Will There Still Be Chinatowns in Utopia?

(Source: Unsplash/. c.)

We're living in an age of monomania. If you hang around online, you’ll see lots of people adopt a persona consisting of one principle that they just crank up to 11 and apply to everything. The incentives of social media encourage having a shtick—it’s why people are K-Pop Stans or Swifties. It’s usually harmless.

In the realm of politics, though, this results in some really stupid discourse among people who seem determined to overfit a tidy ideological principle to the messiness of the real world. The real world, like it or not, is a thicket of contradictions.

For example, how should we view ethnic or cultural enclaves in cities? How can we reconcile the obvious value that they provide with the fact that many of these neighborhoods owe their existence to segregation or discrimination? What kind of claim does a particular minority group have to these places, and how should that claim inform public policy? Or should it? Can we balance the need for a city to be open, accommodating, and in constant flux with the desire of communities within that city to hold on to spaces that are uniquely theirs—even if that means excluding others?

These are very hard questions. Only a monomaniac would insist that they have simple answers.

Will a Post-Racism Utopia Have Chinatowns?

It’s a completely 101-level observation to look at American cities and see the grave harm done by policies designed to exclude people on the basis of who they are. This harm is a through line from Jim Crow laws and the Chinese Exclusion Act, to 20th-century redlining, to the more insidious contemporary version: rules that, while they don’t single anyone out on the basis of race, religion, or culture, render neighborhoods so expensive and exclusive that they are functionally segregated by those other attributes, as well.

It's equally true that many of the communities that have arisen in response to segregation and exclusion have become tremendous sources of social support and empowerment for their members. Consider the “Black Wall Streets” that popped up around the Jim Crow South (and in the often equally segregated North), the Chinatowns of the West Coast, the countless immigrant enclaves that dot America’s newer cities and suburbs. Consider late-20th-century “gayborhoods” like San Francisco’s Castro district; Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn; Somalis in Minneapolis; Vietnamese in Orange County. These enclaves, dominated by minority groups who face discrimination or unique challenges in the broader society, are focal points of community solidarity; of entrepreneurship and wealth building; of art, music, and culture; of the preservation of language and tradition.

If the discrimination and the racism all went away, would those enclaves still be valued? I think they would.

I’ll go further: Ethnic neighborhoods enrich and enliven cities in ways that create immense value for the city as a whole. A city without its pockets of unique culture would be a lesser city. I don't think that’s even a controversial opinion. Except on Twitter, whose whole currency is controversy.

I know, I know. Twitter is an ugly funhouse-mirror version of the things real people think and say. All the incentives are to be a monomaniac, to instigate and join pile-ons, and to take others’ ambiguous words in the worst possible reading. In this case, though, a run-of-the-mill Housing Twitter fight was illuminating about blind spots that many people have regarding urban planning and policy, and that makes it worth writing about.

A user with the handle rad_planner, whose name is apparently Josh and whose bio describes him as a “Communist, Queer, and Professional Urban Planner,” ignited a firestorm with a series of tweets, the first of which reads:

in an ideal society, there would still be cultural neighborhoods that provide exclusive, safe spaces for those cultures to be preserved and to grow. believing that these clusters would be better if integrated into whiteness/heteronormativity is of a settler mindset.

Almost 700 people quote-tweeted Josh, overwhelmingly to mock or angrily denounce him or both. The common themes were that he was defending segregation, proposing something that the Apartheid regime in South Africa might have smiled upon, or perhaps the Nazis. (Godwin’s Law is alive and well.)

Try to set aside whatever gut reaction you have to the language of Josh’s tweet, which is the jargon of left-wing social justice movements (“whiteness,” “settler,” etc.). Think about what he’s saying. The heart of his claim is that an ideal society would contain many cultures, not one homogenous culture. And that there ought to be space for those cultures to call home in the physical world.

