is developing possible policy measures to help tenants in Chinatown resist gentrifying pressures. As many of these tenants may not have proper leases because they live with extended families and constantly move in and out to follow jobs, says Romero-Alston, “we’re finding the antidisplacement measures that do exist aren’t effective for Chinatown. So we have to figure something out, whether it’s a new piece of legislation or an adequate way to enforce the measures.” Like the consortium, the Urban Justice Center has also been following the funding of post-9/11 money. “Analyzing the 9/11 funds is like trying to disentangle this huge ball of wax,” says Romero-Alston. “We’re back tracking and following the money, and none of it’s really going to help the people in Chinatown who need it.”

Romero-Alston calls Chinatown the “last frontier” of Manhattan’s real estate development. “It’s been relatively quiet in Chinatown, but there’s a lot going on beneath the surface, or rather high above ground,” she says. “It feels like there are hawks flying overhead getting ready to dive in.”