Displacement through Gentrification

Rising commercial and residential property costs spatially and economically exclude working-class residents and small businesses who cannot afford to participate in a city’s economic growth. The poor and their community spaces are seen as deviant and invaluable for their inability to be productive or profitable. Our system of capitalism prioritizes profits over people.

There is a growing economic and social divide between the working-class community members and the new wealthier, and often white, professionals and artists in Chinatown. This speaks to the ways in which governments and government-like private and public institutions, such as the non-profit Chinatown Business Improvement District, render some people visible (and valuable) and others invisible (and not valuable) through the promotion of gentrification. Business Improvement Districts are often a tool of gentrification, participating in the increasing criminalization and privatization of urban cities. Working closely with both local governments and private investors, they play a large role in the decision-making processes of urban redevelopment. With property owners sitting on their boards and a lack of engagement with working-class residents, are they truly representative or accountable to the needs and wants of the rest of the neighborhood?

A key and inherent element of gentrification is the displacement of low-income people of color and homeless communities through increased rents, evictions, and criminalization and aggressive policing, the latter of which disproportionately impacts black and brown folks. In Chinatown, gentrification threatens to indirectly and directly displace existing informal economies, small family-owned businesses, cultural institutions, and the significant population of seniors, tenants, and immigrants. More than 41% of the population lives in poverty,⁷ but more spaces are made inaccessible and unaffordable for residential and commercial tenants, forcing them to leave Chinatown because of rising rents. Public spaces are increasingly being policed by private security who are hired by the Chinatown Business Improvement District. They have harassed street vendors, musicians, and homeless individuals who make up the community.

In Chinatown, gentrification takes place in the form of wine bars and micro hotels (with nightly rates of $1,199) to new proposals for microbreweries and mixed-use complexes such as the 770-unit College Station Project by Altas Capital Group and the 920-unit Elysian Park Lofts by Lincoln Property and S&R Partners that all appear to be 100% market-rate housing. This disregards the livelihoods of existing working-class immigrant residents and the needs and demands for culturally appropriate health and social services, community gathering spaces, grocery markets, and quality low-income housing. When residential projects and new businesses are developed solely to attract and cater to “a younger, more privileged and upwardly mobile demographic,”¹ gentrification is economic investment in a new demographic of affluent individuals and businesses at the exclusion of the existing poor community.