While thinking about the settlement of Asian residents in Chinatown, one must consider its role as an ethnic enclave. It means that there is a great percentage of the residents sharing the ethnic and cultural identity, as well as their economic activity.
As you walk down the streets of Boston Chinatown, you cannot help to notice the advertisements and brands in Chinese, to smell the sense of ethnic food, to hear people speaking languages such as Mandarin and Cantonese. Yet for a group of residents with lower incomes and limited English, they are facing a real problem in this constructed exotic enclave: housing. With the gentrification of the city, the rent of the neighborhood is reaching an unaffordable price for those who live here.
“My clients with less earnings are coming for government housing, which has a very limited amount,” says Mei, a housing specialist at Asian American Civil Association. “I add their name in the waiting list, yet it will take five to 10 years for people to move out of their current houses. There are limits on affordable housing available in Chinatown, those housing are called subsidized housing, and almost all of these types of housing are already full capacity as the housing authority no longer accepts any more waiting lists.”
With the increased housing price in the neighborhood, the residents in Chinatown are dealing with the situation in a variety ways. While some of the low-income residents are moving out to areas such as Quincy and Malden for cheaper prices, the rest stay in Chinatown in tolerant ways. This is because many of them are recent immigrants with limited English capacity. For this group of people, they have to live with their social networks with people speaking their language.
Therefore, some people choose to live with roommates at a cheaper price, yet it does not guarantee a comfortable living environment. The roommates with lower incomes sleep on the couch in their dining room. The overcrowded families are becoming a severe problem within these days.
S is a middle-aged man living with his parents. Their family is in low economic status. Their landlord illegally divided a separate floor into a two-floor building. When an AACA staff tries to apply for an internet benefit for S’s family, their home address cannot be found. This is because they are living in an address that is illegally constructed. After S moved out of his family, he rented an apartment with 5 people his age. It is also illegally divided by the landlord. S still does not have the right to apply for the internet benefit.
Most of the lower-income groups are struggling to live in a stable place. What will be the next steps?
In February, with the funding received from the Mayor’s Office, BlueHub Capital and Local Initiatives Support Corporation Boston, the Asian Community Development Corporation, a non-profit organization in Boston Chinatown, purchased a privately owned building to overcome some people’s housing difficulties. The address is 64-68 Beach Street. It is a six-story building located in Chinatown with a restaurant at ground-floor and 14 residential units. Once the project is done, 100 units of affordable housing will be open for the Chinatown residents.
“And here in Boston’s Chinatown, we do see that the housing crisis is so critical that we need all the tools that we can lay our hands on,” says Angie Liou, the executive director of ACDC. “So we will continue to build new affordable housing, because there isn’t enough, but we also want to continue this new strategy, which is trying to buy what’s already out there. And in some ways you can think of it as once we, a nonprofit, buy it, it’s in effect taking it off of the speculative market.”
In the meantime, gentrification is becoming a problem in Chinatown, with the demographic change with more white residents in the neighborhood, and the increased tourism due to its role and a historic town. The number of condominiums are increasing. A search for the rental price of Chinatown apartments on the rental website Zillow primarily shows expensive condominiums instead of lower-priced apartments. According to Zillow, prices of the studios are ranging from $2,000 – $3,945, and the prices of the 1-bedrooms are ranging from $3,745 – $4,291. There is a clear contradiction that exists between different classes. On the one side, people are crowding in the illegally divided apartments with no access to the social benefits. On the other side, the individuals are living in the single studios alone, paying expensive rents. At the same time, the landlords increased the rents of their apartments, which were once affordable for the low-income people. The rest of the buildings upgraded their equipment and raised the rents.