The outrage relies on an outlandish reading of what he actually wrote. Much of the controversy hinged on Josh’s use of the word “exclusive.” Many of his critics read that word as a call for neighborhoods officially reserved for those of a particular ethnic or cultural group, where those who don’t belong to that category could be prevented from, say, renting an apartment or starting a business. Never mind that that is not the plain meaning of the sentence, which refers to “neighborhoods that provide exclusive, safe spaces,” not that are themselves such spaces.

I don’t want to digress into a lesson in sentence diagramming. But the reasonable reading of this is not a stretch. I, a white descendant of Scandinavians and Germans who immigrated to Minnesota in the 19th century, can visit the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis, which has become a Somali immigrant enclave in recent decades. I can even live there. But If I have reason to walk into a mosque, I am going to do so with a lot of deference and humility, because I am a guest and outsider in that space. There is nothing sinister about this. This is how I read “neighborhoods that provide exclusive spaces”—by allowing members of a community who require and make use of such spaces to live in physical proximity to each other.

Part of why Josh’s critics conjured up fantasies of armed paramilitaries patrolling an ethnic neighborhood to keep white tech bros out, or perhaps of a Chinese-style system of migration quotas and internal passports, is not anything he said, but a larger blind spot that afflicts the discourse about cities and planning.

Who Owns the Neighborhood?

Is local control good or bad? Is the maintenance of community character a valid pursuit or a nefarious one? Those phrases are shibboleths—code for a whole, larger set of beliefs and assumptions—and how you react to them may depend on which monomania you subscribe to.

It’s currently in vogue among urbanist (and especially YIMBY) commentators to be opposed to “local control.” Not a little bit opposed, but maximally so. “Community Input is Bad, Actually,” says a 2022 headline in The Atlantic. The growing conviction of a lot of advocacy organizations and individuals is that states should simply preempt local authority over zoning and development.

And look, it’s not hard to recognize the pitfalls of “local control” as practiced in cities. Today’s housing crisis owes more than a little to the exclusionary policies by which a wide range of mostly affluent communities have granted themselves an effective veto over new development. “Local control” is the rallying cry of the owner of a $2 million house seeking to ensure that nobody builds any more homes nearby that might render her own less of an exclusive idyll. The structure of local government, from unrepresentative community input processes to roadblocks in the development approval process, favors the interests of the angriest opponents of change, who will always find it easier to mobilize and act collectively than the beneficiaries. (The benefits, as a rule, are more diffuse.)

As I have pointed out before, this “vetocracy” represents an impoverished understanding of local control: a stunted, limited, defensive idea of what it should mean for a local community to be empowered. It’s worthy of condemnation.

“Neighborhood character” is a curse word among those who have seen it used primarily as the rallying cry of the wealthy and privileged in defense of their privileges. Yet neighborhood character (no scare quotes) is a real thing. And an important one. Just head down to Chinatown to witness that.

The very best places are outgrowths of the very particular communities that live in them. Intricate webs of ties—social capital—allow people with a shared community to help each other prosper. None of that happens without empowering locals to shape their places, and without ensuring them some continuity: that they won’t be displaced or priced out or excluded from decisions that affect them.

Monomania causes smart people to take a valid insight—the fact that appeals to preserve a place for its existing residents are often weaponized to further harmful, exclusionary aims—and vastly overextend it. To the point where an observation like Josh’s, which speaks of preserving a neighborhood’s culture, smacks of “neighborhood character,” which smacks of “local control,” which smacks of Very Bad Indeed.

It’s much harder to grapple with the contradiction: that we must do two things at once. We must ensure that cities can adapt, grow, change, and be welcoming places to generations of residents who don’t need from them the same things their forebears needed.

And yet we must also find a way to empower and protect those rooted in a place from being uprooted against their will.

Conservation, Not Preservation

A good-faith line of criticism of Josh's tweet was that which simply asked: What policies would you actually put in place to protect the character of these cultural or ethnic neighborhoods? After all, if you're not talking about some sort of coercive system, then presumably outsiders to the dominant community would be free to buy property or rent an apartment in these neighborhoods, and to compete on the open market for those spaces. And surely if enough people did that over time, the place could lose its unique character.

