When Pei Ying Yu and Yan Nong Yu learn they have to leave their apartment immediately, it comes as a sudden shock even though they’ve been dreading it for months. It’s January 28, 2015, the day after a blizzard hit Boston. The schools are closed and the governor told commuters to stay home. Along the narrow streets of Chinatown, the owners of grocery shops and bakeries shovel sidewalks while pedestrians climb over snowbanks, everyone displaying the exaggerated courtesy of neighbors getting through a minor disaster together.
Pei Ying is in her sixties; she came to the U.S. in 2008. Her younger sister followed two years later. Both speak very little English and make under $12 an hour as home health aides. Their apartment, which they’ve lived in since 2013 and share with another roommate, is part of a broken-down row house building at 103 Hudson St. When a new landlord bought the building in mid-January, the Yus knew he’d have a lot of work to do to bring it up to code. That meant he would need to move them, and the rest of the tenants, into a hotel for a while.
The two sisters stand in front of their old apartment building.
Kieran Kesner for BuzzFeed News
The sisters are at their jobs when they get the news. Yan Nong hadn’t been home since the day before — she was snowed in at a client's house. After work, they cram their clothes, clean or dirty, into plastic trash bags and talk about what might happen next. It isn’t just the inconvenience of being temporarily relocated to a hotel that worries the Yus. They wonder if, once they leave their home, they’ll ever be allowed to move back.
Boston’s Chinatown, home to around 12,000 people, takes up a quarter of a square mile near the center of Boston — an area that’s in the midst of a luxury housing boom. Seven blocks away, a new, towering apartment building, The Kensington, is asking more than $4,000 a month for an 822-square-foot one-bedroom, more than five times the $700 that the Yus and their roommate pay.
While the Yus and their neighbors pack up, community organizer Karen Chen talks with them about their next steps. She and a half-dozen volunteers document the possessions tenants will have to leave behind, make calls to the media, and hand out signs to supporters who joined them: "Stop Corporate Greed" and "This Is Our Home" and "We Shall Not Be Moved."
Chen is co-director of the Chinese Progressive Association, a group that's been at the forefront of a fight to keep Boston's Chinatown from disappearing. The CPA was founded in 1977 to work on issues, from housing to employment, that concerned Chinese-Americans in Greater Boston. Its small headquarters, just a few blocks from the Yus’ home, is often crowded with older Chinese-speaking local residents volunteering or seeking help. It also draws younger Chinese-American volunteers from all over the area, many of them high school and college students who have never lived in Chinatown but have strong ties to the neighborhood through their families.
Source: BRA, Chinatown Master Plan 2010; apartmentguide.com
As the protesters chant and sing in front of the building's steps, the person they’re protesting walks over to stand on the sidelines. Tim O'Callaghan, a former firefighter whose real estate company, First Suffolk LLC, had bought the old brick row house, is visibly flummoxed.
"I just want for you to understand," he tells the protesters. "I’m a humanist. I'm not a pig."
O'Callaghan's a longtime Boston developer, middle-aged with stubble and blue jeans, a pair of reading glasses perched on his baseball cap. He’s built his business for years while serving in the fire department, and since retiring in 2011 he’s been at it full-time.
He says the protesters have him all wrong. He’s a good guy. He works 12-hour days. In a different time and place, he says, he'd be standing with the tenants against big, unscrupulous developers. “People sell buildings in South Boston every day in Back Bay,” he continues. “What makes Chinatown any different?” Consequently, “I think this is harassment, what [the protesters] are doing.”
For O'Callaghan, the argument is straightforward: The previous owners left it an uninhabitable mess, so, by rehabilitating it, he’s doing the tenants a favor. "It's a shame a building could sit here 75 years being in that condition,” he explains. No one is debating that part: The city even filed criminal charges against the previous owners on account of the structural violations. What the protesters contest is whether the current tenants will ultimately benefit from those improvements. Chen says the plan is for the work to take six to nine months while O’Callaghan (who addresses her as a "beautiful woman") puts the tenants up in a hotel.
Source: Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, 2013
It’s a pattern becoming more and more familiar in the transitioning neighborhood. A 2013 report by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) found that the absolute number of Asian residents in Boston’s Chinatown actually increased a little in recent decades, as tall apartment and condo buildings nearly doubled the neighborhood’s population. Yet the overall percentage of Asian residents in Boston's Chinatown fell from 70% to 46% between 1990 and 2010. And the economic discrepancies between the two groups are extreme: The typical Asian household in the neighborhood made $13,057 in 2009, while the typical white one made $84,255. When a new residential project across from the Yu’s building designated 95 affordable units, it received more than 4,000 applications.
And it isn’t just Boston. Gentrification is not a new reality in American cities, but it is reshaping the country’s Chinatowns at a rapid pace. In New York City’s, strong community organizations and ownership of buildings by Chinese associations have helped stem the loss of housing for immigrants, but local advocacy groups say displacement is still a looming threat; a recent Vocativ analysis found that Chinese-Americans in NYC’s Chinatown dropped from 55 to 49% between 2009 and 2014. The shift in Philadelphia’s Chinatown has been even more dramatic, dropping from 74 to 48% in that same period. In Washington, D.C.’s Chinatown, there are only 300 Chinese-American residents left, down from a peak of 3,000 in 1970. The area’s still a tourist destination with Chinese restaurants, and a city regulation means that all businesses in the area have Chinese signage — you can find a Hooters with a sign in English and Chinese characters. But the local Chinese grocery stores and bakeries have all shut down.
“That is our nightmare,” says Andrew Leong, an associate professor of law, social justice, and Asian American studies at University of Massachusetts, Boston, who co-authored the AALDEF study. “That’s our warning sign. That’s what we do not want our Chinatowns, our living communities, to turn into.”
