CPCS Professor Seeks Something Concrete for Chinatown Residents

By Anne-Marie Kent

At noon, Chinatown's narrow streets are bustling with Boston workers on lunch break. Evenings, the enclave is alive with diners searching for the perfect meal. However, if UMass Boston professor Andrew Leong has his way, Chinatown will be known for more than its menus.

Leong is chair of the Campaign to Protect Chinatown. Most people, particularly policymakers, says Leong, simply don't see residential Chinatown. In his CPCS and Asian American Studies classes, he often uses a self-guided tour to help students realize that there's "actually a living community here aside from the restaurants."

This community, says Leong, is threatened by gentrification. About three years ago, developers proposed building "Liberty Place," the largest rental-housing complex in Boston since the early 1980s in Chinatown. Its more than 400 luxury units offered very little to Chinatown residents. The median annual income in Chinatown, says Leong, is currently only $14,000.

Leong asks, "Why do we need to save space for working-class immigrants?" He explains that historically all Chinatowns have acted as "waystations," facilitating the acculturation of new immigrants. "Contained within this one community you have all the basic necessary services: job placement, English language classes, citizenship classes, all the things you really need to advance yourself." Destroying these opportunities, says Leong, means forcing new immigrants to "fend for themselves."

Leong points to the effects of gentrification in similar neighborhoods, like Boston's North End, where the working-class immigrant Italian community has largely been displaced by a wealthier community of "yuppies" willing to pay high prices to live close to downtown streets. Gentri-fication, says Leong, destroys the "working-class fabric" of communities.

Leong is a longtime advocate of Chinatown's working class. As a UMass Boston professor, he helps students understand the issues firsthand. Several years ago, Leong and CPCS Professor Marie Kennedy co-taught a project titled "Building Chinatown for Chinatown." Students analyzed various proposed developments, focusing on benefit to the community. During the 2002 summer session, some of Leong's students participated in the protests against Liberty Place while others watched closely from the sidelines.

"They saw the real faces of this community," says Leong.

One of Leong's students, CPCS graduate Har Yee Wong, was instrumental in the formation of the Chinatown Residential Association, the first-ever wholly residential group in Chinatown.

The settlement Leong and other community organizers reached with the city and with the Liberty Place developers includes formal recognition of this group, plus a set-aside number of "affordable housing" units. Developers now must approach both the Chinatown Residential Association as well as the long-standing Chinatown Neighborhood Council, whose membership includes few Chinatown residents.

Leong says that the hope of a dual review process and the power given to the residents is "meaningful enough and substantial enough for us to allow them to build 28 stories."

"The residents will get power and affordable housing will be built," says Leong.

"That's something concrete."

Image: Andrew Leong shares his advocacy work for Chinatown with his students and community organizers to help reshape awareness of the area's cultural history and residential needs. (Photo by Harry Brett)

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