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A HOW-TO GUIDE FOR FIGHTING BIG DEVELOPMENT

For decades, Chinatown has created a blueprint for fighting big development, with the Sixers’ proposed arena as their latest target. Here’s how they do it.

T-shirts for sale during a No Arena in Chinatown protest at 10th and Arch Streets in Philadelphia, on Sunday, Dec. 25.Monica Herndon / Staff Photographer

For 150 years, Philadelphia’s Chinatown has fought to preserve its existence and authenticity as big development project after project targeted the neighborhood — from the Vine Street Expressway, to a federal prison, a casino, and now, the proposed Sixers’ arena.

Many community members believe the arena — which would be situated on the southern border of the neighborhood, just six feet away from a Chinatown business — is a new shape of the same threat the community has battled for generations: gentrification, lower quality of life, and cultural erasure.

Today, Chinatown is one of the few remaining communities of color and low-income communities in Philadelphia’s downtown core, and one of the only authentic Chinatowns left in the country. That’s largely thanks to the significant organizing the community has done over the decades with an unusually high success rate — which has set an example for other marginalized communities to follow in their own fights.

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“From proposed @Phillies stadium to casinos, Chinatown residents consistently punch above their weight,” public policy consultant Faye Anderson tweeted this month. “Their determination was inspiration for those of us who successfully blocked @TempleUniv from building a football stadium in the middle of a Black neighborhood.”

We asked some members of Chinatown’s community to take a step back and reflect on the organizing and activism over the years. Here is the advice they have for other communities who are confronting gentrification or displacement.

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You can’t organize without community

At the end of the day, and before anything else, organizing is about a strong community, and fostering the relationships within that community.

The organizers in Chinatown all have different stories: Some immigrated and found a cultural home and safe refuge from anti-Asian bigotry in the neighborhood. Some were born and raised within the fabric of the community. And others frequently visited the neighborhood in search of a homey meal or heritage connection with their families growing up.

But the common denominator among those different stories is a shared love for Chinatown, and that passion is what has fueled the community’s organizing over the years.

Ellen Somekawa
Executive director of the Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School in Chinatown

“The importance of building positive community is the converse side of fighting back to save the community when it’s threatened. The conscious effort to build up those things that bring people together, and making a community important to people is part of what makes people want to stand up and fight for it.”

The Mid-Autumn Festival is a prime example of that community- and relationship-building.

Hosted annually in Chinatown, festival organizers partner with restaurants in the neighborhood to donate food to feed the volunteers and put up posters — in return, they don’t have street vendors at the festival so they can funnel attendees to the small local businesses instead.

Debbie Wei
Founder of the Mid-Autumn Festival and Asian Americans United (AAU)

“It’s very culturally significant … and we’re consciously making decisions that are pro-community. Those relationships come in the process of all these things, but they also just come from regular interaction.”

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Find friends to stand with you

Intersectionality is a term that’s been buzzing around activist circles for decades: Justices are intertwined, and one community’s oppression ripples out and impacts folks outside that community.

Chinatown organizers say that finding allies to support them in their fights against big-dollar projects has been another key to their success over the years.

For example, when Debora Kodish found out about the arena proposal, she felt compelled to fight to protect the community and neighborhood that she felt was so special to Philadelphia’s character. In October, Kodish rallied a group of Jewish activists to protest a breakfast that developer David Adelman spoke at, hosted by the Jewish Federation Real Estate Group.

And on Christmas, which fell on the last evening of Hanukkah this year, they passed out fliers in Chinatown for people to take with them to their meals, with prompts about family traditions coming to Chinatown and why they should support the community.

Jewish activists were in Philadelphia's Chinatown on Christmas day to support the community against the building of a Sixers arena in their area.Alejandro A. Alvarez
Debora Kodish
Community activist

“We have a deep respect for Chinatown and a love for this community that should be understood as a treasure. It’s one of the few vital Chinatowns on the East Coast, it’s one of the last remaining communities of color in Center City, it’s a cultural center — why aren’t we as a city trying to figure out how we preserve and sustain this, and pay attention to what community members themselves need?”

Debora Kodish speaks as allies gathered in solidarity during a No Arena in Chinatown protest at 10th and Arch Streets in Philadelphia on Sunday, Dec. 25.Monica Herndon / Staff Photographer
A sign on display at the protest.Monica Herndon / Staff Photographer
A giant dreidel was on display at the protest.Monica Herndon / Staff Photographer

At a recent community meeting hosted by Chinatown organizers, multiple people from non-Asian backgrounds spoke in support of the community — particularly Black Philadelphians who have seen the way gentrification and displacement have impacted their neighborhoods in West Philly.

“The 76ers, the developers, or anybody else has no right, legal and certainly not moral, to destroy Chinatown,” Asantewaa Nkrumah-Ture, who is Black and a longtime housing activist, said at that community meeting.

“You and I both know what displacement has done for our people,” she said to David Gould, the chief diversity and impact officer for 76 DevCorp, who is also Black. “You and I both know displacement, and people settling in your community and pushing you out. You and I both know what that looks like.”

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Pass the torch down generations

At a recent community meeting hosted by Chinatown organizers, a group of children sat on the floor at the front of the room with paper and crayons in hand, coloring and drawing as they observed adults fight for the neighborhood. In another part of the room, a special table was set up for the elders of the community to comfortably sit as the meeting took place.

Neither was accidental.

