Something is missing from Washington DC’s Chinatown. Of course we can all notice the elaborate friendship arch topped with characteristic pagoda style roofing, and the yearly Chinese New Year festival. There’s a handful of bustling restaurants and decorations throughout its streets, and Chinese characters adorn each of the storefronts and street signs throughout the few blocks that constitute this cultural icon in our nation’s capital. But despite the Chinese decor, Chinese shop displays, and Chinese food, what’s becoming increasingly hard to find in Chinatown are Chinese people. The very human beings responsible for the existence of this much loved and increasingly desirable destination for so many. And with recent news of plans to demolish Museum Square, one of the two remaining buildings still home to low-income residents in Chinatown as well as the majority of the district’s Chinese population, it seems that those left are being perpetually pushed towards displacement.
Museum Square sits at 401 K Street NW, today surrounded by many new buildings of luxury apartments and condos, grocery stores, restaurants from Subway to Sweetgreen to wine bars and gourmet eateries, all interspersed throughout a plethora of new development. The building holds a Section 8 subsidy contract, and families living in its 302 units pay rent that is adjusted to be no more than 30% of their average monthly income. This contract has preserved most of the only remaining rental housing in the neighborhood still available to low income residents in the face of a wave of development and soaring housing prices that leave no corner of Chinatown unturned.
In October of 2013 tenants received a notice explaining that the owner of the building intended to terminate their contract with HUD, thus ending all meaningful affordability requirements. More recently tenants were issued another notice which revealed plans to demolish the building. The notice also offered tenants of Museum Square the opportunity to purchase the property, and was posted throughout the building’s hallways per the provisions of DC’s Rental Housing Act. This act has made the district notorious for its “tenant-friendly” laws, which require that before any rental property in the district can be sold or demolished, it must first be offered to the tenants who call it home. Theoretically, this creates opportunities for tenant ownership and long term affordability of rental property in DC, and could be instrumental for tenants like those of Museum Square who wish to preserve their building as affordable. But it only seems that way before taking into account the $250 million that it would cost to acquire the building, which works out to just over $827,800 per unit. In reality, the astronomically inflated price tags that developers are able to attach to these properties in up-and-coming areas of the city often render tenant purchase rights virtually useless for tenant ownership, or to aid tenants in avoiding displacement by maintaining affordable rents throughout the city.
In addition to the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, or TOPA, owners of buildings where at least 25% of apartments have rents considered to be affordable are also required to issue DOPA notices. Per the District Opportunity to Purchase Act, properties that are home to low-income tenants are offered to the city before they can be sold or demolished (in addition to being offered to tenants) as another opportunity to preserve affordable rents in DC. But out of the vast majority of rental properties sold in the district each year which qualify as affordable based on rent levels, only a tiny fraction comply with this part of the law requiring that they be offered to the district. And of the few that have complied over the years and issued the appropriate notices to the district, the city has not sent a single response to a DOPA notice, rendering DOPA another of the district’s efforts to preserve affordable housing that doesn’t extend beyond paper. If it were actually utilized, DOPA could be a beneficial tool to protect its residents’ housing in the face of economic interests in development that cause hundreds upon hundreds of people to be displaced each year. But again, to date this tool goes completely unused.
Washington DC’s Chinatown hasn’t always been such an expensive hot spot in the city. Even before the recent wave of gentrification that has resulted in a rapid drop in the number of Chinese businesses and residents, Chinatown has had a turbulent history of displacement and endurance. During the development of the Federal Triangle, DC’s original Chinatown was uprooted completely. Once established in the blocks surrounding H and 7th Streets NW, the riots in 68 also took their toll on the neighborhood, causing many residents to permanently relocate to suburban areas of Virginia or Maryland. But even so, in 1990 Chinatown was still predominantly made up of low-income Asian residents and Asian owned businesses. As of 2010 the neighborhood was home to less than 20% Asian residents, the majority of which lived in Museum Square or Wah Luck. As one resident of Museum Square describes it, “we have endured so much. We lived in this neighborhood when it was not safe for us, when things were hard. We should now be able to see some of the fruits of our endurance. It is not fair for them to displace us like this. We must fight to stay here now.” Surely the long term residents of Museum Square are willing to fight in any way they can to preserve what for many of them has been their home for decades. Unfortunately, the infamous Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act may not be much help in their struggle to stand up to the determination and economic interests of developers, despite the justification of the act’s existence as a means available to tenants to try and protect their housing.
Ironically, all the authentically ‘Chinese’ elements that defined Chinatown and were indicative of its attractive urban cultural diversity are the same ones now being priced out of the area by its high desirability. An especially visual illustration of this can be found in the signage throughout the neighborhood. In accordance with a city mandate for cultural preservation of Chinatown, all stores and businesses must bear signs that display Chinese characters. In the face of such rampant gentrification, these Chinese characters become adornments for huge chain corporations like Starbucks and Urban Outfitters, and no longer signal locally owned businesses intended to serve the local community of primarily Asian low-income residents. Chinatown has become an Asian-themed amusement park for young professionals that continue to price long-term residents out of the neighborhood.
While the situation in Chinatown is certainly a chillingly illustrative depiction of the harsh effects of gentrification, we need only to zoom out slightly to see that Chinatown is not unique; in fact this is a city and country-wide phenomenon. As with Mount Pleasant, Petworth, and countless other neighborhoods, Chinatown has become a hot new urban commodity for those able to afford the luxury of living there, while long term residents, who along with their families and histories were part of the formation of this “cultural enclave”, continue to be incessantly pushed out. It is a process by which neighborhoods become empty, expensive shells of their former selves, and new residents get to wear the badge of “U Street” or “H Street” or “Chinatown” for free, no matter how high they pay in market rent.
