This is What Community Looks Like: The Politicization of Community Under Urban Redevelopment in Chinatown, 1975-2005

• In Event: 40821 - Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 18. Urban (Re)Development

Abstract

Given histories of neighborhood demolitions, displacement, disinvestment, and reinvestment in primarily low-income and minority neighborhoods, government officials require community engagement to legitimize their policies as beneficial for the community. While theories on urban growth machines and urban regimes highlight the role of growth coalitions—made up of local government officials, rentier elites, businesses, and the media—in promoting unfettered growth at the expense of residents, they rarely analyze how community and resident groups become subsumed in growth coalitions through community development (Molotch 1978; Stone 1993). Doing so reveals how community groups with varying residential, social, cultural, and economic stake in the neighborhood attempt to balance development goals while responding to larger structures like the government, real estate and financial pressures, and conversely how the community development process shapes ethnic community and political identities. This paper traces the history of redevelopment in Los Angeles’ Chinatown from 1975-2005 to study how government officials, community groups, and private developers frame the community and its needs to push for their own redevelopment goals. I ask: How does the government conceptualize and enact community engagement in redevelopment? What power did community groups have to shape community redevelopment in Los Angeles’ Chinatown? Using archival government documents, community leaders’ archives, interviews, and newspaper articles, this paper traces the role Chinatown community members had in shaping redevelopment the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles and how the neighborhood and the city’s redevelopment strategies evolved in response to shifting federal funding, foreign investment, and demands from residents.

Author

• Victoria Tran, University of California-Los Angeles