Wei Chen
Civic engagement director of Asian Americans United (AAU)

“Older and younger generations are the key to why we keep fighting to preserve and protect the community. Kids from the community will walk around and the older generation will be able to teach them how the older generation fought to protect this community. We have to educate the younger generation about why we should have a Chinatown, why we should have a community. We have to remember Chinatown is always our home.”

When Chinatown protested against the proposed Phillies stadium in 2000, for example, the elders in the community decided all of the protesters needed to wear matching T-shirts, and collected the money to design and print them. But more significantly, they suggested a strike across all of Chinatown, convincing each business to shut down so everyone could march to City Hall in opposition to the stadium.

“They were tapped in to the business owners,” Wei said in August. “The English-speaking kids, we could have never pulled that off.”

On the flip side, AAU has a program specifically dedicated to training high school youth in ways to organize, modeled like an internship program. The youth have an educational space to learn about Asian American identity and history, and are given organizing tasks such as surveying Chinatown residents.

Grace Fan
Youth programs coordinator of Asian Americans United (AAU)

“Investing in young people is really important in terms of bringing up the future generation, and bringing up young leaders who will foster our community and fight for what’s right.”

Growing up with the Chinatown community heavily impacted college students Kaia Chau and Taryn Flaherty, who were frequently at protests and organizing events as kids, and have now started their own activist organization: Students for the Preservation of Chinatown.

They’ve since organized protests and teach-ins on University of Pennsylvania’s campus, finding the intersectional connection to non-Asian students who are passionate about gentrification, and also not the biggest fans of Adelman, who is CEO of Campus Apartments.

The best-friends duo have also taken to Instagram for their activism, rallying people to comment in support of Chinatown on 76 DevCorp’s posts — one of which garnered nearly 200 comments.

Kaia Chau
Co-founder of Students for the Preservation of Chinatown

“My generation specifically has really come to consciousness about very large systemic problems that are going to affect us for the rest of our lives. I think Chinatown is another issue that has added on to this continuous frustration, but I also think young people have had it with government officials, billionaires, and developers.”

Communicate

A massive part of organizing is being organized, and that can only be done through communication and overcommunication. Chinatown organizers have mastered that through tabling in the neighborhood, passing out fliers and putting them up at local businesses, printing newsletters and newspapers, holding informational meetings like the one two weeks ago, and utilizing social media.

But particularly important for the Chinatown community is bilingual outreach. Organizers work intentionally to include and empower the entire population, because without the Mandarin and Cantonese speakers, their success rate would likely be much lower.

Mary Yee, founder of Yellow Seeds, forged one of the first major bilingual organizing efforts in the neighborhood. Town meetings were always bilingual and decentered around English; fliers and newsletters were translated. That work set an example for organizers to come, including AAU, which had each question and answer translated at the community meeting they held earlier this month.

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Learn the system and the players

When the Vine Street Expressway was first proposed in 1966 to cut through the middle of Chinatown (and tear down the beloved Holy Redeemer Chinese Catholic Church and School), the first thing Yee did was research.

Then, she learned and maneuvered the system: setting up meetings with different planning officials in the city to learn more about the plan, reaching out to architects and engineers at big firms to convince the government they needed to look at different alignments, finding out about the Environment Protection Act and submitting a letter requesting an environmental-impact statement, requesting a meeting with the governor, and organizing large groups to attend and protest at City Council meetings.

Mary Yee
Founder of Yellow Seeds

“We basically tried to critique everything. [The Vine Street Expressway] is not as massive and awful as it was planned originally.”

In the fight against the arena, community members organized a trip to the Chinatown in Washington, D.C., to learn about how the NBA and NHL arena built in 1977 impacted the area — and they invited Councilmember Mark Squilla to join them. When community members heard about proposed legislation earlier this month that would have freed up more land in the area where the 76ers hope to open the arena in 2031, they quickly rallied to flood the City Council meeting in opposition. And at the community meeting they held two weeks ago, Squilla attended and pledged that no authorizing legislation would move from his office unless community members had a chance to review it first.

Xu Lin
An organizer and the owner of Bubblefish restaurant

“They know we can raise hell if we have to. They know they cannot ignore the community.”

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Preserve your neighborhood, but preserve yourself in the process

Activism can be grueling, disheartening, and draining work — both physically and emotionally. To make it sustainable and viable, Chinatown organizers suggest building a large community to rely on for support. Organizing is not something you can do alone — it’s something you have to do with community.

Debbie Wei
Founder of the Mid-Autumn Festival and Asian Americans United (AAU)

“Resistance is a tradition in communities that have had to practice resistance. It’s something that’s passed down, and you just have to keep doing that.”

But it’s also about finding joy and purpose in the work.

Kaia Chau
Co-founder of Students for the Preservation of Chinatown

“One thing that I really like to keep in mind is organizing not in fear and not in anger, but in joy. I’m organizing because I love Chinatown, I’m organizing because I’ve had such good memories in Chinatown, my development was dedicated to Chinatown. You need to remember why you’re doing it.”

Acknowledgment

The work produced by the Communities & Engagement desk at The Inquirer is supported by The Lenfest Institute for Journalism. Editorial content is created independently of the project's donors.

Staff Contributors

  • Reporter: Massarah Mikati
  • Editors: Sabrina Vourvoulias and Sabrina Iglesias
  • Digital Editor: Felicia Gans Sobey
  • Copy Editor: Lidija Dorjkhand
  • Photographers: Monica Herndon, Tom Gralish, Alejandro A. Alvarez, Ed Hille, and Michael S. Wirtz