Philadelphia’s Chinatown is a mere 0.3 square miles, a postage stamp community that nonetheless enjoys an impressive purchase on the city’s psyche. As Center City booms around it, this little ethnic enclave is changing radically. To help its residents adapt to the new day, Chinatown’s most prominent civic group just released a comprehensive plan for the neighborhood’s future.

Founded in 1969 to oppose a proposed route for the Vine Street Expressway that would have destroyed neighborhood landmarks, the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation (PCDC) is one of the city’s most sophisticated community groups. In addition fighting such existential perils, it engages in more quotidian planning and zoning efforts, including the new report released this week.

“Chinatown is a neighborhood that is constantly changing and adapting in order to survive,” said Sarah Yeung, director of planning for PCDC. “The key is to strike a balanced approach while at the same time not letting go of our values, which is to allow for community self-determination and to create an equitable community.”

Funded by the Wells Fargo Regional Foundation, this is Chinatown’s first comprehensive plan since 2004. Some concerns remain constant. Affordable housing is one of those necessities that is never fully addressed, especially in a neighborhood with scarce land and a steady stream of newly-arrived, often lower-income, immigrants.

The 2017 plan pays greater attention to the need for green space and safer access to available parks. Preserving the neighborhood’s light manufacturing sector is another new priority in the 2017 plan.

For years, the area north of the Vine Street Expressway, now most commonly known as Callowhill but considered Chinatown North to many, hosted many small factories and warehouses servicing the historic neighborhood’s many restaurants.

“Connecting Chinatown North to the historic core has always been the challenge for this Chinatown,” said Kathryn E. Wilson, Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University and author of the 2015 book Ethnic Renewal in Philadelphia’s Chinatown. “There was always Chinatown North [of Vine Street], but the expressway really cut off the top part of that community. A lot of what neighborhood planning has done since then is try to bridge that.”

That challenge is different than it used to be. Callowhill is undergoing a renaissance. The increasing number of old factories and warehouses being converted into condos and apartments, has led some developers to aspirationally call it “the Loft District.”

And that’s just one of the many dramatic changes to Chinatown documented in the report. Between 2000 and 2010. Chinatown’s population spiked from 1,975 to 4,537. Although it is still majority Asian, the percentage fell by 18.2 percent to only 54 percent, while the white population grew by 14.9 percent. The Chinese immigrant population, meanwhile, has diversified with an emergent Fujianese population and numerous dialects becoming evident beyond Cantonese (which has historically dominated Philadelphia’s Chinatown).