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Working from ethnographic fieldwork, Hom chronicles how Chinese Americans continue to gravitate to this space—despite being a geographically dispersed community—and how they have both resisted and encouraged processes of gentrification and displacement. The Power of Chinatown bridges understandings of community, geography, political economy, and race to show the complexities and contradictions of building community power, illuminating how these place-based ethnic politics might give rise to a more expansive vision of Asian American belonging and a just city for all.

Laureen D. Hom is an associate professor of urban and regional planning at San José State University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work is at the intersection of urban studies, ethnic studies, public policy, and public administration.

What motivated you to write the book?

I have always been interested in urban racial inequities and how communities construct a sense of place. During graduate school, I became more interested in how gentrification threatened spaces of community and how to resist forced displacement. At the time, there was limited scholarship in urban planning that centered the Asian American experience around gentrification. And not much on the older Los Angeles Chinatown even though I knew it had a thriving community.

I also have family roots in urban Chinatowns, specifically San Francisco Chinatown. I grew up visiting my maternal grandmother in Chinatown every Sunday. When she passed away in 2013, I realized that along with the loss of this older generation, I was losing part of my relationship with Chinatown.

Many urban Chinatowns at the time, including those in San Francisco and Los Angeles, were struggling with gentrification and displacement pressures. I was living in Southern California and wanted to get involved with my local community to build a new sense of home and focus my civic engagement (along with my research). As I was welcomed by different community leaders in Los Angeles Chinatown, I realized they had similar questions about the neighborhood. This community gave me the space to think through the intellectual and personal questions I had about the meaning of Chinatown for Chinese and Asian Americans today. 

Why are urban Chinatowns as spaces so important?

Urban Chinatowns are neighborhoods that have a rich history and have been important spaces for working-class immigrants to find housing, jobs, and social services through the community infrastructure. These spaces are undeniably necessary in recognizing the cultural diversity that defines urban areas. But they also ensure there is equity in cities—enabling those facing economic and cultural barriers to find opportunities to better their life outcomes.

Urban Chinatowns are also “complete neighborhoods” or “villages,” meaning that they have their own small, distinct ecosystem that consists of housing, businesses, and community and cultural institutions. All these different components are interconnected—the neighborhood is not purely a residential or commercial space. So, a change to one aspect of the neighborhood changes, impacts the other parts as well. This point is crucial to understanding the potential  ripple effects of changes to the neighborhood. And it can be applied to other neighborhoods as we find methods for equitable development.

What does the Los Angeles Chinatown, one of the oldest urban Chinatowns in the United States, teach us about building community power? What challenges does it reveal?

There is a long history of local activism and civic engagement in Los Angeles Chinatown, which highlights just how politically engaged Chinese and Asian Americans are and have been for a long time. The community has never been apolitical despite model minority myths! And much of that activism has been to represent and serve the community. As the political engagement has evolved and the Chinese American community has become more diverse in demographics and political interests, tensions have grown about how the community is represented in their activism and civic engagement. 

This is the core issue of my book. In a broad sense, building community power in Chinatown shows how local leaders and activists are grappling with diversity and pluralism in politics, but at a very localized level. They are trying to promote a unified voice for Chinatown, in ways that do not also homogenize the community. I observed firsthand how the community is trying to work with difference, and how at times that can lead to conflict, power imbalances, and disengagement among people. 

Despite these challenges, I also saw constant activities to bridge the community, especially ones that centered intergenerational community building. LA Chinatown has a long history of youth-based and youth-focused activism. Recently, the Chinatown Teen Council has emerged as a prominent group speaking out against gentrification and providing services to elders in the community. Engaging youth is a very effective way to build a foundation for ongoing community work that can be passed on to future generations.

What was a surprising or especially intriguing insight that came out of your research?

Embracing the emotional aspects of political engagement and the less tangible dimensions of gentrification was intriguing and quite challenging! Early in my fieldwork, I was at a public event and an older community leader introduced me to a city staff person. He told me that one of the hardest aspects of addressing gentrification was that it was an emotional issue for so many. This is not easily captured through numbers and statistics—the data used to make policy decisions. When I learned about conflict within the community as they fought to represent Chinatown on development issues, I also kept hearing about how it was highly emotional. I began to connect this to some of the critiques I heard about the new and proposed developments as not benefiting the community and seen as a force of gentrification, even if they were not directly displacing older buildings or people, and even at times providing some affordable housing units.

Rather than dismiss these actions and sentiments as “irrational,” I dug deeper into the emotions. I realized that these perceptions that people had about Chinatown did not consider the personal relationships that people had within the community and how some of these debates about neighborhood development in different forums would possibly strain these personal ties. I also found these emotions were due to a long history of exclusion from the political process and decision-making. This truly opened my eyes to a more expansive definition of gentrification that considered how political processes may lead to different types of forced displacement, from economic to cultural and political. And more specifically, I now consider how those political processes and mechanisms can cause social disruptions to the community, not just the actual development.

What is one thing you hope readers take away from the book?

I hope that readers, especially those who do not live in an urban Chinatown, see these neighborhoods with a different lens. Chinatowns are not just cultural spaces that represent Chinese and Asian American history or commercial spaces to eat and shop. They also represent the broader history of immigration and urban change in the United States. They are evolving, contemporary communities with people living and working in the neighborhood. Urban Chinatowns are neighborhoods that have also struggled alongside other marginalized communities to push back against gentrification and other social injustices. This change in view supports coalition building with other neighborhoods and allow us to envision neighborhood changes that are both community-driven and equitable.