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 . . . → Read More: Chinatown to Lose More Affordable Housing