Displaced by Design: Growth, Race, and the Fight for Belonging in Koreatown and Monterey Park

• In Event: Migration and Place

Abstract

Questions about who benefits and who is displaced by gentrification and urban redevelopment remain the subject of ongoing public and academic debate. The paper considers the additional dimension of political displacement as a critical form of displacement that shapes growth politics and argues that to characterize these conflicts as one between money versus sentimental attachment or between white homeowners fending against Asian immigrant encroachment misses the multigenerational and multicultural complexities of ethnic communities, especially in diverse metropolitan regions. In recent years, some local governments have welcomed the influx of transnational capital and networks from new immigrant capitalists and entrepreneurs, who have revitalized and reinvested in neighborhoods that deteriorated in the wake of corporate flight and government disinvestment during the 1970s and 1980s.
We discuss the conditions that led to the decline and revitalization of select grassroots counter-movements among local Korean and Chinese American activists in urban growth politics. The case of Koreatown and Monterey Park demonstrate how the urban political landscape is made up of heterogeneous interest groups not only in respect to place, but also, political agendas and social belonging that can converge rentiers, business elite, and residents around common place-based causes. In Koreatown, resistance to unfettered development is rooted in institutional dynamics including fragmented organizational power, class divides within the Korean community, and struggles to assert public accountability within a large metropolitan political power structure. In the case of Monterey Park, the aging old guard was not replaced by a sustained slow-growth movement as a result of both demographic change and the absence of a durable institutional infrastructure capable of anchoring collective action as it did in Koreatown. We argue that issues of political empowerment and cultural preservation in these struggles are often intertwined with local people’s vision of home, community, and belonging in ways that engender coalitions and conflicts in unexpected ways.

Authors

• Angie Y. Chung, University at Albany, SUNY

• Jan C. Lin, Occidental College