That is, in fact, the usual history of such places. The Mission district, a lively Latin American immigrant community in San Francisco that has been undergoing dramatic gentrification, used to be an Irish enclave. Historic LGBTQ neighborhoods often arose as part of cycles of white flight, disinvestment and gentrification. Neighborhood change is natural, goes this line of thinking. What are you going to do about it?

In answering that, there is a huge amount of middle ground between “internal passports” and “let the market rip.” As in all things to do with cities, it is useful to look to ecology for wisdom. This is a subtle linguistic difference, but it’s helpful to think of conservation—not preservation—of neighborhood cultures. Conservation is what you do to something living and evolving. Preservation is taxidermy.

How do conservationists approach an ecosystem under stress? The answer is not to seek to control all change, but rather to limit its pace, mitigate its disruption, and allow for continuity. You might take steps to limit the conditions (for example, forest edges where logging has occurred, or dams which alter a wetland’s hydrology) that invite invasive species which will destabilize the ecosystem. You might also encourage the growth of native species that you know are crucial to the stability of the ecosystem.

In the human world, we can identify policies that would mitigate the flow of what Jane Jacobs called cataclysmic money into a neighborhood: a flood of outside investment that tends to scour and replace whatever social and economic ecosystem was there, instead of building upon it. Cities can implement anti-displacement policies like rent stabilization, and legal protections against eviction under abusive pretexts or pressure tactics. Institutions like community land trusts are bottom-up efforts to get some land in a neighborhood into the hands of non-profit organizations with an anti-displacement mission. In general, land-use and development regulations can be reformed to encourage distributed and local property ownership and discourage large-scale speculation and wholesale redevelopment. All of these things and much more are part of a conservation toolkit for culturally unique places: one that doesn’t put a neighborhood under glass, but does mitigate change and allow for continuity.

Ecology teaches us that change isn't really the problem. Neighborhoods, like ecosystems, do change, and in fact were never meant to be unchanging. There is no single snapshot in time of a place that represents its authentic, eternal character. 100 years from now, Chinatown may not be Chinatown, but there's decent money on the idea that there will be a Chinatown. Even now, new cultural enclaves are popping up in the strip-mall suburbs, like Atlanta’s Buford Highway.

This recognition also helps us get beyond the other pitfall of recognizing the ethnic or cultural character of a community, which is the risk that that character becomes something that is fetishized or preserved in a very artificial way. This is certainly part of the story with Chinatowns in America, which are usually tourist destinations. If Chinese restaurants are closing in large numbers, it is in large part due to the changing needs and circumstances of the Chinese community itself. Not something to lament.

Change itself is not a cataclysmic experience for communities. It's when it happens too fast for the web of social ties to adapt, stretch, and re-form, and so instead it gets ripped apart.

There's a saying about falling off a cliff: that it's not the fall that kills you, but the sudden stop at the end. More precisely, it's not the stop that kills you, either. It’s the deceleration. Our bodies have no problem going from 100 miles per hour to zero, but doing so in a single second is certain to be a traumatic experience.

We need to get past talking about these things in absolutes. Neighborhood change or neighborhood stasis, local control or top-down everything, mobility or segregation, community or autonomy. That’s hard in the era of the shouty Twitter pile-on. It was probably hard before that, too.

The toughest lesson for anyone who wants to change the world is that, in the end, you don’t get to. A better world can only arise as an emergent thing, the product of many hands and even more decisions. In some senses, I think some of those who read violence and atrocities (“Hukou! Internal passports!”) into a fairly innocuous tweet about cultural neighborhoods were telling on themselves. Not that they themselves wish violence, but that they struggle to imagine any way of bringing about a different society other than by top-down dictate or at the barrel of a gun.

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