As the rally continues, several members of the local press approach O'Callaghan and he declines comment. But then, as Pei Ying Yu takes the mic to tell her story, he suddenly interrupts to call to the reporters: "She can move back in the building. You can put that on record.” State law requires that tenants displaced for a building rehab be allowed to return, he says. (Which is sort of true: Were O’Callaghan to evict the tenants that day, they could have protested due to the building’s code violations. But no-fault evictions are legal in Massachusetts, so once the building is repaired, he’ll be within his rights to evict the tenants and raise rents.)
But O'Callaghan insists it isn't just a matter of following the law. "We're not looking to displace the people," he promises, as the tenants pack their belongings inside. "They're going to move back in. They're coming back. They're not going to get screwed."
Kieran Kesner for BuzzFeed News
The Yus’ apartment is part of a few blocks of row houses, dotted with produce stands and tiny grocery stores and wedged between Tufts hospital, a DoubleTree Hotel, and the I-90–I-93 interchange. Nearby, in the shadow of growing high-rise apartment buildings just a few blocks from Boston Common, is a cluster of hot pot and dumpling restaurants with bright red and yellow signs. There are a couple chain stores — a CVS, a Boston Pizza — but also social clubs where new immigrants get help translating paperwork and finding jobs. At the local public elementary school, students learn English and Mandarin and celebrate Chinese festivals.
Hemmed in by poverty and discrimination in the 1870s, Chinese immigrant workers settled in a neighborhood that was home to a series of impoverished immigrant groups: Syrians, Jews, Irish, and Italians. Riddled by railroad tracks and terminals, it was one of the worst places in the city to live. Chinese residents put up laundries and restaurants, building what would be a center of Asian-American life in New England for more than a century.
In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act barred most Chinese women and children from immigrating, leaving the neighborhood a little world made up almost entirely of men. So local leaders built a system of family associations: surrogate uncles and nephews and cousins bound together in mutual support by a common family name. That same exclusion helped give rise to organized crime; a 1974 city decision to locate a red-light district known as the Combat Zone right next door to Chinatown also stoked Bostonians’ concerns that it was a dangerous place to live. But those worries dissipated as crime fell throughout the city over the past two decades. Since 2005, dozens of neighborhood volunteers in blue vests have been patrolling the streets in the evenings, helping to keep illegal activity down.
A man reads a community bulletin board in Chinatown where local announcements, job notices, news items, and cultural events were posted.
Boston Globe / Getty Images
Chuck Kwong, an upstairs neighbor of the Yus who’s around their age but has lived in Chinatown much longer, recalls the neighborhood as he found it when he first moved to Boston in the early '70s. He'd been able to rent an apartment with friends for $100 a month — worth it even though they spent very little time there. He'd work at restaurants on Cape Cod, staying in boarding houses owned by his employer. On his days off, he returned to the apartment and spent hours wandering through Chinatown, stopping at restaurants and bakeries and social clubs where locals played mahjong.
But the neighborhood was already starting to get squeezed. Between the 1950s and 1970s, state and local governments built roads through Chinatown, knocking down homes and businesses. Urban renewal projects razed apartment buildings and replaced them with hospital and medical school buildings. Then, with the turn of the new millennium, luxury condos and apartments sprang up. Today, Kwong says, the social clubs are still filled with old-timers, but for the most part, new immigrants who could use their support can't find anywhere to live in Chinatown.
From one perspective, what’s happening is just part of life in a dynamic, thriving city.
“It is natural and it needs to happen,” says Skip Schloming, executive director of the Small Property Owners Association, a Boston-area landlords’ group. “The neighborhood needs to adjust to what’s needed.”
Schloming says it’s common for old buildings with low rents to deteriorate because the owners don’t have money for proper repairs. A booming housing market means landlords have the incentive to make improvements, but only if they’re able to charge higher rents. If that means displacing lower-income tenants, Schloming argues, the city should provide relocation services, helping tenants to find apartments in more affordable neighborhoods where they can reconstitute their local communities.
To some extent, that kind of relocation of the community is already happening, with many Chinese immigrants now living in the Boston suburbs of Malden and Quincy. But Leong, the UMass professor, says these Chinese enclaves are too diffuse to replicate Chinatown.
It's something the Yus themselves had experienced prior to moving to Boston. They grew up together in China’s Guangdong province, but took different routes to America as middle-aged adults. Pei Ying's a tiny, gregarious woman who usually wears jeans, graying hair tied up in a practical bun. She was an accountant before she left Guangdong for Atlanta, where her grown son still lives. Yan Nong, the more shy of the two, headed to San Diego, a longtime destination for Chinese immigrants. Yet without cars, U.S. work experience, or strong English proficiency, both sisters struggled to adapt to life in cities without major Chinatowns.
Acquaintances insisted that things were different in Boston. When they arrived, they were thrilled to find streets densely packed with shops catering to Chinese tastes and a bus and subway system that let them travel independently to jobs. In the midst of the tight real estate market, it was their new network of friends in Chinatown that helped them find the apartment at 103 Hudson.
"You can take transportation everywhere," Pei Ying Yu says. "Lots of agencies in Chinatown can read over letters for you. It's very easy. There's a lot of places to learn English as well."
Beyond practical conveniences, she says, there’s a sense of comfort in Boston’s Chinatown that she and her sister hadn’t found in other American cities. She said that, if it weren’t for housing issues, she wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Boston to any Chinese immigrant.
“I would say to them that coming to Boston will be just like going home, because everything you find at home you can find here in Boston,” she says. “You don’t have a language barrier. You step out your door, you’re going to have access to Chinese people.”
Kieran Kesner for BuzzFeed News
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