Inside a church near Chinatown adorned with red and gold streamers last week, residents and advocates sketched posters to carry to the District’s annual Lunar New Year parade.
But instead of words of celebration, the posters displayed messages of protest in multicolored letters, reading, “No slack for slumlords” and “Chinatown needs small business support!” The postering was a part of an event hosted by Save Chinatown Solidarity Network DC — a grassroots, Asian American and Pacific Islander-led organization fighting against gentrification and displacement in DC’s Chinatown.
The gathering of about 100 attendees served as a Lunar New Year celebration and the culmination of the group’s year of collaboration with long-term residents, small business owners and working-class families to challenge the D.C. government’s revitalization proposals for Chinatown.
Cassie He, an organizer with the network, said advocates formed the group last year to argue that proposals from local officials lacked thorough community input and concrete plans to increase affordable housing and protect small businesses in Chinatown.
“The narrative we hear a lot around D.C. Chinatown is about how sad it is and about how it’s dying, which is true, but also at the same time, it is not a losing battle,” He said. “There are still residents here. There are still small businesses. And if we don’t take action now, then it’ll really die.”
The group’s fight spans back to January 2024, when Mayor Muriel Bowser launched the Gallery Place/Chinatown Task Force, composed of members — like Jodie McLean, the CEO of the retail real estate company EDENS, and Deborah Ratner Salzberg, a member of Uplands Real Estate Partners.
The team drafted a plan to revitalize the Gallery Place/Chinatown neighborhood through “8 Big Ideas,” including modernizing the Capital One Arena, building green spaces and converting 5.6 million square feet of space to add 16,500 new residents to the neighborhood.
A month later, Bowser released the highlights of the Downtown Action Plan, a 155-page document created by the DowntownDC and Golden Triangle Business Improvement Districts that underscores plans to solidify the area’s arts scene, invest $515 million into Capital One Arena and increase public safety to attract more visitors.
“As an existing cultural and entertainment district, Penn Quarter / Chinatown is a promising canvas, which presents opportunities for additional attractions moving forward,” the plan states.
Representatives from the Gallery Place/Chinatown Task Force and Downtown Action Plan did not return multiple requests for comment.
The Save Chinatown Solidarity Network’s seven “Bigger Ideas” include prioritizing AAPI-owned small businesses, increasing affordable housing and allowing working-class, long term residents to drive the decisions surrounding the future of their neighborhood.
The District’s current-day Chinatown was established in 1931 between 5th and 7th streets NW and expanded to include every block from G Street to Massachusetts Avenue and from 5th to 9th streets by the 1960s.
Over the years, factors like the 1997 construction of the Capital One Arena and increasing rent prices caused many residents to move to the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia. The neighborhood’s Chinese population dropped from a high of about 3,000 in the 1970s to 361 today and now lies between H and I streets and 5th and 8th streets, though its boundaries are frequently contested by long-term residents.
As residents and supporters from across the District entered the church for the Feb. 1 event, they mingled and enjoyed an array of traditional Chinese dishes like stir-fried noodles, shrimp dumplings and fried rice across the sun-soaked space.
The Hung Ci Lion Dance Troupe then performed a traditional lion dance to the beat of a drum and cymbals. The dancers, covered in an ornate, red lion costume, traveled through the crowd and threw lettuce onto the attendees as a sign of good luck. After the performance, the network’s teach-in ensued with a presentation of their collective’s mission and future vision for Chinatown.
Cassie He said the network’s event aimed to propose a “counter vision” for the future of Chinatown through their “Little Chinatown, Bigger Ideas” proposal while also celebrating the network’s one-year anniversary and the Lunar New Year.
She said the network, which now has about 40 to 50 regular volunteers and about 70 people involved overall, has had “casual conversations” with the task force, but they have not been able to schedule a formal meeting with the co-chairs since the task force’s inception a year ago.
“The task force themselves, the majority of them are land owners, none of them live in Chinatown, and a lot of them are developers, and so it’s just been really hard to have conversations with them,” He said.
He said the network is currently advocating for the predominantly elderly residents of Museum Square One, one of the two affordable housing buildings left in the neighborhood, as they face poor conditions like broken elevators and inconsistent access to hot water. She said the network is demanding that an affordable housing developer rebuild affordable units in the building and that in the interim, the landlord improves the conditions.
He added that the group is opposing the development of a nine-story luxury hotel on H Street that would push out two small businesses — Full Kee Restaurant and Gaoya Salon. She said the hotel developers have agreed to feature nine “pop-up shops” of small businesses in their retail space and the network is working to have “priority preference” over which businesses are chosen for those pop-ups.
“This has been a battle that’s been going on for a really long time, and so for long term residents and community members, I think it’s really exciting for them to have a voice,” He said.
Shani Shih, a founding member of the network, said the government aims to transform Chinatown into an “economic engine” of Downtown D.C. by increasing the number of residents and real estate development, while the network aims to center the needs of Chinatown residents and advocating for them to direct the decisions surrounding their neighborhood.
“Our mission is to amplify the voices and the anti-displacement efforts of the long term working class residents of Chinatown,” Shih said. “When it comes to this moment that we’re in right now, what we are facing is our city government, right, pouring billions of dollars of public funding into a revitalization agenda.”
Grace Ng, who said she started volunteering with the network a few months ago, said she saw a stark contrast between the “thriving” Chinatowns in her hometown of New York City and where she went to school in the Bay Area of California and the District’s Chinatown, as the D.C. neighborhood continues to fight gentrification and the displacement of residents.
Residents and advocates for Chinatowns in cities across the country are also working to bolster tenants’ rights and resist property developments amidst ongoing threats of gentrification.
“I think, always, small changes or big wins for us,” Ng said. “And I think I just hear a lot of stories about how the tenants themselves are very happy that we’re here to rely on us. I don’t know, I think just having people that are willing to fight the good fight with them.”
